Taking care of the body

[mad_m]

Hello fellow Bodies in Motion! Wondering about your stories of healing and recovery. I'm on the road back from a long layoff from running related to overtraining and muscle imbalance, and a major rock fall last September. Without getting into the details of the problems (long, boring, trust me), I finally owned that I'm getting older and simply taking a few months off with stretching just won't cut it anymore. That was a long road of getting past depression of not being able to move the way I wanted, at the speed and with the power I used to.

I hate it when I get the advice from medical professionals or massage therapists to not run, not push it, perhaps take it easier - I found the right mix of body work with an acupuncturist. After a few months of work with her, and on my own (stretching, rolling muscles, and pushing tennis balls into my trigger points at home), I'm now able to do some walk-running, body weight exercises, and the occasional short dyno at the rock gym. I also got outside to lead a few easy sport routes over Easter weekend. I used to be too proud to mix running into my walking, wouldn't climb routes I thought were beneath me, and didn't think strength training had a place in improving my climbing (totally bought into "if you want to climb, then climb!") In short, I was holding myself back with standards that my injured self couldn't meet, standards that were arbitrarily set. After letting them slack a bit, I realized how much I really can do after all, and that I'm on the road back to where I want to be.

What are your stories of breaking and rebuilding? What personal myths did you need to overcome?

Comments

[geekturnedvamp]

For me, learning about anatomy and physiology and biomechanics has been helpful, because having a more realistic understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the body (both in general and my own body in particular) gives me some perspective on my limitations. That said, I still have to remind myself daily that part of the reason I can't do some of the shit that a lot of my classmates--who are almost all current or former dancers/yoga teachers/super fit personal trainers--are able to do is that they're significantly younger than I am, have spent many more years doing this than I have, and spend more time practicing than I do. (Especially the first one, because while intellectually I know that age makes a real difference in how quickly we can progress in physical training or recover from injury, I look much younger than I am and that makes it easy to keep forgetting that my body is actually older than I think it is.)