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Saturday, April 9, 2011

Keeping Injuries in Perspective

Over the last week my spirits have fluctuated between sadness, anger, frustration and acceptance. I am generally an upbeat person, I don’t complain about the little things (well, maybe my son’s cat, Thor, who meow’s incessantly and rubs against my legs when I get up at 4:00 am to use the bathroom…yuck!)
I have an injury, I have worked very hard over the last several months, since October actually, to add a great deal of lean mass, keeping fat at a minimum, and to be able to compete on May 7th, I will not be able to compete now.
Some people keep telling me I can, I appreciate their encouragement, but they are people who have never done this, so they don’t realize that you cannot stop lifting weights for the last 5 weeks prior to a competition.
The training at this point is rigorous; it is intense, twice a day, hard, nothing easy. I am already getting soft, it won’t be possible.
I tell myself to keep it in perspective. My rib is going to heal and I will be fine. What about the Olympic athlete who has trained all their life only to be injured just before the Olympics? Their lifetime dreams are shattered. What about the woman who loses her child in the first few months of pregnancy, she may never recover emotionally from the loss. And the bicyclist who is hit by a car and shatters their hip, they may never ride or even walk again.
Things like this help me to snap out of it, really to just get on with life. I think lack of sleep doesn’t help matters, that’s when I have pain, during the day it’s only what I would describe as discomfort. The pain sets in when I lay in bed and attempt to move, it radiates throughout, keeping me awake. When I do drift off, then shift I am again awakened with the pain pulsating through my body.  I have a shorter temper, I think about it all the time.
It’s been a week. How on earth people spend an hour every day on a cardio machine, day in and day out just boggles my mind. I am only doing it to maintain some form of caloric expenditure, but I ache to lift again.
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