Strides

Today, August 9th, 2018, marks exactly five months post-surgery. If you ask the doctors, this puts me past the halfway point, where the original timeline they gave me is 7-8 months until full recovery. If you ask anyone who plays ultimate who has had a similar injury, they would put me right around the halfway mark, saying that you usually need to add a few months after when the doctors clear you before you would be fully ready to get back on the field. Regardless, I've come a long way from where I started.

In my last post, I had just been given the green light to start running. My first run was on the Alter-G, a specially designed treadmill that creates a bubble around the lower half of your body to relieve some of the impact when running. Running at 80% of my total weight, I went for a total of two miles, alternating between a fast walk and a medium paced jog every tenth of a mile. From there I went to running on a normal treadmill at full weight, again going for two miles, alternating every tenth of a mile. It was a very weird sensation. You kind of forget how often you run until you haven't done it for 3 months. Even if you aren't playing a sport or exercising, you still run pretty frequently. Maybe you're just crossing the street and see an oncoming car, or are walking home and it starts raining, or accidentally get too close to a bee's nest. In any of those cases, I simply just had to accept my fate and continue walking.

From about the time I had started walking again to when I was just getting cleared to run, I had been working with Mike, a trainer at UPMC who also works with the Steelers. As training camp had arrived, he had to leave to focus entirely on the Steelers, so I was traded off to a woman named Cara. Since the trade, things have happened very quickly.

I went from alternating every tenth of a mile with Mike to running 10 minutes straight with Cara. I did that two or three times before they bumped me up again to 15 minutes straight, which is what I currently do as a sort of warmup. There are a few phases left in my recovery. I still have agility, jumping, and cutting. After a few sessions with Cara, she tested my leg strength to see if I could move on to agility. I had to have at least 92% strength in my bad leg compared to my good leg, measured by getting my one-rep-max in both leg press and knee extension. I amazingly hit 100% strength in leg press and 93% in knee extension.

Since I had done so well on my testing, not only did I move on to agility, but Cara said she would test me again in only two weeks to see if I could be cleared for jumping, which requires 95% strength. Agility is some simple footwork drills using mini-hurdles and an agility ladder. I've only done it twice as of writing this, and it has a similar feeling to when I first started running. It is definitely a strange sensation, and the little lateral motion that I'm doing seems to go against my natural instincts to protect the knee. Regardless, it suffices to stay that I finally feel like I'm making big improvements in my recovery. It doesn't seem too long ago that I was going up and down stairs one at a time, doing everything I could to not stress the leg too much. Just last week I moved out of my house, carrying a whole spread of heavy things up and down stairs.

With the rate of my improvement lately, I'm hopeful that I'll be back at 100% earlier than expected. When I first got injured my goal was to be healthy by the team's first Spring tournament in February, 11 months after surgery. Now, I'm hoping that I can be back to practice after winter break, closer to 10 months post-surgery. It's not a huge jump in the timeline, but I'll take anything I can get at this point. These months have gone by a lot faster than I had expected, and with school starting back up soon, these last few are going to fly by. I'm feeling a lot better physically, and more importantly, mentally. This has not been easy by any means. I'm closing in on the end of this journey, and I couldn't be more excited to get back on the field.