Life is full of things that get in the way of the plan, or sometimes even things that completely blow your plan up into little pieces. Thankfully for me my most recent occurrence is the former and not the latter, but it can still be frustrating.
Against my better judgment, as the start of any good story begins, I played ultimate last week. I was at a tryout for a team called Mesteno and stupidly rolled my ankle.
I say "stupidly" because I didn't roll it doing something awesome. I did it after I stopped and went to turn around to go back in line. I have pretty loose ankles, but I felt a pop as it happened. I immediately felt pain, hobbled over to the sideline and put it up with ice. The ice in this case was an ice block and a Tecate compliments of Tower. Tower made me drink the Tecate that was on my foot later, which I was ok with.
I rested a bit and then my next stupid decision was to go out and play more. It actually felt ok. I could "feel" it, but it wasn't hurting me to do normal frisbee motions. I iced more when I got home and did the typical athelete self diagnosis of looking up "how to treat a rolled ankle" on the internet. From my research I think I have a mild sprain. There wasn't significant swelling, but there's a little bruising. So ice, arnica, and rest. I'm not going to lie, it hurt the next day, but at least it didn't really look any worse.
It's been almost a week now and I'm happy to report that things are doing better in the ankle department. I purchased a beefy ankle brace for future ultimate endeavors which, if anything, puts my mind at ease. I went on a long training run on Saturday (22miles) at the race course and it felt fine. There were little pains here and there, but nothing more than the usual. The run allowed me lots of time to think about what happened is I realized that I hate the term "setback".
I don't like the word setback. On face value it oozes negativity. Hearing setback makes me immediately think, "it's going to set you back and that's bad". In reality, training is full of things that divert you from the exact plan; weather, sickness, injury, or forgetting your shoes. When something happens that disrupts training it's too easy to focus on the negative and what happened. It's most important to focus on what you can do in the moment and in the future. On Molly Brown we talked a lot about relevance/irrelevance, or things we have control over and things we don't. Being able to separate it out and realign your focus into what you can do in that moment means you're thinking with a forward motion in mind. It's irrelevant to focus on rolling my ankle, it is relevant for me to focus on how to protect it in the future and how I can heal myself to get out and start running again. Dwelling on it as a setback only focuses on what happened. I would rather focus on what can I do next.
The word setback immediately sounds like focusing on the past, or focusing on something I cannot change. Even saying the word implies the past. I can't change that I hurt my ankle, but I can focus on what to do today and tomorrow to continue to prepare for my race. So I took a day off, I kept icing, I bought a brace, then I put socks on, laced up my shoes, and ran.
Rolling my ankle caused me to modify my training for a few days, but there are countless other things that have done that throughout the course of my running career. Saying setback means I can't move forward, but acknowledging that sometimes things disrupt your training gives you the control to keep moving forward. Therefore I don't see this as a setback, I just see it as training. Just as a thunderstorm keeping you inside for the afternoon, or a deadline at work that has to get done when you're training for a race it's all part of the package. Maybe that's why training programs are so long, because we all know that at least once or twice you're week plan is going to get thrown and you have to adapt.
*I'm less than a month out from race day!
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