My first real post: Injury status

For the entire past week, I've felt pretty good. So good, in fact, that I think I probably could have played at OSU. That being said, not playing at OSU was a very good idea, because I'm still very weak and would have put myself at a high risk for reinjury. Anyways, today at the gym, I made my first real step towards full recovery by doing a lower body lift with TallE.

We started with the usual weigh-in. I weighed 156, which is a few pounds below my norm. I attribute this to the 11:30 start time of this lift, rather than to any substantive loss in body weight. Either way, we did some pretty intense stretching, which I really need in order to not hurt myself. After this, I did something that I haven't done in a long time: Squats. I started off with some pretty low weights - only 15lbs on each side of the bar, just to make sure I was going to be able to handle it. Surprisingly, my back/abs were able to support the weight with no pain whatsoever, which is a very good sign in my road to recovery. I completed two more sets, with 25lbs and then 35lbs on each side. 45lbs probably is about the maximum I could handle at this point, but that's not bad at all. Anyways, the exercise went off without a hitch, felt really good, and I experienced no pain.

Then it was off to the hip adductor machine. I did 50lbs to start, 30 repetitions. This was also pain free. Went up to 70lbs, and did the two remaining sets of 30 repetitions at this weight level. Again, pain free. This is all a very good sign

Fast forward to tonight. We had Cost Center time from 11:30-12:30, so Nick and I decided to go do a little throwing. I didn't warm up too much (which was a stupid stupid idea), but it didn't seem to have any adverse consequences. I jogged towards discs at the beginning, did some pretty decent jumping for high discs, and towards the end I was making full cuts at about 75% speed. I felt weak through it all, but there was relatively little pain the entire time. This is a very good sign.

Finally, once I was done throwing, I pulled out a few of the things I did at PT this past summer. The first of these was simply shuffling at 50% speed for approximately 20 yards down and back, then 75%, then 100%. I did this pretty much pain free. The next one was a 5 yard sprint, immediately shuffling right 5 yards, and then immediately sprinting 5 more yards. I also did this with the shuffles to the left. Had no pain in this, although I started it very carefully to make sure it wasn't going to be problematic. I think there's a mental block at this point with my injury, where mentally I am being extremely careful to make sure I'm ok to go before I actually go. Getting past this mental block may be challenging in the next month. Anyways, did those sprint/shuffles, and then finally did one more sprint thing where I sprint 5 yards at a slight angle forward, backstep 5 yards, sprint forward 5 yards at an angle, then backstep 5 yards, and so on and so forth. This was pain free also.

All this is very, very good news. I stopped today before I was completely fatigued. I'm gonna keep taking it slow. Very slow. But I'm gonna be ready for CCC - I promise.