Finding Your OK

After I finished writing my post about the mental side of injury, I was all proud of myself. I thought to myself, I’ve got this. I’ve been through surgery twice before. I know it sucks but I know what to expect and I know I can get through it. No problem.

And almost as soon as I clicked publish, I started to feel it. That heavy feeling that starts to hang on your shoulders, kind of indescribable and definitely un-pinpointable. It’s like someone lurking around the corner. You can just feel it there.

Apparently 3 weeks in a sling is the limit of my patience. I just wanted to move like I normally move. Not a little extra carefully. Not with my right hand bracing my left shoulder. Fine. If I can’t exercise then I just won’t move. I think that my vivofit tracked maybe 3000 steps a day. If I was lucky.

After a few days of sulking, I decided to go for a walk and started listening to the Another Mother Runner Podcast. Their guest was Summer Sanders, someone I grew up idolizing. {It was a great podcast by the way and Summer offers up a ton of advice about racing because, you know, she was kinda successful and all.}

At the start of the show, she talks about how she had shoulder surgery the day after Christmas. She was mountain biking, flew over her handlebars and had a 4th degree separation of her AC joint. They reconstructed her shoulder and also repaired an old labral tear that’s been in her shoulder since before the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. She was in a sling for 6 weeks all day, all night and unable to run.

As I entered into Prospect Park, it was a gorgeous sunny day and there were so many people out running. And I started throwing daggers with my eyes at their sweaty faces and flushed cheeks.

Just then Summer said, “It’s OK. I can mentally overcome it. I see people run. It’s a gorgeous sunny day and I’m stuck in a sling and I’m fine with it.”

To be honest, my first reaction was, “UGH. Rationally, I am OK with other people running and moving their bodies and living their life but there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to be OK with it. Because…Because…I felt like my five year old, grasping at words and compelling arguments but all that tumbles out of my mouth are whines and screams.

Summer said that people keep asking her when she’ll be back to normal. And her answer? Her expectations are really low and she expects to be back in the pool swimming in a year. You would think that for someone like her, whose life = swimming, that this would be devastating and frustrating. But she said that sentence with an incredible sense of calm and zen.

It reminded me of an piece from Kristin Armstrong. Kristin talks about how we can get so tied up with our responsibilities that we don’t give ourselves a break, that we worry incessantly. She mentions a quote from Michael Singer – “Everything will be OK as soon as you are OK with everything.”

“Everything will be OK as soon as you are OK with everything.”
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And that’s it. Why am I not OK with my current situation? I mean, aside from the obvious physical pain and limitations. Is it because it messed with my routine and how I identify myself? Because I am afraid I’m missing out and that it would make me less than as a blogger and writer because I can’t share insights from my latest run or yoga session or because I can’t post fun yoga pictures every day?

Yes, yes and yes.

But do those things matter?

I hate to talk about being injured blah blah but when you’re injured, that’s what you think about all the time. But I am working on finding my OK.

Learning to find your OK when injured #fitfluential #runchat
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PS: Did you know that there’s a Make Everything OK Button??

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