Rehabbing from an injury involves constant pain evaluation to measure improvement.  Throughout improvement, pain is still experienced and can vary by level and location.  I feel so much better than I did two years ago, but I’m still banged up. I feel it every day, yet not anywhere close to a year ago. I still have bad days and some of those are parlayed into bad weeks.  My physical therapist once told me that I should imagine a high performing stock chart when measuring my improvement.  Over time, stocks do not have a uniform growth trajectory.  There are days and periods of time where that stock may drop but it will bounce back up in time as the overall value continues to grow.  I expect taking frequent steps backward before taking two steps forward. 

My pain levels shot up a few days before Christmas.  I’m sure I could have called my PT and said, “dude, I got an emergency here” but I decided I’d just tweak my fitness plan for a few weeks and rehab myself as much as possible.  The pain was isolated to a few spots on my lower back and left hip.  I thought about just taking a 5-7 day break from physical activity.  Maybe the rest would help?  Maybe sitting on the couch would solve my problems? 

Whatever.  If you’ve been reading for a while, you know I’m not built like that anymore.  Sure, that would be the case if the car accident occurred a few years prior to when it actually did.  That’s the old guy.  The new guy said its time to get up and rebuild this body.

I reduced running mileage over the following two weeks while increasing the number of minutes spent completing rehab work.  I also increased my frequency of DDP Yoga from 4 days a week to 5 and selectively chose routines that worked on my sore spots.  (Standup 1&2, Synergy and Below the Belt 1&2 for those of you DDPY peeps who read this).  Finally, I increased my visits to the cryotherapy center, spending more time in the whole body cryotherapy chamber and utilizing compression therapy on my hips.  The compression and cryo helped reduce the inflammation while speeding up the recovery process.

The increased pain experienced in late December has subsided.  On top of that, my average daily pain level is much lower than it was when I started this blog in May.  The workout plan that I put together for June-December has paid off.  I’ve progressed faster than any other time period since the injury.  I’ve already ran 99.8 miles this month and feel confident that I can hit 125 before February 1.

I feel 80% recovered most of the time.   This includes plenty of 90% days mixed with days in the 70s…or below.  Every now and then I’ll have a 95% day—I love those!  The worst time of the day is generally getting out of bed, but I can also aggravate injured spots pretty easily.  My amazing wife has to do all the heavy lifting around the house because my lifting ability is on par with a 12 year-old girl.  Weight-lifting is still a chore, and can be embarrassing when the female next to me at the gym is lifting double my maximum capacity.  I’m not capable of curling over 40 pounds without pain; 20 pounds for single arm dumbbells.  I still get in the gym and keep grinding.  It won’t always be like this, unless I let it.  Despite all that, my core strength is at my absolute lifetime peak and my short-range, running speed is approaching my personal best.

I’ll continue with my 3 pillars of focus:  Cryotherapy, Rehab work (assigned by my PT) and DDP Yoga.  It’s the magic formula.  No pain pills….no surgeries.

Go get it.