Daily Musings…
It’s so hard to get and stay excited, and it’s so easy to get discouraged. That’s the experience I’ve been having with the never ending saga of my achilles, hip, back injury. It feels like two tentative steps forward whenever I’m feeling good, and three dread filled steps back whenever a symptom creeps back in.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to rehabilitate this injury for almost 7 years. It started with a partially torn left achilles tendon, went untreated, and turned into a right hip, back, and quad injury. My left achilles doesn’t hurt, and hasn’t hurt in years, but all the compensating my right side has done over the years has left me all ‘jacked up.’
I’ve seen doctors, physical therapists, massage therapists, chiropractors, acupuncturists, and osteopaths. They have all helped a little bit in their own way. But none of them have been able to solve the mystery. And many times over the years I’ve resounded to the fact that I would deal with this for the rest of my life. But, before I knew it I’m trying something new.
I recently used Claude AI to give it a new go. Progress over the years has been slow, but there has been progress. The most progress I’ve made on it has been over the last 12 - 18 months. Perhaps not coincidentally, this acceleration of progress has coincided with being settled for the first time since getting injured.
But the better and better I’ve been feeling, and the more and more my movement has been opening up, the more apparent it’s become that the issue is a lack of strength and mobility in my left achilles, that persists until this day. So, I put Claude AI to task and asked for a comprehensive rehabilitation plan that focuses on increasing strength and mobility to my achilles, calf, and glute (my left calf and glute have also atrophied in comparison to the right side).
The program is daily, with three categories: mobility, tendon loading, muscular strength (strength is every other day). I’ve been doing it every morning for almost a week (Claude suggests it could take 4 - 6 months to fully heal) and I’m already noticing so many improvements. My run and walk gait are better. My hinge is better, and my posture is better. It’s working, I can feel it. And it’s exciting.
But this morning I bent over to pick something up off of the bathroom floor and that familiar discomfort returned to my back, and I thought ‘o fuck.’ And right away I got it into my head that yup, this will never go away. Two tentative steps forward, three dread filled steps back.
It’s so easy to get discouraged when we are so early into a new process, or when we’ve been on a journey for a long time and it seems like there is no end. Instead of it feeling like a step back it feels like; Why bother? Am I ever going to figure this out? Is there anything to figure out or is this just the way it is?
When I get like this I like to remind myself of all the other times when I was feeling that way. When I wasn’t sure why I was doing it. When I wasn’t sure if I could figure it out. When I stopped questioning if there was anything to figure out. Then I like to remind myself that in all those times it was worth it, there was something to figure out, and I figured it out.
Finding my partner after years of saying I would rather just be single than navigate the dating world. Moving into a house and building my dream garage gym after living in apartments for the first 37 years of my life. Fighting the urge to go back to work, despite the societal pressure and financial pressure, and continuing to pursue my passions instead. When it’s come to these big things that have felt like moving mountains it’s always worked out eventually. It takes persistence to move mountains, and I like to remind myself of that.
“For anything truly great to take place requires a long obedience in the same direction.”
I’m one week into a 4 - 6 month journey to rehabilitation and the lesson is it’s easy to get discouraged, and it’s hard to get and stay excited, and I need to remember that.