I thought I was handling my Achilles injury pretty well.
Even though March and April are my favorite months to ski in Alaska, I haven’t been too depressed. Maybe the fact that volcanic ash has slightly tarnished the snow conditions has helped me from being disappointed. But I’ve been focusing on doing what I need to do to get better (ice, heat, stretching, etc), so I haven’t been able to dwell on missing out. But as my recovery has dragged out longer than I hoped, its been getting harder to stay upbeat.
I was talking with my friend Erik the other day about how we endurance athletes program our minds to endure suffering, and how that translates to other aspects of our life. We inflict pain on ourselves on a daily basis. Sometime good pain, sometimes bad pain. We’ve training our bodies to handle the pain by focusing on the goal. Keep moving, the pain will end as soon as I make it to the finish line. But in life, we don’t always know if there will be a finish, never mind where it will be. This throws a monkeywrench into our coping strategies.
If the doctor had told me, “Your leg is going to hurt like hell for a month, but then it will be 100% healed,” I would have been thrilled. Instead my leg feels fine, but I have no idea when I’ll be able to use it again. This is so much harder to deal with. I’m stuck searching for a finish line that keeps moving. First, my goal was to be recovered in time for crust skiing season (April). Then, when I realized the extend of the injury, the goal was to be ready for Orienteering season (starts in May). Now I have reset my target again – this time to be ready for packrafting and peakbagging this summer (June/July). It could very well be delayed again.
The thing that has hit me the hardest is seeing other people move on. All my friends are making their summer adventure plans. All my fellow Iditarod Trail invitational racers are training for their next adventures. Meanwhile, I’m still stuck in the wake of the ITI. The analogy that keeps popping into my head is that its like our Rainy Pass trail-breaking adventure, if only everyone else made it through and I was left behind, still stuck in the waist-deep snow, moving one agonizing step at a time.
I’m stuck in “wait and see” mode, and the waiting is the hardest part.
Hey man – I got bad tendonitis in my achilles running Boston one year and it took me 2 years to get over it because I kept trying to come back too fast and too much – make sure you don’t overdo it for a while!