“Hey, don’t cry,” the ER nurse said. I approached my hospital bed. “We’ve put that arm back together.”
Yes, we did. Two doctors, me, the threat of being placed under general anesthesia and two huge IV bags of painkillers to do so. And it still hurts like hell. But that’s not why I was crying.
My injury was Season Ender.
When my shoulder suddenly dislocated, I was doing simple shoulder stretches at home. The sound was disgusting. The pain was soon there. And after trying (and failing) to put my shoulder back into the socket myself, I headed towards the ER. Also.
It was the first time I had a shoulder dislocation during a stretch, but it was the third time I’d refusing to jump out of my socket and return, and landing in the ER. And, as the doctor explained, Strike 3 meant surgery.
It was August 2016. Less than two months later I had surgery and became another professional athlete with a career-rising injury.
It is the universally recognized truth that injuries suck, and for athletes, pain isn’t even the worst part. If you live to compete, the most unbearable aspect of getting injured is that you can’t do what you like (training and racing). Most of us are experiencing that disappointment at some point. Durability is frustratingly common in endurance sports. We push our bodies to the limits and ask them to cover hundreds of miles each week in multiple athletic fields. It’s no surprise that they sometimes break and fail.
Until it happens to you. And then it’s definitely surprising and a bit heartbreaking. If you’re lucky, if your injury is relatively mild, you can heal yourself with a little smarter self-care and rehabilitation in a few days or weeks. But if your injury is severe enough to require long-term medical procedures — like me — you need to play a long game and how well you play will determine the time you need. Here’s what I’ve learned on the sidelines for almost a year and how to recover quickly after an injury.
Find the right doctor
Finding healthcare professionals who know your sport, have a great reputation and extensive experience, popularizing treatment for athletes is the key to promoting diagnosis and recovery. That’s because they understand how your injury affects your abilities in the context of your sport. Therefore, they can customize your treatment plan and develop realistic prognosis to how long it takes to return to training and race. Trust me, such “insider” care can make a difference in the world, especially when it comes to minimizing recovery time.
How do you find such a doctor? Ask friends and training companions for recommendations, talk to your coach, and do your (most important) your own research. There was no surgeon on the western shoulder of the Rockies that I didn’t Google stalking before I finally settled down to the doctor for my surgery. I ended up choosing what I did because he was a competitive cyclist, a successful track record of treating athletes, a physical therapist and an implicitly trusted friend. I knew I had found the correct documentation when my friend said, “EK, I trusted him on my shoulder and saw hundreds of patients.” It is your body and you want to make sure you have 100% faith in the person who chooses to repair it.
Accept your situation
As the proverb says, “I want the best hope, but prepare for the worst.” Once you receive your post-injury diagnosis and prognosis, be prepared to accept them, whether they want to hear or not.
I’ve had a hard time with that advice. When I went to meet a shoulder specialist to learn about my MRI results, I was hoping he would tell me that intensive physical therapy could fix my injury. Instead, he told me that without surgery there was a 100% chance that my shoulder would be dislocated again. “When will the surgery be done?” he said.
His diagnosis hit me like a freight train. I wanted to cry. I had a hard time not screaming. I bit my tongue and fought back the urge to tell him that if I didn’t know my injury wasn’t serious, his years of medical experience must have been fraudulent.
Of course I was wrong and he was right, but it took me a while to accept it. Some people compare the psychological process of dealing with the serious injury of grief, both suggesting that they follow the same progression, denial, anger, negotiation, depression and acceptance. I still don’t know which phase I was in when I went under the knife a few weeks later. I knew that was something I had to do to have the hope of maintaining a professional athlete, but I definitely hadn’t accepted my situation yet. There were no other options that I had a chance to help me get back to the race.
Learn from my mistakes. If you are recovering from an injury (particularly one that required surgery), I recommend you do everything you can to move through the grieving process as quickly as possible. It’s easier than that, but if you’re surrounded by strong people you trust and love, and if you feel the same way about you, it really encourages the process. They can help you know that your injury is just a blip on your exercise journey. It does not define you, and it will not last forever. It is mostly a passing ritual. Once you realize all of this, you can finally start healing.
I will talk about it from experience. After I reach the acceptance stage, everything – and I mean all – It’s become much easier. It took me almost two months to get there, but after doing it once, I stopped trying to hurry up with rehabilitation and committed to following the letter’s treatment plan. Soon my progress began to speed up.
Treat rehabilitation like training
Endurance athletes are incredible creatures. Successful what we do requires focus, a strong work ethic and unwavering dedication to our sport. All of this helps us through training and race highs and lows, including getting injured.
It took me a while to accept the situation after the injury, but in the end I threw myself into rehabilitation with the same courage and joy I trained. I went to three physical therapy sessions a week and had two sessions of surprisingly boring rehabilitation exercises a day. Don’t get me wrong – my path to recovery was not smooth. Far from that – my arm/shoulder complex has been unstable for years and I’ve learned many dysfunctional patterns to compensate for it. Learning these patterns took longer than expected, but I kept focused, tried to stay positive, and told myself that everything would ultimately work out (and of course, that did).
Through it, I refused to allow myself to become just a “injured athlete.” I used all the free time I would have gone to training to pursue other passions and entertainment. It helped me to keep my smarts in a good place. I also learned how important it is to maintain a sense of humor. The path to rehabilitation is not always easy, so keeping it bright is an important part of staying motivated. Certainly, maintaining the ability to laugh at yourself during the dark period is a powerful drug.
Focus on what you can do, not what you can
It’s easy to hang on everything you lack after an injury. Your training buddies may be posting all sorts of PRs on Strava and talking about upcoming events with the same excitement and enthusiasm you normally do. Your competitors may be winning races that you think you might have won. You may also notice that you fill out a race refund request rather than a registration form. But you need to shut it all down and learn to train your brain to train your brain can Trust me, trust me, because there is still so much you can do to work towards your goals.
My right arm was not working perfectly, but I was able to use my left arm only three or four times a week from mid-November to March. It’s a one-armed swimming for nearly five months, but that meant I could ride in the pool, look at my teammates and maintain the water feel, which is important for the swimming mechanism. I also spent a lot of time doing vertical kicks in the pool and kicking them with a fin or kickboard, all of which turned me into a completely demon kicker. No one on my team can touch me with kicking now!
Outside the pool, I went for long walks, ran on Alter’s (anti-gravity) treadmill, rode gently on my trainer and worked with my strength coach at the gym (mainly with core and body conditioning). Although progress was slow, my coach and I were able to gradually increase the amount of training, so we were able to put together 13-15 hours of training by April/May. Certainly, that’s less than half the time I usually spend on training every week, but it was progress and it felt good.
Focus on prevention
Once you experience the bystanders, you never want to go back to them. The best way to do that is to use “Prehab”. This means incorporating exercises that will help prevent future injuries to your training program. The shoulders are soothed, but for example, I continue to do many intrinsic joint strength and mobility jobs to keep it healthy.
Furthermore, we cannot fully advocate the importance of following a whole body strength and conditioning program. While you run, swim, or ride a bike, you don’t have to hit the gym, but cutting logs for a few hours each week will increase your speed and power and significantly reduce the risk of injury.
Winter months are the best time to build a foundation for strength. This will help ensure that your body is robust enough to handle all the miles you plan to put it in the spring. Therefore, you will eat healthy, sleep properly, and engage in normal self-care (such as foam rolling, stretching, mobility training). If you take care of your body, it will reward you.
