"Pain used as a weapon is one thing. Personal pain, the kind that comes from just living our lives, is something else. Pain isn’t a lot of fun, at least not for most folks, but it is utterly unique to life. Pain-physical, emotional, and otherwise-is the shadow cast by everything you want out of life, the alternative to the result you were hoping for, and the inevitable creator of strength. From the pain of our failures we learn to be better, stronger, greater than what we were before. Pain is there to tell us when we’ve done something badly-it’s a teacher, a guide, one that is always there to both warn us of our limitations and challenge us to overcome them. For something no one likes, pain does us a whole hell of a lot of good."
That's a quote from one of Jim Butcher's books. He's one of my favorite authors, by the way. Good stuff.
For the most part, I love pain (for the sake of this post, I'm referring to physical pain) for the reasons that Mr. Butcher writes about.
Those who've followed my blog know that I've suffered from a list of physical ailments as long as my arm off an on since I started swimming again last fall. Up through last weekend, all of them but my left elbow had resolved themselves! So, sorta-masochist that I am, I decided to try play chicken with the pain train, courtesy of Terry Tate (...I'll give a brownie point to anyone who gets that reference).
A bit of backstory--when I lived in Charleston, I had a pretty tough running/pt/weights routine that I did four or five times a week, usually over my lunch break at work. However, the latter half of last April was really busy at work, so I only worked out a couple times after the beginning of the month. And then all last May was chaotic, what with my move up here at the end of the month. So, the result was that prior to this past weekend, I hadn't done any serious running, pt, or weights since the beginning of last April.
Back on track, last Friday after work, I lifted for the first time in roughly 10.5 months, then did a freaking awesomely tough spin class, then swam for an hour afterwards. My upper body was totally beat afterwards, and most of my muscles were on fire from spin and weights. Come Saturday, my arms/shoulders/lats were pretty sore. On Sunday, without the soreness having abated an ounce, I did a 1000 pushup challenge, to try and do 1000 pushups throughout the course of the day. Uh, not my most brilliant idea ever. From mid April 2011 to last Sunday, I'd done maybe a total of about 150 pushups. The day started off pretty well, and I hit the 400 mark without too much of a problem. After that, though, the soreness and my total lack of preparation set in, and I barely scraped my way through 750 pushups before bed.
On Monday, my arms, chest, and the front of my shoulders were in pain. I'm not referring to just being sore, I mean actual pain. It was awesome! The tendon thingy that goes from mid-forearm up the outside of the elbow to the bicep on both arms was freakishly tight. I couldn't straighten my arms without having some sort of weight pulling them straight--my arms weren't much straighter than C-3PO's arms are. Yeah, yeah, I know, needless nerd reference. Shoot me. I couldn't lift my arms up more than shoulder level in front of me without struggling to do so, and couldn't swing them further back than straight out to my side. I swam for an hour before practice Monday night, and it took the full hour before my arms were loose enough to let me do full streamline. The forearm tendon thingy didn't fully stretch out till yesterday, a good three days after the pushup day. They're still a bit tight, but I've got full mobility again.
One big advantage of my arms being super tight was that on Monday night, I did a fair amount of breast in practice without pain. Normally, that is a surefire trigger for the deep seated ache and twinges of pain just above my left elbow that've plagued me since October or November. No problems with that this time! Of course, I had a rather stilted breaststroke pull due to the arm problems, but it was quite nice to actually be able to swim an IM in practice without having to stop and massage my elbow after breast!
Tonight's practice will be the first one without any arm tightness, so I'll see if the elbow issue will be a factor tonight or not...
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