Nick has had some very good posts of late on 1) Listening to your body and 2) Failure/Setbacks; I’ve been out of the loop here for awhile and as a means of explaining myself, I thought I’d throw up a post in an attempt to reinforce the excellent points he’s made. 

A few months back (April or May I think) I was doing a CF workout at a non-CF gym near my office.  I knew this place wasn’t exactly my style but I joined up as a backup plan to the CF box I worked out in because it was cheap and close to the office and I could dash over for a quick workout at lunch, or hit the treadmill to get the blood flowing if the weather sucked to much to be outside.  Being as it’s such a small place, they’ve got a lot of gear packed in there which means you get bumped from time to time if people aren’t paying attention.  In the middle of overhead squats I got bumped by a guy that was screwing around with his buddy and not paying attention…instead of tossing the weight I fought it and felt that tell-tale pain in my groin.  I dashed to the bathroom long enough to examine myself and wrongly convince myself that it wasn’t much of a bulge (not the good kind!) in my lower abdomen at all.  One sneezing fit later and I’m a candidate for hernia repair surgery. 

This represented a huge setback for me.  At the time, I was scaling benchmark WODs less and less, gaining some serious strength and power in my legs (always my goat) and gaining confidence and power in olympic lifts.  My cleans and snatches were getting downright snappy and here I was ordered not to lift at all and do only moderate linear exercises (brief jogs or bike rides) in advance of surgery.  THAT SUCKS!

Going through an injury requiring surgery (however routine and minor) has taught me several important things of value in the CF realm:

1) General anesthesia is cool.  Nuff said.

2) The 37 year old body recovers and responds to trauma in a way completely unlike the 24 year old body.  I had a hernia repair in graduate school and despite it being an open procedure, I was back up and about in 2 days, and back to normal activity inside of 2 weeks.  Despite this recent adventure being a scoped procedure, I was bent over for at least a week, and just over 1 month out anything involving core rotation (Russian Twists for example) produces sharp pains in my lower abdomen…something my surgeon assures me is normal as the body adheres to the teflon patch.  Because of my age and fitness profile, listening to my body becomes critical in cases like this…better to take an extra week that an extra 2-3 months because you didn’t listen in the first place.

3) To paraphrase the great Yogi Berra, 80% of this game is half mental.  While I remember being really annoyed at pushy-shovy frat-boy for running into me, I don’t recall being profoundly mentally impacted by the injury, but I’ve found that I now overthink any CF routine that involves oly lifts.  Even in the CF box I work in now, a hypersensitivity has crept into the concious part of my workouts, leading to hesitation, self doubt, and poor form whenever the bumpers are supposed to end up over my head.  I had been having trouble getting back into a rhythm during such workouts and this whole crisis of confidence came to head when I asked the trainer where I should ditch the weight “if I can’t push it up”.  WTF?  I used to asked where he wanted it when I was done and owned it.

4) Building on point 3 above, you cannot “forge elite fitness” or get anywhere close to it if your confidence is shot.  My solution to this problem is to over-communicate with my trainer asking tons of questions about form and process, and at the same time cutting back weight and focusing on form to rebuild muscle memory for lifts.  Sure it means that I’m not getting the full benefit of my oly lifts right now, but we rebuild from failure in measured fashion rather than repeating the same damn thing over and over again, expecting different results.  I can see it starting to pay off now, and my weight and percieved power during the workout are increasing, and I’m far less concerned now with the “if” and more focused on “what next”.

To sum up, take the prescribed time to recover from injury or fatigue.  If our goal as crossfitters is to build fitness and perform all workouts “as prescribed”, why in the hell wouldn’t you rest or recover from injury as prescribed.  And be sure to deal with the mental toll injury exact on you if a constructive and measured fashion.  Pain and discomfort are most certainly a part of the crossfit experience. The workouts are designed to make us uncomfortable and push us beyond traditional boundaries of what we think we can do.  The thing is, I haven’t ever read an article or a blog post, nor have I ever talked to a coach, that said we get extra credit for inflicting pain in a way that is ultimately destructive to our path.

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