Being Injured

DABDA

You’re injured. Something has been hurting, you tried to manage it while continuing to train, but it got to the point where you had to stop rowing.

It sucks! It has happened to me many times. It took me too long to figure out how to approach injuries in a better way. 

If this is your first time being sidelined from an injury, you could have any number of thoughts running through your head. I’ve been fine for so long, why did this happen now? My teammates are going to get so much faster without me. What do I tell my coach? How do I even approach this -- just rest it? 

If you’ve suffered multiple injuries, the latest one brings all of those thoughts, plus thoughts like: Crap, not again. Whyyyyyy?!

Bad to good

I have some bad news and some good news for you. The bad news is that you’re injured because you were doing something wrong. In rowing, most injuries that sideline athletes are overuse injuries -- we do the same movement over and over again, and you were not moving in a way that your body could support. 

The good news is that your body is pretty amazing. You can fix those movement patterns, your injury will heal, and you can row/move in a new way that your body can support sustainably. Pain/injury is not something that has to happen.

Mentally, to deal with being injured, you have to start with acceptance. Wishing that you had done something different in the past will not help. Worrying about what your teammates can accomplish without you while you’re gone will not help. You should be able to say “Ok, this sucks and I wish I didn’t get hurt, but here we are. What can I do about it?”.

Acceptance and to-do’s

Well, here’s what you can do about it:

To begin to deal with any injury physically, you have to start with acceptance as well. You have to accept that there is a problem in the way that you were doing things. If you ignore this fact, then as soon as your body heals (after some amount of rest/time away from rowing), one of two things will probably happen: you will regress right back into the same patterns, and the injury will reappear; or you will compensate to protect the old injury, so something else will start to hurt. 

Every stroke, there is force transmitted from your footplate to your handle -- from your toes to your fingers. Through that entire chain, there are hundreds of muscles, bones, ligaments, tendons, organs, etc that need to work together. Your body, when organized correctly, can support tremendous loads. Even when you have poor mobility and can’t organize it well, it will still be able to do pretty much everything you ask of it… until something gives. 

It’s important to remember that your body can do incredible things. One of those things is adapting to our regular behaviors. Unfortunately, our day-to-day activities (sitting in chairs, looking down at our phones, etc) do not ingrain healthy movement patterns. The very first time you sat in a boat, you might not have had good hip mobility due to your lifestyle. So, your body learned the rowing stroke from day 1 in the wrong way, and it’s been adapting to that ever since. If you want to be the best athlete you can be, you will have to unlearn bad habits.

Being a student

To really understand all of this yourself, you need to become a student. I learned the most about injury prevention/unleashing performance from Kelly Starrett. He is the BEST resource for explaining 1) how your body is supposed to move and 2) how you can help it get there. The $60 you spend on his book Becoming a Supple Leopard will save you hundreds of dollars in PT visits down the line and dozens of hours of lost training time. He also has hundreds of videos posted on his YouTube channel and website, The Ready State. 

Once you understand what is wrong and how to fix it (which could take a while of searching!), you are no longer helpless. You have ownership of your own journey. 

The fixes won’t happen overnight, it is still a long journey. But if you are doing things right, you’ll be able to see and feel progress over days (sometimes), weeks (often) and months (always). Trust the process.