Nice Recovery
Holding my enormous lap dog doesn’t seem to be hurting my knee at all.
The Big Game was this past weekend and I had fun pulling for the Rams and enjoyed that killer halftime show and even won $10 in a raffle. Woot!
But the play that hit me the hardest was when OBJ went down with a non-contact knee injury in the second quarter. He’d been having a great game up to that point (first TD of the game, a couple other clutch catches) and then he had to get helped off the field and did not return to the game. It appears to be an ACL tear, which means a long recovery and he may not return to form since this will be his second tear on the same knee.
You can have your opinions about OBJ as a player and personality, but no one wants to see that happen. In fact, there’s a movement among NFL players to ban turf fields since they tend to cause just this kind of injury.
Yesterday I was watching the weekly STORROR vlog, and got a little misty-eyed as there was the first footage of Sacha Powell training again since a nasty broken leg two years ago.
Ok, I’ll explain. STORROR is the most popular parkour team in the world. They hail from Brighton, UK and have been training and doing videos together for over 15 years. There are seven members of the team, and the fact that they’ve stayed together this long is remarkable. Their videos are quite entertaining, you should check them out.
Back to Sacha - he suffered the injury at the beginning of the pandemic. Since then he has put on weight and appeared pretty down in most videos. The team kept him around, helping him be at trainings with them and obviously supporting him. He’s also one of the two members who does the video editing and I’m sure that helped keep him motivated.
His first “training” yesterday was inspiring to watch, but a far cry from what he was doing pre-injury. He still has a long road ahead of him, but it was heartening to see him take the first steps.
I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to not be able to do train and fully join his teammates for two years.
Wait, no, I can actually imagine that. My knee surgery in 2005 sidelined me for nearly a year and it was another year after that before I felt truly confident in the knee. It plunged me into the deepest depression I’ve faced and that stuck with me for over a decade. Any injury (especially to my leg) would trigger memories of the depression and that would lead to bouts of depression again.
Lorraine remarked yesterday how far I’ve come since she’s known me. Early on when I got injured, I would get down and it was bad at times. Now I’ve learned better how to cope and not allow the past injuries to affect my current mind set. It helps that she is an expert at healing and can talk me through what recovery will look like. Mostly it helps that we talk about it.
It is important to acknowledge the mental/spiritual impact of injury and recovery. I think a lot of time in sport there’s the “you gotta be tough” mentality and that may be counter-productive to working through an injury. It is OK to be scared, sad, angry or whatever you feel. Find someone to talk to about it and develop mental coping tools along with the physical rehab.
I wish OBJ the best and look forward to seeing how Sacha returns to form. And trust that my own recovery will be positive and speedy.
