I have an injury. I’m injured. Or maybe I could be more dramatic and say that I AM injured. It is who I am. Have been so for years. One of my shoulders cracks and pops when I do push-ups. My left elbow has been achy since the very first time I touched a Moon Board. I dislocated my right knee in a heel-toe cam back in 2001 and it’s still “loose.” Blew my other knee in a dropknee on the Rodeo Wave. Tweaked what seems like all of my fingers. And my hip hurts in general. Oh yeah, and I have plantar fasciitis. My neck starts to hurt when I am at my desk too long. Back hurts when driving.
I’ll think of more…just give me a minute.
The point is this: If you are a grown up who moves around in the world, you’re going to have injuries. The older you get the more you’ll have and the longer they will take to go away. They aren’t traumatic full-body disorders, they are tiny parts that aren’t working their best. So you have a choice: Think of yourself as “injured” and unable to do ________, or think of yourself as 98% uninjured, and ready to go.
Last year, my friend Tobey and I were hunting elk. She picked one out of the group, took the animal down, and we went to work taking the cow apart. As we moved into the animal’s right hindquarter, something didn’t look right. In fact, the elk’s entire upper leg was a mass of re-matrixed bone fragments, clearly the result of a gigantic trauma. Maybe hit by a truck, fell off something, who knows.
But she was just out there being an elk. Running, eating, moving miles and miles every day. Not "being injured," not complaining, not thinking of herself as special because of her injury. And probably 80% of those animals had injuries of their own. But they kept being elk, doing elk stuff.
And so even though I might have an injury or two, I can still be a climber doing climber stuff.
Somewhere around 0% of climbers with injuries that see my colleague (and physical therapist) AJ Sobrilsky about an injury are told to stop all activity. Instead, AJ finds out all the things they can do, and then helps them modify the things that cause pain. He encourages them to keep moving, to keep training, and to keep aiming toward their goals despite this setback.
Do Your Therapy (AND GO LIKE HELL)
When you have an injury, you should treat it. But your training should consist of more than just doing your therapy. In my twice-per-week in-person climbing training class, almost every athlete that attends has to make some kind of modification. One climber has a chronic shoulder injury. Another has hand problems associated with her work. Another just had shoulder surgery. They come to class, do their modified exercises when needed, and they go hard on the things that are unaffected by the injury.
If each of them waited until they were 100% to get back to training, they’d never get back.
Things Are Going to Change
My brother-in-law used to be an ultra distance runner. One of his favorite quotes during these hard runs was “whether it’s going good or bad, things are going to change.” You may be in the throes of despair because of this finger injury that just won't go away. And there is a gigantic chance that a year from now you might not even remember which finger it was. There is also a chance that you may someday experience an injury so devastating that all other injuries you've had pale in comparison. We just don't know. Things will change.
Last spring, I ran into a friend of mine that's an orthopedic surgeon. I had been to his office, maybe six months before to see him about a shoulder problem. Since we hadn't seen each other in a long time, one of his first questions was about how my shoulder was doing. Needless to say, I was surprised to find that I couldn't remember which shoulder it was and what my complaint had been.
This led me to start thinking about other injuries I had had. I started digging back through my training logs for the past several years and making notes about injuries and how long they lasted and how long I complained about them. One of the fascinating results of this exercise was that injuries just seemed to go away after a while, whether I was specifically worrying about them or not! Which gave me an idea…
The Monthly Review
You've probably read about my monthly testing. I will test peak load, pull-ups, anaerobic endurance, weight myself, and do some measurements. You should test too, but you should not worry about my test. Pay attention to the things you're trying to improve and the things you are trying to avoid. This is a really good way of keeping you on track and checking in to see if your training is worth a damn. Here's a hint: if these numbers aren't changing, your training program is not doing what you want it to do.
Which leads to my idea: I started to pay attention to my injuries. Every month, along with my testing, I would print out the outline of a human body. These are easy to find on the Internet, but I wanted to use one that looked as much like my friend Liam as possible (shown below). I would then draw a little number next to each part of my body that was injured. For example, number one might be my left index finger. Number two might be my right elbow. Number three might be my hip. Number four might be a pulled muscle in my shoulder.
Every single month, I end up with somewhere between three and six numbers on the sheet. I write down the details of those injuries. What exactly is the nature of the injury? How bad is it? What does it keep me from doing? What am I doing about it?
If I get to the end of a month, and I am still sustaining the same level of pain or difficulty with the injury, I have failed in my rehab. If my injury is improving, I can keep training the same way I have been training. If my injury is getting worse, I immediately fire myself as coach and should probably ask someone else to write my next month's program.
The remarkable insight that I came to is that very often an injury will go away without my knowing about it. The only reason I even remember the issue is that I looked back one month in my training log.
A secondary insight is that I have some actual data on the injury instead of my over blown emotion around whatever the current issue might be. As I write this, I look back to one year ago today and see where I had an injury in the DIP joint of my right index finger that caused me to question whether it might end my climbing career. It did not.
You’ve got pain. You’ve got tweaks. Next year, it will be different.
Michael Boyle is fond of telling us that unless we fell down or got hit by something, it's a training injury. The number one goal of any training program should be to avoid injury from the training program. Our second goal should be to build a body strong enough to avoid injury in the performance environment. Only third do we get to be concerned with improving performance.
Next year, it will be different. You get to pick what different looks like.