I guess that my age is catching up to me. My latest round of injuries has forced me to reconsider what I am doing and why.
My left knee is f***ed. After a few days of me pushing through the pain, last night I raced a breaking point. I can’t bend it beyond a few degrees without pain. I was tossing and turning all night from the pain. This morning I woke with it completely swollen and I cannot use it my left leg to push up from a seated position.
I’d like to bang my head off the wall. I’m pretty sure I caused this injury when I was pushing deeper into a yoga position last week. I should know better. Whenever I try to deepen my yoga postures to force flexibility I overstretch and get injured. Usually, the results in a nagging tweak for a few days. But sometimes, like in the case with my shoulder and my foot (and now my knee), it’s worse.
F*** me.
My workout volume is still quite high and fairly intense every day. I get a lot of enjoyment from it. It’s my primary hobby and the results are generally great.
But I’m overdoing. Obviously.
I’m tired of always having some sort of injury.
So, as I heal this time, I’m going to cut back on everything.
I’m cutting a bunch of stuff out of my floor work to reduce the workload, the volume and the time.
I’m going to cut back volume of swimming. I’m going to cut back the length of my dog walks.
I’ve decided to give up drumming altogether. My right leg, foot and tendons cannot handle the repetitive stress.
I’ve gone through this cycle of re-evaluating my workouts and modifying them many times during my life. Despite my reluctance to cut back, every time I’ve done this it has resulted in something better.
- When I gave up my 30 year pursuit of big muscles through weight lifting, my flexibility improved, I no longer had back and shoulder pain and elbow pain and surprisingly I got leaner.
- After I stopped doing high intensity “functional training” like plyometrics, kettlebells, and Olympic lifts, I never had another lower back issue. For years, I suffered from lower back aches with an occasional weeklong flare up that took me out of commission.
- After my second hernia surgery, I cut the volume of my workouts with no obvious negative side results.
- When I had bursitis in my elbow, I couldn’t do pushups. The bursitis eventually healed but I realized that not doing pushups made my shoulder pain go away almost 100%.
- I tried to phase them back in, but after a week, I stopped. I miss doing pushups but love not having the pain they caused.
I’m not writing this post for you today.
I’m writing it for me. Because giving up on things I could once do and things I enjoy is difficult.
I don’t like to make changes. I hate to give up on myself. I hate to accept that physically I cannot do things I once could do easily.
I don’t want to decline slowly over time.
I want to go like my dog Shortie did. He lived a full, active life. Then he had a fairly rapid decline and died.
But I’m kidding myself in some ways. Shortie’s last 5 years were good no doubt. But he was declining the entire time. He lost muscle mass. I had to shorten his walks because he’d get a back or neck ache from more strenuous hikes that he used to do with ease. He needed to take a pain pill every night to was his sore bones. He no longer could run or jump the way he did just a few years earlier.
I see the same progression (decline?) with my little old lady Snickers. At 14, she’s not the dog she was at 10 much less the energetic, lean racer she was when she was 5.
Neither am I.
And so, like I’ve done before with Shortie, Snickers, my wife and myself, I’ll make adjustments.
I occasionally fantasize that stem cell treatment, nanobots and genetic technology might one day reverse the downsides of aging and eliminate nagging injuries & disease.
It’s nice to think that will happen.
But I live in the world of reality and I might as well accept it.
Even if I will go down fighting.