I Hate following my own advice!

A Diary of Injury Recovery

I’m posting this series in the hope that it will be helpful and instructive for others.

Injuries are a fact of life.  It’s a certainty.  No matter how skilled one is, or how careful, sooner or later, an injury will occur.  For those of us who live physically active lives, injuries tend to fall in several categories:

Impact

Strain

Over use

Repetitive motion

Mine was an impact injury.  More on that in a moment.

I have been an athlete for the greatest part of my life.  I have lived and worked around, and with,  athletes for over a half century.  Once I was a young, enthusiastic, and fairly ignorant athlete.  I did some stupid things…  and suffered from them.  I was taught, I studied, and I learned.

I first learned how to recover properly and well from an injury.  For many years I have been dispensing the advice on correct injury recovery.  From time to time, I’ve had to follow that advice too.  Here, in a short form, is The Advice:

Define the injury

Cease training and allow the injury to heal

During the healing period, maintain light, healthy, non-aggravating exercise

When appropriate, develop a “Recovery Training Plan”

Follow that plan with discipline and patience.

So what brought all this on? 

April 16:  I took a tumble while mountain biking.  As falls go it wasn’t anything spectacular.  There was no great speed or other heroism involved.  The rear wheel washed out as I was cresting out of a deep gully obstacle, and I twisted and fell to the side.  It wasn’t all that hard a landing.  I wasn’t even knocked windless by the thumping landing.

There was a fairly sharp pain around toward the back of my rib cage.  The curvature of one of my lower left ribs had landed precisely on the curvature of a rock.  This resulted in a crack in the rib, around toward the back.  Ouch.

In the immediate aftermath of the fall, I didn’t know that I had suffered a deeper injury.  It felt like soft tissue damage, and I’ve had my share of that.

April 17:  The day after.  Pain in the impact location, but it was manageable.  I was stiff and sore.

I took the Wednesday Evening Path Ride out.  Climbing on the bike was a surprise.  As soon as I was in the saddle I experienced a blessed relief from pain.  That lasted throughout the ride, but…  As soon as I dismounted, the pain came back strongly, and in waves.

April 18:  Define the injury.  Pain at the impact site increasing sharply.  Difficulty drawing a deep breath.  Time to go see a doctor.  Received confirmation of my suspicion.  I’d cracked a rib.  Fortunately, I had no ride leader obligations.

Doctor’s orders:  Avoid strenuous activity.  Do not aggravate the injury.  No mountain biking.  Avoid any risk of falling or further impact.

Took the bike out for a gentle evening ride.  I felt a good bit of pain, but kept the effort low.  I paid a penalty for that ride.  That night my entire back went into spasm.

Sleeping is a problem.  I was having trouble finding a position that didn’t cause the rib to flare.  The best one was face down, but that triggered more pain in my back.  Not a good situation.

The realization was that I would just have to do minimal activity, treat with anti-inflammatory drugs, and live through this.

April 19:  Get up.  Struggle through the day.  Go home.  Try to sleep.

April 20:  Define the injury.  Made a conscious decision not to do my usual gentle Saturday morning early ride.  Slept a bit later.  (sort of)  Met the regular Saturday morning path ride.  This is a very easy ride, and my thought was that gentle exercise would be good.  It wasn’t terrible.  I only had to deal with a slight, but constant, dull ache while on the bike.

I should mention things that I’ve dropped from the routine.  Ordinarily, my morning wake up ritual consists of a series of stretching exercises, followed by a core strength toning routine.  That was absolutely unthinkable.

April 21:  Define the injury.  I managed to sleep a bit later.  I took it very easy around the house.  In the late afternoon, I went out for a very low effort bike ride of about one and a half hour duration.  This led to an interesting discovery.

The act of mounting the bike was painful.  Once mounted, the pain subsided, and stayed down.  I could trigger pain if I tried to exert effort.  Each dismount and mount (intersections) triggered a new bout of pain.  That night, the back spasm was back.

April 22:  No unnecessary physical activity.  Getting through the work day was difficult enough.

April 23:  One week out from the crash.  “Are you going to do the mountain bike ride this evening?”  The answer that came to mind was “Are you freaking CRAZY!!??”  Instead, I went out for a very gentle one hour ride on the paved paths of the town.  The ride was good, but again the back spasms gave me a very restless night.

 Summary:  That was the first week of injury recovery.  I had two prime goals in mind.  One was to just survive the stinkin’ thing.  The second was to determine what level of activity I could tolerate.  That last was important.  Increased physical activity, within careful limits, will aid healing.  The trick is to find those limits.  If the activity is too vigorous or too long, it will aggravate the injury and retard healing.  I was looking for that happy medium.  I’d sta