Don't Look Back

I did pushups this week. At least 10 in every class I've taught. As a karate Sensei this would normally not only be considered no big deal but a surprisingly low number. I haven't been able to do pushups for nearly a year. A mountain bike crash last October left me with an impinged shoulder and a career as a karate instructor left me with enough inflammation to keep a firm lock on that impingement. 

Over the past year I've been through countless doctors’ appointments, sports medicine doctor appointments, x-rays, ultrasounds, bone scans and a cortisone shot. On a side note, the cortisone shot was at the beginning of the cycling season and though I was able to jump from 30 km rides to 110 km rides in a week without feeling any ill effects in my legs, the pain in the needle site was so miserable I cannot fathom pro athletes willingly subjecting themselves to this. Imagine having paraffin wax injected into your muscle, and then feeling it harden over the course of a week and you pretty much have the experience of a cortisone shot, all the discomfort with none of the annoying side effects like actually fixing the problem. Then suddenly, a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that I wasn't in pain.

Chronic pain is a funny thing, what keeps you awake at night in the beginning, becomes so familiar that you forget what it feels like not to hurt. When it disappears there's a weird period when you don't notice because you've gotten so used to just getting on with it. Other people's sympathy for your pain lasts about 2 weeks, after which no one cares or remembers anymore and if you remind them you are viewed as "milking it", so you put up and shut up. You learn to ignore the pain until you slip into bed and the full force of your over doing it during the day catches up to you.

The pain is gone, and now I have to deal with the weakness. Weakness is not something I deal with very well. I'm a very small female, the grade school girl who was picked last for soccer baseball - a made up sport for weaklings. I have devoted most of my adult life on not being delicate, not fitting the mold of the "delicate China doll" (which I have been called). I take great pride in surprising people with my strength and "toughness". Needless to say, struggling through some rather mediocre pushups doesn't sit very well with me. 

This is where professional me and personal me have to sit down and have a serious conversation. Professional me says that loss of strength is to be expected after such a lengthy recovery. That I should take my rehabilitation one day at a time and celebrate the successes along the way, "look, you did over 70 pushups this week, 3 weeks ago you couldn't do one." Just like I would say to a student in my situation, and I would mean it! Personal me spends a lot of time looking back at where I used to be. Personal me remembers the 100 push up warm-ups and clapping push up days. Personal me gets frustrated by my weakness. Both professional me and personal me have a lot more empathy for others than I do myself.

I've seen this scenario played out many times with friends and clients alike. People who used to be athletic, who got away from their sport and then stayed away because when they tried to re-enter it, their ego couldn't handle not being at the top anymore. That is exactly what it is, ego. The only person judging the number or quality of my pushups is me. No one else is thinking, "yeah, she's a nice person, very professional, takes pride in her work...but...have you seen her pushups lately? What is going on there?” The fact that so many people I know have quit after absence from sport due to ego scares me. I am a very humble martial artist, by an ego maniac about my strength - for my size or any size. I don't want to become another quitter. I don't want to be frustrated.

I'm trying very, very hard to breathe deeply, enjoy the journey back and to not think about asking, "are we there yet?".