On not giving up
Weightlifting, you crazy b**** of a thing, I can’t give you up. I just need to figure out how to live with you in such a way that I don’t become addicted to heavy duty anti-inflammatories.
The surgeon told me I could “return to sport” six weeks after the surgery. So, I did.
I imagined a line across the calendar at this six week mark. After this time I would be fixed, before this time I would be broken.
I started light, technique-focused work on the two Olympic lifts – the snatch and clean and jerk – six weeks to the day after knee surgery. I marched into the gym on that Friday, strapped on my lifting shoes (I’d not permitted myself to wear them until I was “allowed”).
I was back.
I’d done the rehab my physio had instructed. Probably not as fastidiously as she had hoped but more frequently than I normally do when she gives me this stuff. (How many of you do the physio exercises? Seriously?)
Banded crab walks. Glute bridges. Glute bridges clasping a medicine ball between my knees. Body weight squats to a HIGH box.
It was boring.
Every now and then I’d do something I knew I wasn’t “supposed” to do.
Like trap bar deadlifts. 80kg x 2.
It was part of the PT course I am doing. We do a lot of practical work. They want us to feel the work, experience the stuff we will be programming for people.
I had to do the deadlifts. Almost everyone else in the course would be lucky to be 25. I couldn’t decline it. What would that look like?
It’s this kind of shit that gets me into trouble.
I know how old I am, I know I am old enough to have given birth to many of my fellow students but that doesn’t mean that I want to feel it.
Except I do. I feel terribly, inexplicably old sometimes. I woke up one day and here I was, I had turned 50 and much of went before I could barely remember.
So every Wednesday in the PT course I do as much as I can. By the end of the night, I can barely walk but this is a small price to pay. I come home at 11pm, ice my legs, have a shower and go to bed. It will all be fine in the morning.
On the weekend I went to Frankston to watch the Giants women play. Given the week leading into that game, I felt it was important to be there.
I caught a 7am flight to Melbourne. Then the Skybus to Southern Cross Station. Then a train to Frankston. Except there was trackwork, so I had to get off at Cheltenham and catch a bus the rest of the way. I was on the bus for an hour. I just made it to the game in time.
The game was as I had imagined. The Giants started with promise but couldn’t maintain it. The Hawks had too much class in key positions and frankly, their fundamentals were better and given they were sitting at second on the ladder coming into the game, they were no doubt mentally flying.
By the end of the game the Giants were showing signs of physical, but more heartbreakingly, emotional exhaustion.
It was just too much.
As I left the ground a smug dude in a Hawthorn scarf called out to me: “Bye Giants! Back to Canberra!”
This is a reference to an “insult” that fans of more established clubs hurl at Giants fans. You are actually a Canberra team. You’re not Sydney.
It’s not a very effective or even clever insult.
I walked back to the train replacement bus, sat on it for an hour, caught the train back to Southern Cross station, got back on the Skybus, then caught my Jetstar flight.
By the time I got home I was in quite a bit of pain. My knees – indeed my whole legs – had been painful all day. I took anti-inflammatories (only ibuprofen, not that sweet, sweet melobic stuff that makes my legs feel weightless and new). They didn’t work.
As I sat on that train replacement bus to Frankston I was thinking: maybe I am asking too much of my body. Maybe I am stupid. Maybe I shouldn’t be weightlifting at all. Why don’t I swim, like my mother suggested? How would it feel if I didn’t slam my feet into a wooden platform, wearing hard-soled shoes, over and over again?
What if I just stopped?
I thought about every impact that I subjected myself to in a routine training session. Every snatch, every clean, every push jerk. No wonder my legs were cracking the shits.
I will give it up, I thought.
I booked in to see the physio on Tuesday. Since I’d registered for that competition I mentioned last week, I had tried to maintain a level of training that I thought was acceptable, that was expected.
I wasn’t doing enough, I thought. I should and could have been doing more.
Before the appointment I mapped out everything I’d done since the surgery. At least, everything I had noted in my training book. When I saw it on paper, I realised that perhaps I was doing too much.
Shit. My physio had warned me. Liz had warned me.
So ah, I said to my physio, I think I’ve gone too hard too fast.
She just smirked. She knew this would happen. That’s why she’d warned me not to do the competition. That’s why she’d encouraged a graduated introduction of impact training.
(That’s why she then taped my knee up in far more rigid tape than normal, so it was difficult to move).
The stupid thing is, that’s what I thought I was doing. I didn’t count all the other stuff. The squats and the lunges and deadlifts and the bike work and the stairs at PT training. All the stuff I did with gritted teeth because I didn’t want to show weakness.
I also trained too many times at Atletika.
(Did I tell you I have a PhD? I did? And I still do stupid shit like this? I see).
I went to training on Monday afternoon at Atletika, thinking that perhaps I will take a long break, or indeed, give up weightlifting.
Danica knew I was not happy. She gently talked to me about taking things one step at a time – instead of my usual “I am hurting too much and I don’t know why and I will never be able to do this and I may as well give up and my life is ended” style.
She reeled me back in.
I did some upper body work. Hypertrophy. If I can’t lift ‘properly’ I may as well get jacked.
At the end of the session, I sat on a bench at the back of the gym and watched everyone.
How could I give this up? How could I give up weightlifting? How could I submit? How could I, indeed, surrender?
I can’t.
Weightlifting, you crazy bitch of a thing, I love you and I can’t give you up. I need to figure out how to live with you in such a way that I don’t become addicted to heavy duty anti-inflammatories because I am continually pushing myself too far.
I also must accept my limitations and my age. Just maybe not today.
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