It’s not until you have sustained an injury in your sport do you realize how easy life is/was when you didn’t have an injury. In the generalist of terms, all you (the individual) have to worry about is doing your sport. If that means running, ideally all you have to worry about is running. That sounds pretty damn easy to me!
When you’re healthy, there’s no worrying about how you’ll get to the track next or if something will bother you during a workout. While it’s very important to stay positive through an injury, it does take exceptional focus to accomplish. However, in the end, this factor alone determines how quickly an athlete will bounce back and the overall quality of his/her life whether injured or not.
It’s taking years as a matured athlete to see injuries as they are; just injuries and not correlate them to mean something terrible ie. I’ll never make it, maybe this isn’t for me, etc. So when I read Todd Herman’s recent post “The Story of the Turtle and the Frog”, it resonated very loudly with me. In his post, Todd talks about focusing on other information outside of your own limited view (an injury in this case). By being so narrowly focused upon oneself throughout the injury, the athlete inevitably will miss out out on other opportunities that arise and ultimately miss out on “life”. Staying positive not only gives you the ability to heal faster, it also keeps you moving forward in all areas.
With the past week and 1/2 of cross-training, my personal experience on this matter has been very eye opening. It’s given me insight into what I need to do to clean up my dedication to my sport and most importantly, given me a chance to spend lots of time with my daughter free of worry and doubts and full of laughing, playing and relaxing. All three I don’t do nearly as much as I should.
The results have been very rewarding. Even though I’m injured, I’m in a great mood. Furthermore, my foot is feeling 60-70% better. If it keeps up, I should be back running next week.
One last thing before I go, something I haven’t spoken of at all, but that is my Faith in God in all of this. There are so many things that are out of my (our) control throughout life (and they all seem to have have happened to me! lol) I’m a firm believer that if you stay the course, work hard, continue to believe in yourself and practice unwavering Faith in the things you can/can’t control, in the end you will be delivered.
‘Nuff said.
Never Let It Rest,
Brendon
