13. Hey body… whatsamatta you?

So you’re idling along, trying to be better. You’re waking up earlier, getting more exercise, eating healthier foods and generally feeling like for the first time in a long time… possibly ever, that you are moving in the right direction. The sands of time have slowed down and you’re rediscovering some of the vitality of your youth. A new happiness has entered your life, and with it a sense of achievement and satisfaction that keeps you coming back for more. That’s really how I felt. Ok, rediscovering vitality of my youth maybe stretches the reality of my situation. In truth I was just in the best shape I have been as an adult and felt unstoppable. My injury prone body, which used to punish me for sleeping with my head in the wrong position, had started to accept the new level of abuse I was throwing at it… I felt good when my body ached… it was a good ache, instead of just feeling old.

Yeah, I knew there would be hiccups along the way, but I’ll cope, after all – I’m becoming incredible – so it would take something pretty major to knock me from my pedestal... right? Not true I’m afraid, as I discovered more recently when I managed to injure my back. That’s it. That was all it took to completely knock me off my stride. Was it broken? Was I hang gliding in Venezuela, living my best life when disaster struck? Surely only something of this magnitude could stop the mental and physical fitness train I was currently riding? Nope. Just a small injury to my lower back, presumably from over exerting or possible poor form when doing weights. That was enough to eventually pause the positive momentum I had been building and allow old thoughts of frustration and failure start to creep back in.

I had never quite appreciated the level of accomplishment I derived from my new routine and the progress I was experiencing. I mean, I knew I felt better about myself, but I had attributed it to a combination of factors, so did not recognise how much my new ‘physical self’ contributed to this sense of success. I had felt like my body was no longer subject to the same concerns I had experienced before. I didn’t think I was pushing myself beyond my limits and besides, my new, fitter body could take it. I hadn’t even had a cold for over 4 months?! (which with 2 small kids at nursery and school, completely shattered my previous personal best). Now, I can’t say for sure what it was that caused the injury, although I suspect deadlifting may be to blame – or rather a lack of concentration from me – who is new to compound lifts – and subsequent poor form probably caused me to over exert the wrong muscle. What I can say is that for almost 4 weeks I ignored the problem, and just kept going as usual, which at this point meant HIIT in the mornings with weight training most days a bit later on. I wasn’t ignorant to the injury, but it didn’t stop me either. I was still clinging to the hope that my new super body would manage to recover and repair without me needing to stop the routine that was showing me the results I wanted. Anyway, as far as back pains go it was manageable, I mean, it wasn’t like back pains I have had in the past where I was rendered almost immobile. I was still able to crack on… so I did. This was largely because I didn’t want to lose momentum. I thought if I stopped that it might signal the beginning of the end, and god knows I didn’t want things to stop, it’s been going so well. I realise now the flaw in my logic. Did I really have that little faith in my will power or commitment that I thought taking time off to let my back recover might jeopardise the new life I’m trying to create? Would a couple weeks of not exercising make me decide that actually, life was fine before, and I didn’t want or need to ‘grow’ or improve myself? Of course not, and now I know better. I know that if I have to, I can take ‘time off’ when needed and will be able to pick up exactly where I left off. This isn’t just a phase, that can end as quickly as it started – this is the new me, injuries and all. But at the time, this is not how I felt. So when I did finally decide late one Sunday night, after enjoying my cheat day indulgence, that I wasn’t going to be getting up early to exercise it really did hit me like a tonne of bricks. Like this admission that I had to stop in order to try and recover was a failure. Like I was no better than before I started all this hard work, and my body was letting me down again… just like it used to. Things I thought (naively) were all in the past, and issues that dogged the old me, should not be impacting the new me, and so when I was forced to admit I was still susceptible to injury it upset me. So maybe I hadn’t changed much after all.

Now don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t as delusional as that all sounds, I mean I knew really that I was still likely to injure myself from time to time, after all, professional athletes injure themselves so why the hell would I, a 37 year old, dad of two with no particular sport credentials not be subject to training injuries. But, because of the quick progress I’d made and the welcomed feeling of success I’d experienced my view on how I wanted things to be was overriding the rational part of my brain that knew how they actually where. I ended up in a bit of a mental funk.

I decided to take a couple weeks off from my exercise regime. This meant no HIIT and no weights for two weeks. It’s not a lot of time really when we’re talking about letting your body repair, but it was as long as I was willing to risk given my mindset at that time. In fact, if I’m totally honest I initially said one week, in an overly ambitious and destined to fail plan for full back recovery. I think I always knew this would extend, but saying one week at the outset made me feel better about the decision, and I was able to turn a deaf ear to the rational comments coming from my ‘sensible brain’. In a nutshell, I lied to myself, and even though I knew I was lying it made me feel better about making this decision and allowed me to move forward in a new direction, rather than just keep spinning on the hamster wheel of endless back pain. I’m not suggesting this lie was a good idea, but I can see now why I did it. It came from the emotional, anxious part of me that was caught between desperately wanting my back to get better and not wanting to lose the momentum of my fitness journey for fear of total collapse. That first week my journal was bleak, with phrases like ‘it makes me feel hopeless” and “my body is going to keep letting me down, so I’ll never be able to reach my physical goals’ becoming typical of my thoughts at this time. However, reading back through my journal it is clear I was having an internal dialogue with one part of my mind giving in to self pity and a victim mentality - while the other side was trying to give me a kick in the ass and trying to pull myself out of the funk and process these negative emotions. So hey, maybe I am making progress.

Once I realised this it became easier and easier to get my head back in gear, while my back continued to twinge, and if I’m honest… didn’t seem to get any better. Anyway, by the start if week two, I had started to flip my funk on it’s head and start having more positive thoughts about the situation that served me much better. Journal entries began taking an almost optimistic tone, or at least a more ‘I can handle this’ type approach. After 8 days out of my routine I was enlightened enough to write:

“I noticed yesterday how my mood deteriorated as my back got more and more painful. So ‘one’ I need to try and address the physical aspect of it so I don’t have to feel stiff or sore, and most importantly I can get back to doing exercise. But ‘two’ I need to figure out how to mentally deal with having this ‘obstacle’ as it really seems to be a source of negativity. If my thoughts create my feelings, then I need to change how I think about it. First I need to know what exactly my thoughts are and try to understand why I’m thinking like that.

I think I’m aware of having a lot of past issues in my lower back, so am thinking that I’m always going to end up with back pain – which makes achieving future goals unlikely. This is rooted in the past, as having had lower back pain plenty of times before I have a lot of past experience to call on and so I’m finding it hard not to assume this is the same, and will keep happening. I need to spend some time thinking about how the future me would think and feel about this.

I think in the rare event that the future me did injure his back doing exercise he would just go and get proper help… sort it out asap, with the right guidance and he’d be back at the gym in no time. He wouldn’t get down about it as he knows it doesn’t happen that often and he knows he’ll get it sorted out.”

So that was it, the beginning of my return to greatness. Well, when I say greatness, I really mean my return to not ‘funkness’. But hey, I’ll take it. That’s a victory in my book. I had simply decided I didn’t need to make my current issues mean anything about my future goals. Everything was still on the cards, it had just been slowed down temporarily. And besides, I was learning a lot from this experience, both about myself and about lower back pain generally. Who knew thoracic mobility and glute activation were so important?Probably a lot of you… but I didn’t.So, with the right help I was going to get my back sorted out once and for all, so hopefully it won’t become a re-occurring theme, and my girls won’t need to ask me (almost daily) ‘is your back sore today daddy?’.