Finding Different Strengths
or, recognizing injury for what it can be
Since the end of October, I’ve been injured. I guess. It’s hard to come right out and call it that because the injury didn’t happen in one specific moment. It likely happened over time, over years. It’s a degenerative meniscus tear—so, by definition, it’s just the gradual breaking down of a part of the body that can see a lot of stress. But even though it didn’t come about through a finite and particular action, the tear to my meniscus is, alas, an injury. In my circle of rowing friends, we would say that I am, at the moment, “broken”.
Much of these past months have, indeed, looked like the life of a “broken” athlete: I’ve been going to physical therapy, I’ve been doing my exercises at home, I’ve had an MRI, I’ve had a cortisone shot. It’s all helping.
What’s not helping? My own foolish attitude. My essential resistance to the fact that I have an injury, and my insistence on a stance that is only partly wise, only partly prudent, only partly compliant.
Oh, I’ve made mental strides, of course. My much younger self would have bulled herself forward in every single athletic thing she wanted to do, regardless of pain and visible signs of increasing damage. And then that younger self would have found her injury truly incapacitating, a medium-sized hindrance turned maximum physical problem. I have, at this stage of my life, at least not done that. I have backed down, I have dialed back. Interesting, though, isn’t it, that the formulations that just came quickly to my mind—”back” down, dial “back”—imply a kind of anti-progress, a reversal.
It needn’t be thus.
It’s taken me months, but I have come to learn in my body something that I have long known in my mind: when you’re injured, you can find different strengths. It’s not binary. You don’t go from strong to weak. You go (or can go, if you’re smart) from being strong in one way to being strong in another, different way.
This all started for me the weekend after the Head of the Charles, after a period of almost a year when my knee (finicky since my first ligament tear in my teens, and through years of soccer and one arthroscopy) had been exceptionally solid. The kind of solid where you completely forget that you have a finicky knee and you keep doing your strength exercises for it and you are acing them. But I’d also been ignoring little twinges, little split-second jabs, that were telling me something—if I’d wanted to listen. So, come October 27 and a nice easy run along the Charles River, there was a twinge that made me limp home.
This was followed by the aforementioned treatments and the ongoing PT. And also, come December and the first snowfall, my return to skiing. Cross-country, on day one; then some uphilling; then some ski-area downhill; then the moguls I love; then more backcountry; then cross-country skate-skiing. Reader, it was too much. Because I was making some concessions to my injury, I felt I was making all the concessions necessary. I decidedly was not.
I flirted with other modes of finding and maintaining strength—the rowing ergometer (an old frenemy), the indoor bike, yoga—but I wasn’t committing. I was, I realize now, fundamentally failing to see those other modalities as the strengths they are. I was paying lip service to adaptation, to redirection while, essentially, continuing to see change as a reversal (see “back” above). But if you let it, change can drive a powerful adaptation.
It will come as no surprise to the wisest among you that my recent revelation has led me to set skiing aside for now. Reaching the acme of my personal athletic maturity, I even stopped myself from trying to go on a run yesterday. But my knee feels so good! I should try! Look! I’m trotting around inside the house and it feels good!1 I went for a walk instead. And then I got on the indoor bike, where I’ve been feeling stronger with each session. I am finding different strengths.
Strength is such an obvious good that we can sometimes take its nuances for granted. It comes from actual power to move weight (see Laura Van den Berg’s latest). It lives in the ease with which you pick up grocery bags, or tug open heavy doors. (I will never forget the feeling of newfound upper-body strength for this marathoner who discovered rowing in her early 30s.) Strength lives in the ability to walk around your town, or run up a mountain, or hike a trail, or dance.
Sometimes we’re called upon to find new strengths, whether they be physical or mental. I think it’s helpful not to see that need, that search, as a setback (that word again). It can be, instead, an opportunity to be agile and wise.
I have to imagine most of you reading this have been way smarter than me about these things. Tell me how you’ve turned a “setback” into progress, how you’re finding strength now (new strength and old)!
picture my husband here, watching with a raised eyebrow, surely waiting for me to come to my senses
Ah, dear Henriette. It's so you. Our bodies are wearable. The major joints have odometers, though we can't see the dials and each of us is different. But certainly high pressure, high torque, high impact lower extremity exercise speeds up that odometer. Nor is it unusual for a knee to seem fine except for tiny little clues, then all of a sudden to manifest a major joint disruption, with no real turning back to status quo ante.
I'm glad you are adjusting. There is lots of activity that you'll be able to do without pushing to the anatomical twisting and bending limits your knee won't handle safely anymore. Couch potato is not in your future.
I am just recovering from my own experience. A year ago I had no issues with my right knee within the normal exercise, walking, golf and modest gym work I did (including step master) none of which maximally torqued the knee. But one day in April, without any precedent injury, I developed swelling and pain that didn't respond to conservative treatment including steroid injections. It turns out I had essentially no cartilage left. Just worn out and the closing bell had rung. I underwent total knee replacement at the end of October and, while not yet up to full knee strength, am essentially fully functional. My new part is so inobtrusive that I forgot to mention it at airline security.
Of course, needing an implant or a major revision of life activities in the absence of external event, appropriately brings reflection on aging and mortality. As a physician I am all too aware that we are not built to last forever and not every breakdown can be repaired. But I believe there usually are many ways to remain active and productive, not only different from the past but sometimes better. And if everything develops cracks (cf Leonard Cohen), it does let in the light, and we may see better and be wiser.
Best to you.
I have had two meniscus tears, one very old that would flare up every now and then, and then a new one in 2019. When I went to the doc, he confirmed the new tear, so I said great - let's fix both at once (same knee). He cautioned me that other parts of my knee were shot, but I wanted to go incrementally.
That said, fixing the tears was not enough, and I had to ski with a brace - UGH. I also could not finish a golf swing (left knee). Plant and pivot were out of the question. Biking still worked, and actually helped, so that is how I got strong again.
Therefore, I went for the knee replacement in 2020. After recovery, things have been great! I had not realized hockey had hurt so much (for it was so fun), but now, skiing and hockey are pain free!
Moral: listen to your doctors... Lee McShane Cox