Healing Hurts

If you’ve been to physical therapy for a chronic injury, you’re well aware that healing is pain. There’s typically much more to ridding a nagging injury than receiving a pleasurable massage.

Damaged tendons and ligaments are especially stubborn. Healing them is a game of months, not weeks.

I had a hamstring tendinopathy that lingered for months, and no amount of light exercise or massage would have any noticeable effect. It wasn’t until I focused on a spot-specific isometric hold, and performed multiple sets of 30 seconds, twice a day, that the hamstring started to get better. It’s difficult to get blood flowing through tendons, which is why it’s difficult to stimulate new cell growth.

I now know that isometric holds are the key to healing tendons. An isometric hold is a muscle contraction held in a fixed position and in one place, often against some sort of resistance. For example, if you were to use a leg extension machine in a weightroom and push to full leg extension, then hold that extended position, you would be engaged in an isometric hold. A wall sit could also be an isometric hold.

The isometric hold that helped my hamstring was challenging as hell, but I figured a few minutes of hell each day is better than a lifetime of possessing a bad hamstring.

After the hamstring recovered, I found myself wondering how many chronic injuries in the world would have healed, had hustle culture allotted more time for those afflicted. Who has the time to perform physical therapy exercises each day, in addition to routine exercise, work, and the daily obligations of adulting? Better yet, who really wants to when there are so many other lingering stressors dancing around in the mind? I suspect injured tendons often don’t heal for this reason. Instead, damaged tendons often steadily degrade until they eventually die.

Healing hurts, and similarly, I’ve noticed that once you’ve passed a life apex, maintaining the status quo hurts. Use it or lose it, the saying goes. This applies to both the body and mind.

If you don’t give your mind new stimulus and strain in the form of challanges, it eventually gives way, like a damaged tendon. Maybe we should treat our minds like a tendon in physical therapy,

So a good life requires pain, ironically, and to some extent, pain should be embraced.

40, Forging Ahead

The 40th birthday arrived, which I didn’t think would ever happen. For so long it seemed like a speck on the horizon that a journeyman would never reach. Then one day you wake up and you’re walking in it: the middle. It fully envelopes you and is here to stay, and a new speck forms on the horizon ahead: 50.

Someone asked me if the birthday was scary and I responded that no, I’m good with most things that age doles out. The inevitable wrinkles, gray hairs, slower recovery times, ailing body parts, and (hopefully not) weakening memory are inevitable. I’m at peace with all of that. It’s the acceleration of time that worries me more.

I’ve written before that the mind tends to group memories of similar days together. If you work a predictable 9-5 office job, the mind will group memories of days, weeks, months, and years into one big chunk, creating the “last year felt like a day” phenomenon. Maybe it’s a matter of efficiency. So if you want to keep time from pushing its foot on the accelerator, the best thing you can do is remain spontaneous.

I lived much in my 30s. I lived in China for two years, moved to Saint Louis, got a cat, toured San Francisco, relaxed at Lake Michigan, hiked the Shawnee trails (and drank wine on said trails), hiked North Carolina waterfalls, hiked Yellowstone, hiked in Utah, wine tasted almost everywhere in Missouri, ran four marathons included Boston, healed a broken collarbone, lived without a car for two years, swam with sharks in the Bahamas, sipped fine Sonoma wine, toured the Florida keys, held an albino alligator, visited Mexico, visited Russia, visited France, saw most of my favorite metal bands perform live, biked the eastern US coast, learned to sleep, met my partner, and learned to accept who I am. At least that’s what initially came to mind.

So here’s to an increase in spontaneity for the next 10. It would be nice if that keeps time at stalemate. That’s what I’ll tell myself, even though I’ve seen every Final Destination film and know what’s inevitable. Managing to keep time moving slow might be an impossible task, but one can try.

I might be a little more sore the next time I find myself in a moshpit, but I’ll still be at the show.

"I Don't Wanna Die"

The fall season is a bit like life in that it’s both beautiful and painfully ephemeral.

It seems like we are allowed a few weeks to appreciate the vibrant foliage before it desiccates and leaves behind a gaunt assemblage of ghostly spindly bare trees.

I reckon we can feel this way about how our bodies age. There’s a grace period where time affords us some beauty after having weathered the storm of our youths, but eventually the destruction can be merciless, especially if we don’t plan for it.

The cold is starting to creep into the bones and I especially feel it in my right collarbone, which has broken twice. It is a harsh reminder that not all things fully heal.

I find myself thinking of ways to make time slow, which requires discomfort. The sameness of days only makes time accelerate.

I’ll fight my own mortality to the end because frankly, I don’t wanna die.

Fall may be brief, but I’m determined to catch the next one.