Recovery

Injuries

I seem to post a lot about these recently. Thankfully my own has made a great deal of progress this week: my calf has much greater range of motion, the nature of my pain has changed completely and its severity has decreased substantially. I feel like I am well on my way to recovering and thanks to some help from friends and training partners I now have a stationary bike to help my rehab.

It is interesting that my most recent post dealt a bit with the idea of faith. While I've struggled with faith in God and church for most of my life (and more so recently) the one thing I haven't been struggling with is faith in my recovery. I knew I had injured myself, got good advice, got good treatment, took my recovery seriously and determined to let it have minimal impact on my training and preparation for my black belt test. Thankfully my injury occurred with enough time for me to recover (by making full use of that time). I've learned alot about myself in that time: I can be patient, measured and careful when necessary, as well as confident and determined when I need to be.

It's strange, but if I hadn't been doing martial arts I probably wouldn't have injured myself in the first place. But if I hadn't been doing martial arts, I don't know that I would have had the tools necessary to recover the way that I have. As I keep pointing out to my students, the study of martial arts is full of paradoxes...