The Lesson of the Torn Tendon
For those of you that laughed and cried tears of sympathy when you read about the great witches hat debacle during my race debut I thought I would give you an update on the most watched injury in history.
After x-rays, MRI scans and various Specialist and Physiotherapy appointments the diagnosis is in. I have torn the main tendon in my ankle and bruised a couple of the bones down there just for good measure. It seems that running for 9.5 kilometres after the initial impact perhaps didn’t help things. Hindsight is a wonderful gift for doctors to have on your behalf.
Since the injury I haven’t run at all – both Specialist and Physiotherapist said to me that the injury is indeed very rare and unique AND they still can’t understand how I managed to injure myself so badly. They are calling my injury the ‘Witches Hat Syndrome’ – albeit when they stopped laughing out loud.
My sense of frustration has been high to say the least – not helped by, again, both Specialist and Physiotherapist indicating to me that this injury takes time to heal ‘for a person of my age’. Oh please – let’s just rub it in! You know that it is a long time when every staff member of the Physiotherapist practice knows you by name and asks how the injury is.
At my last visit to my physio – something happened which changed my attitude completely. There had been a suggestion that surgery may be needed and to be honest that may still happen but my physio said something to me that really changed things. I have known my physio for longer than 20 years and really trust him and I think he saw a tad of frustration rising in me.
He said that his aim is to get me 100% well not 90% well because if I run again at 90% – the injury will return and that’s what often happens because most people are just too impatient.
I suspect that most of us think 90% is OK in anything!
At that moment I thought – how many times do I attempt things in life when I am only 90% well? Then when things go wrong I blame everyone else or circumstances when really it was my fault for attempting something at 90% capacity?
Perhaps in the future I should be patient and let the final 10 % heal so I can operate at a full 100%. So no running for me yet – the final 10% is taking some time BUT it will be worth it when I can run at 100%.
