As I write this it's the eve of my 3rd knee operation in about 5 years. I'm under no illusion that this will magically fix everything wrong with my knee, but I'm optimistic that I'll be able to get back to running, and eventually to competing again early next year.
So how did we get here?
The Injury
My knee pretty much disintegrated on impact after I launched myself off an 8ft wall back at the end of June (during the Pain & Suffering race). During the first few weeks after that, I was pretty depressed. My grand plans of all the various races and challenges I was going to complete during the year were ruined. The UK OCR Championships in November that I worked so hard to qualify for - now no chance of me competing.
As a result, I never did much for a couple weeks in terms of training. I felt it was pointless. I never made any videos either, or wrote any posts, and stopped religiously following all of the various social media OCR groups. I didn't want anything to do with OCR, as it just reminded me that I had screwed up my knee again and couldn't take part in anything this year.
Turning Point
After a few weeks of wallowing in self pity, I got my act together. What was I doing? I was better than this!
I planned out my training for the next week, adding in all manor of strange and inventive exercises that avoided putting any stress through my knee. In particular, decent cardio exercises are hard to do when you can't involve one of your legs. So I partially took apart my exercise bike and then raised it up on to a couple boxes so that I could use the pedals as an arm cycle. I think my wife thought I was a bit strange, but it definitely worked.
On the odd day I would film a couple of the exercises, just to keep me motivated and to track my progress:
Video
Lesson Learned
So the message to take away from this: Don't let an injury derail your training and stop you in your tracks. Focus on what you CAN still do, and not on what you can't.
There is always something you could still be doing, and there is never a reason why you can't still do what you love. You just need to be willing to put the effort in, and persevere through the hard parts.
The Paralympics are currently on at the moment, and every one of the athletes you see have taken this mindset to the extreme. Do you think any injury or hardship completely stopped them training or chasing what they love? No chance. Certainly gives you some perspective when you see an athlete with no arms fly up and down a swimming pool at a speed far greater than you could ever achieve, and then head butt the end of the pool to finish.
Next Up
So I'm due for my knee operation tomorrow - a meniscal repair and diagnosis of anything else going on. I'm anxious to get it done, so that I can get on with the "real" rehab. I'm feeling good though, and almost strangely excited about the prospect of the hard hours of training I can get stuck into.
After the op, I plan to do a weekly update of how the rehab is going, to keep me motivated and on the ball. Hopefully won't be long before I'm back in the mud, crawling under barbed wire and clambering over walls.