Well Enough to Work, But Not Well Enough to Play

I'm always angry that "well enough to work" precedes "well enough to play" when recovering from an injury or illness. It just isn't right. Or maybe I should take up less active "play." If I lived to play video games, then, man, would I love being immobile. Unfortunately for me, I haven't owned a video game console since my Atari 2600 when I was a kid and the only video games in the house are Ms. Pac Man and Pole Position and so the progression generally goes:


1 - Sick
2 - Well enough to work
3 - Well enough to work around the house
4 - Well enough to workout
5 - Well enough to play

So last night after doing some work in the garage and getting angrier and angrier. I thought I would very gently TRY the hangboard. After all, it's right there, and besides hanging is supposed to be good for herniated disks: it's supposed to open up the vertebrae and give the disc more room to go back to where it belongs... ie nowhere near my spinal cord.

I got my Metolius Simulator (see pics) this summer from a friend who had a long-lasting finger tendon issue from climbing and didn't see the hangboard as anything he would ever risk. It's harder than I thought. After no real climbing in over six months, I couldn't hang at all from the 'hard sloper' and could only manage at most a few seconds on the smallest crimpers. Since I'm brand new to ha
ngboards and haven't climbed in months, my entire 15 minute workout was probably equivalent to the first half of a real climbers' warm-up. Still, I could feel it. I threw in a few hangs on the pull-up bar and some circuits on the ice tools for variety.

It's easy to see why so many people provide such boisterous cautions about overuse with these things, though. It's not easy to imagine that if this is the workout I was limited to for a few weeks that I would very quickly overdo it and then really be up the creek as overuse injuries in the hand are notoriously slow to heal. Therefore, I consider my biggest success last night one of discretion: I cut the workout short and refused to do even one slow strict pull-up. And my back was the better for it.

Soundtrack: "Pack Your Bags" by The Bodies. I love this song. So funny. I can't find a link to a sample or even the lyrics but it's on TKO's original "Punch Drunk" comp, which is pretty good and cheap (if you can find it). The summary: Guy kicks out girlfriend ("f-ck off and don't you know, I don't give a damn where you go!"), then see's her picture during the bridge and begs for her to come back ("Alright, I'm not mad, won't you please, please come back?") It's a staple in my wod playlists where it always get's me pumped up AND makes me laugh. A rare combination.