Rowing Camp And On The Road To Injury-Free Existence

It has been almost six months since I consciously decided to fix my long-term injuries. I’ve made huge gains, and learnt how to persist and when to back off when needed. 

A big turning point for me was rowing camp earlier this month. I was slow, in pain for many sessions and also very disorganized with equipment and time management. I thought I was wasting my time, at a rowing camp where I could only complete half the session before my back caved in. I told myself that all I had to do was get through camp, and when I left I could quit rowing forever. Sounds like a poor attitude but it was a great way to bargain with myself when morale was low and I wasn’t going to respond to blind positivity. Once I decided it would be ok to quit when I got back, I stopped caring about whether or not I would get injured and just did whatever I could – I aimed to get as much done as possible, and if I got injured, then hey, I could back out and pursue something else. Like a masters degree. Or a full-time job. Or travel. Funnily enough, as soon as I adopted this frame of mind I got a lot more work done and felt much faster. I was also very fortunate to be in a squad of awesome, supportive people – at the start of almost every session I would struggle to push the boat off the landing, or at the end bring it back, and without fail someone would run down from the boat park to help me, and once even a few jumped in the water and swam my boat, with me in it, to the landing. I think it also helped to realize that many others were struggling, perhaps not with injury but fatigue, illness or pressure to be on speed for team selection. The support of the other squad members made it impossible to feel any despair for long. And needless to say I did not quit when I got back to Melbourne.

My challenge now is to make sure I am getting enough training volume done without sending myself back to injury land. So far I have had a 100% success rate with saying no if I am considering the session ahead and dread how painful it will be on back/hamstrings. If I look at the work and imagine it to be great practice for a race, or worry about how I will do it with school crews stopping and starting on the wrong side of the river, then I know I should be fine. I also have a rough idea of how long my back will last before it fatigues, and it has been a huge help to see that 30 minutes of pain-free rowing has now become 60 min on a good day.

I still have off days. Today and yesterday for example, I had no qualms with replacing the session on the watt bike as I had pretty unsettling sharp nerve pain on Thursday evening’s row. While this was a clear sign that I should give things a break, I also would attribute an off day to stress and non-rowing things. The day before I had attended a free session with an alternative health professional that at the time seemed fairly harmless, but was told based on no scans and a very non-medical questionnaire (“how many raw vegetables do you eat a week?”) that I had two slip discs and a million other problems. After leaving I assured myself through building anxiety that this guy was making big claims to freak me out and attract a scared, attentive, paying client. For days I was still very frustrated and even feeling guilty that I had apparently ruined my back again after so much work. There seems to be a huge correlation between state of mind and injury progression - good days will almost always happen when I am seeing myself as resilient and capable. This was an invaluable lesson to stick to what works. I have an amazing chiropractor at the moment and other than massage it seems ideal for treatment to be as simple and straightforward as possible.

That is it from me! Hoping to post again with even more gains and a few happy race results. :) 

Watching many movies with cabin friends was amazing, especially re runs of such classics as Bridget Jones and Notting Hill.

Blister shots - this is my 10th year of rowing and I still get these things