Nate, On Injury and Recovery

"Failure is common in contests between man and nature and when individuals face each other in combat, unarmed or otherwise. Failure also audits the individual, internal contest between expectations and reality. Those who strive fail but a healthy attitude towards failing and towards learning keeps the balanced athlete from considering him or herself a failure. The skills and confidence spawned by failure allowed me to progress instead of repeating myself, and personal evolution is the ultimate goal of my participation in sport. In this context success and failure are the same thing, though one feels a bit better than the other."
-Mark Twight


I'm hurt. And it sucks. Everyone who trains hard and works hard feels this way. We train and work and do everything we can to build ourselves up higher to make and break new goals, but in the end we're only flesh and bone and they can be broken. I think it's only a fool who thinks they're so invincible that they'll never get hurt.

It's that same mentality that will only brush an injury aside and not consider the implication of it. After they recover it'll be back to training as usual. Because it's not the conditioning that injured them, it was weight or duration or form. Right? Injury can always come in two forms; from intrinsic factors that we have very little control over, like genetics. And from extrinsic factors, which are more apt to be changed shape or molded. My initial response to getting hurt was more like that of the gym dinosaur I mentioned earlier. I was convinced that I over-trained , lifting too heavy, and all I need to do is to back off my weight and train back up to wards where I was. But after some consideration I realized that maybe the whole method itself was to blame. It all goes back to the "fall into a zone" view of weight training: bigger and stronger means more weight.

In the end maybe an injury is the way to invite change into your training regimen. The previous effort hasn't failed you but instead taught you a lesson on how you need to be trained versus someone else. Whatever training rationale that is followed is never specific to anyone. It needs to be tweaked and twisted before it's something that works for you. After I'm back on my feet I'm excited to be able to invite change into my workout. Will that be the final solution? Doubtful but hopefully it'll get me closer to a system that's able to bring success in the fact that it allows me to succeed at the goal of having the best training I could as for. An injury is never failure and failure is only another path to succeeding.