I believe that the No. 1 goal in the case of any injury that relates to climbing is to rehabilitate the injury completely as quickly as you can, without doing anything to promote further damage or impede your progress along the way. This may mean stopping climbing for some unspecified amount of time, as it did for me. The key here is unspecified – because while healing your injury becomes your top priority/goal, you must not place expectations or deadlines on your healing time. This will only promote impatience and frustration should the body not meet the imposed “healing deadline.” Instead, daily goals such as completing all physical therapy exercises, icing the correct amount of times and staying positive and active without causing further harm become more constructive during this time. You should also continue to closely monitor the injury, seeking out more guidance from professional resources should the healing process not be taking place as predicted by healthcare professionals.

Step 8: Support Your Efforts with Sleep & Nutrition. These two areas are often overlooked or underrated by climbers in terms of the impact they have on wellbeing, recovery and injury prevention/rehabilitation. However, getting quality sleep provides your body with an incredible healing resource, as does a sound, well-balanced nutrition plan. Avoiding alcohol in excess can help stave off both unwanted pounds and depression while also promoting healthier sleep. Likewise, eating plenty of fresh, unprocessed foods in healthy quantities will encourage your body’s natural ability to heal itself, also promoting sounder sleep during your rehabilitation. For more information about this step, see my previous blogs on nutrition, alcohol and recovery.

Step 9: Return to Activity Gradually with No Expectations. Our minds are almost always ahead of our bodies even when we’re not injured. We’re impatient about getting stronger from training, wanting instant results the minute we start a training program. We’re also impatient with our climbng ability and process, often getting p’o’ed when we don’t send a route as fast as we want to, and so forth. When we’re injured and out from climbing for some time, whether it’s a couple days, a couple weeks, a couple months, or more, it’s imperative that we baby our bodies when we first get back onto the rock, understanding that it will take some time and adjusting to return to “business as usual.” Of course, since the brain is always leaps and bounds ahead of the body, this can prove excessively frustrating when coming back from an injury.

You think of yourself as one level of climber, but now you’re likely to find that you’re not at that level anymore, not yet. You might have left the rock easily dancing up 5.11s and now find 5.9s challenging. Instead of getting irritated and angry with yourself or bemoaning how strong you used to be, try to just listen to your body and take what it can give, knowing that if you complete this part of injury rehabilitation correctly, you’re more likely to be back to where you were sooner than if you overdo it and push into too much, too soon, risking a regression or recurrence of your injury. Start out slowly and limit yourself, particularly on your first day back. Just be happy that you’re climbing at all on that day…it’s better than where you were before, on the couch not climbing at all.

I started back with a day climbing routes on top-rope way below my ability level, just to test the waters and see if my hand dealt well with it. Because of the oddity of my injury (no pain, just a lack of motor control and feeling, plus, it wasn’t an injury caused by climbing/a climbing motion to start with, so I wasn’t sure if climbing would help or hurt it), I figured I should take it slowly and then see what happened overnight after climbing easy routes for a day. Luckily, I experienced improved dexterity from the climbing virtually instantly. I logged a second day on the rocks on harder climbs, and saw a similar improvement – but I only climbed two pitches on that day, and then I took two days off, to let the experience gel and to make sure that I hadn’t done any damage by pushing harder.

Thankfully, I hadn’t, so I’ve continued on with this difficulty increase the past couple of days – but I’m still top-roping, for two reasons: 1) I simply cannot risk falling and putting out my hand into the rock right now, as I don’t want to trigger another bout of semi-paralysis; and 2) I can’t pull up the rope and clip with my left hand yet, anyhow – this is the hardest motion for me right now (along with putting my hair back in a rubber band). I can pull with my hand okay (though it still feels weak), and I can type with no issues now (sooo happy that if I think about this, I almost start crying with joy), but I can’t clip left-handed yet.

Step 10: Savor the Small Victories as You Go. This step goes with all of the above – everything you do that’s a proactive measure toward healing your injury should warrant a personal celebration. This holds especially true for the real indicators that your diagnosis is correct and that your recovery plan is working. If you have been in terrible pain and the pain lessens somewhat, it’s progress. If you can move a limb through a range of motion that it couldn’t move through without pain earlier in your injury, superb. It’s all about seeing the small gains from day to day, rather than expecting or hoping for a miraculous and spontaneous full recovery. Such drama usually doesn’t happen in real life; it’s more of a constant, slow trickle toward full rehabilitation if you’re doing everything right.

Remember to keep it all in perspective and to focus on how far you’ve come from the moment of injury instead of how far you have to go toward full rehabilitation, especially when you’re back out climbing but still on the road to recovery. It’s easy to get sucked back into pushing hard, and it’s almost guaranteed that once you’re climbing again, you’ll feel some impatience and frustration about the pace of your progress, as I know that I do.

For me, being able to type is a godsend, as is being able to pick up a glass, cut vegetables, and now, top-rope rock climbs. Being able top-rope a climb that’s hard for me is a wonderful step forward, just as being able to hopefully try to lead and send it before I go would be an amazing step forward/victory, but I’m not there yet…and that’s okay. If I can do that within the next five weeks, I’ll be blown away, but if not, okay.  I want to lead; I hate top-roping. But I also want more than anything to avoid round three of nerve impingement/semi-paralyzed left hand, so I’m willing to top rope until I feel confident that I can make clips and avoid impacting my left hand when I inevitably fall on lead…however long that takes. I’m just celebrating climbing again right now, and that’s enough.

I know from talking to physical therapists and other practitioners that having their clients not follow rehabilitation instructions is a huge source of irritation for them. People come in regularly to receive a diagnosis and treatment plan, but then go home, don’t follow it, and are then upset when they don’t see results. Just like in everything in life, you’ll get out what you put into your personal recovery plan, and if you don’t put in the time and effort (and money) needed to receive a sound diagnosis and then, to follow the prescribed rehabilitation program, you aren’t likely to see the desired results, nor are you likely to bounce back as quickly as you can.

Step 5: Stay Active. Instead of focusing on what you can’t do while you’re in the “no climbing whatsoever” phase, and instead of climbing on an injury and potentially aggravating it or making it last longer, ask your practitioner or team of practitioners what types of physical activity you can do while you’re injured. For active people, going from massive amounts of daily or near-daily physical activity to just sitting on the couch can be a recipe for utter disaster both mentally and emotionally. Staying active helps a normally active person keep from feeling they’re “losing it all,” while also helping them maintain some fitness despite the time off from climbing – and not just physical fitness.

Anytime I can’t climb due to an injury, I start to feel fragmented and stir-crazy, because frankly, I’m addicted to the total-body workout combined with the physical-mental problem-solving challenge climbing presents. Nothing else I’ve found in this world compares, and that’s a scary thing to me. During my no-climbing time, I made an effort to retain at least a semblance of stability emotionally and mentally by engaging in the physical activities I could perform without too much risk of retraumatizing my nerve. These included trail running, along with a full-body stretchy-band workout. I did bicycle crunches, supermans, and a whole sequence of stretchy band manouvers with my right side, mirroring what my right side did with my impaired left hand, sans stretchy band on the left side. I just performed range-of-motion stuff to remind the left side of what I wanted it to be able do, as recommended by the doctor. I also stretched and did PT exercises. None of this provided the same “fix” as climbing, but it definitely helped.

Step 6: Stay Positive. This might be the hardest step of all in dealing with a climbing injury or an injury that takes you away from climbing. If climbing normally helps provide you with an outlet and escape from the rest of the b.s. in the big world out there, and it’s suddenly swept away from you and not an option, and you don’t know when you’re going to be able to climb again (which is always the great unknown with injuries, because even the best prediction is still just a guess as to when you’ll be able to get back to it), it’s really hard to keep a bright perspective on your body and your potential for healing and becoming whole and climbing strongly again. In some cases, as in severe or permanently life-changing injuries, there may not be a future in which you’ll ever climb as strongly again – definitely a difficult situation in which to maintain a positive outlook.

I actually don’t think there’s anything wrong with mourning the loss of climbing time, ability or strength, so long as you don’t allow yourself to wallow in this place in perpetuity. It’s human to feel sadness when presented with loss, and losing the ability to use your body normally, whether temporarily or permanently, is depressing and difficult to handle, especially if you’re dependent on your body for both work and recreation and your injury impacts both severely. I certainly had some down time when I could neither type nor climb; it was pretty much impossible for me to maintain an upbeat or optimistic attitude 100 percent of the time, for sure. I allowed myself the space to feel bad about it, because I DID feel bad about it, and I didn’t want to suppress or deny those emotions – they’re real.

However, I also realized from the start that to allow myself to look at the darkest possibilities and potentials of my injury (i.e. “Maybe I won’t get to climb in Spain at all…maybe I won’t be able to type again for months,” etc.) was an unproductive approach to rehabilitating the injury. Instead, I tried hard to look for the positives (my prognosis was good; my health was otherwise good; I had a great group of friends to make me laugh; I’m in a beautiful place; I could still trail run and use my right side; etc.) and to keep my mental state as positive as possible for as much time as I could on a daily basis. Sure, I slipped and slid down into an emotional darkness now and again (who wouldn’t?), but I made a solid effort to turn that around as fast as I could – because it’s far more productive to focus on what you can do rather than what you can’t.

Step 2: Educate Yourself. This step actually should happen in conjunction with step 3 (diagnosis), and I almost put step 3 before this – but I firmly believe that with all of the resources available for self-education these days that you should start researching all aspects of your injury ASAP after it occurs, and you can also usually start doing this prior to and throughout all of your appointments and consultations with professionals. Yes, the internet has lots of junk, but it also has numerous reputable sites, including medical databases and catalogs of studies, that can provide superb information about injuries and rehabilitation tactics. If you go into appointments and consultations with medical professionals, physical therapists and alternative practitioners armed with information, you’ll be better equipped to ask relevant questions and also to question dubious diagnoses and treatment plans, as I was when confronted with the ER doctor’s misguided efforts to treat my injury here in Spain.

Step 3: Correct Diagnosis. Don’t just settle for what the first practitioner you see says. Getting a proper diagnosis might involve numerous visits and consultations with a variety of healthcare professionals. Strive to find the most reputable and knowledgeable practitioners you can, seeking out people who’ve handled similar injuries in the past. Specialists who’ve helped other athletes/climbers come back from the same sort of injury are much more trustworthy than those who’ve never seen such an injury before. Talk to other climbers/athletes and put your story out there, drawing upon all of the resources available to you. I’m always surprised at how willing we are as a culture (Americans) to pay good money to fix our cars and homes, but when it comes to our true homes, our bodies, so many of us – even those of us who rely mainly or solely on our bodies for our livelihoods – are reluctant or unwilling to spend the money necessary to diagnose and fix our physical injuries. Our bodies are our ONLY vehicles for this lifetime; in my mind, there’s nothing more precious or worthy for every individual to spend money on than trying to keep one’s personal home on this planet – one’s body – healthy, functioning and whole. Don’t skimp on this or hope that you’ve guessed right. Get a sound, solid diagnosis from someone or a team of folks that you trust. This step and process goes hand-in-hand with step 2, educating yourself, of course.

To do otherwise – to try to continue to achieve performance/training goals in spite of an injury and to put those goals ahead of receiving a correct injury diagnosis/prognosis followed by engaging in appropriate rehab and recovery tactics – is to risk increasing the severity of the injury, possibly prolonging a person’s total time away from climbing and training in the end (not to mention potentially impairing one’s ability to perform normal living activities, in certain cases). By ignoring an injury, refusing to pay for or seek out professional consultation, not educating yourself about it, and/or not rehabilitating it correctly and fully right from the start, you also risk having that injury become a chronic or recurring issue/problem.

I myself have fallen victim to the “ignore it and it will go away on its own” (a.k.a. ostrich) method of treating injuries in the past, as well as failing to take injuries (climbing and otherwise) seriously enough and/or failing to get a thorough diagnosis, prognosis and treatment/rehabilitation plan in the past – thereby prolonging my healing time, promoting further damage and lengthening my total time away from top performance and sabotaging my potential to achieve my climbing goals. By refusing to focus my attentions on certain past injuries and refusing to take them seriously enough, instead continuing to train/climb as usual, I made them into bigger issues than they needed to be had I taken the appropriate measures to treat them from the start.

I’m not alone in this. I’ve observed that this trend is very common in climbers (and probably in other athletic communities as well), both through casual observation and as a climbing coach. It’s not unusual for an avid climber to get mildly injured or start to flirt with an overuse/overtraining situation, and still continue to push it hard in training or climbing on the strained area until it’s much more severe and requires much more time off than it would have if the climber in question had just laid off the area a little when it started to flare up. It’s also not uncommon for a climber to sustain an acute injury to a body part and then continue to try to train and climb and use that body part as though it’s “business as usual,” without seeking out a diagnosis or treatment/rehab plan…and then express shock and dismay when the body part in question finally breaks down and becomes unusable at some point.

So…what’s a climber to do when an injury creeps up on them or slams into them (as my recent nerve impingement situation did), or something in between, that renders the business of climbing and training as usual impossible? Follow the steps in my Training Talk, of course! I’ve tried to lay them out in the order of appearance/integration into life/training/climbing plans that I would use myself, but I certainly may have forgotten to include something – so please feel free to add your two cents if you notice something I’ve missed entirely or glossed over too quickly. My intention with this and the ensuing entries about handling injuries is only to help others, so if you have something fruitful/helpful to add, please do so at any point.

I’ll start with steps 1 through 3 tomorrow.

It went decently enough on day one; I felt weak and unbalanced, of course, but that’s to be expected after nearly two stressful weeks off from climbing. The best part about this day was that it was warm and sunny and at least I was out climbing and laughing with my friends, even if I only climbed three super-easy pitches on top rope. I can’t overemphasize how important the warm and sunny part of this is to me; I loathe being cold (I envision my similarly cold-tolerance-impaired mother smiling and nodding in empathy/agreement as she reads this, ha! Thanks for the genes, Mom!), and being cold AND injured and out at the crags is a lethal combination for me. I even enjoyed just being able to belay Kevin again, honestly. Simply being his partner again at the crag brightened my world.

Yesterday, I felt completely exhausted from the moment I got out of bed. I’m not sure why – if it was a relaxation from the stress of the past couple weeks, or just from not sleeping too well (I haven’t been sleeping all that well here), or a result of climbing after not climbing, or maybe a combination of all those things. I didn’t feel sore or climbing-tired, and my hand felt better (making me feel even more certain that it was the airport fall that retriggered my nerve impingement, rather than climbing).

We went to climb at Terradets, the closest crag to our place in Santa Engracia. It was a gorgeously sunny and warm day once again. I decided to play it safe and only top rope again – not only from fear of impact but also, because clipping and unclipping draws with my left hand is still an enormous challenge for me right now – this motion takes more dexterity than grabbing most climbing holds. I top-roped two climbs, and man, were they ever AWESOME! I feel like I finally got a taste of the climbing here, and so what if it was on top rope with a limp-ish hand. At least the hand got better as I went, and feels better today après-climbing than it did yesterday (thank the stars for this!).

The first climb, my warm-up, was a long 7b (12b), and it was just great climbing, even if my crux was sorting out how to unclip every bolt without flinging the draws down onto the heads of unsuspecting climbers walking below. The second, a 7c+ (13a), was also fantastic, a tufa-ridden excursion with an awesome steep ‘n’ juggy overhang at the top. I struggled with the fat tufa part of this route a bit, not wanting to overexert my left side, and consequently weighting my right arm tremendously, resulting in a heinous pump on that side and a whole lotta taking. Oh well. I definitely have lost the intuitive feeling of and fitness for climbing at the moment, just as I expected I would after two weeks on the couch, but I don’t really mind this so much – both of these things are relatively quick to return, given the right amount of time and space to do so. I’m grateful to be able to climb at all right now, honestly.

My new plan is to rest today, and then head back out to Terradets tomorrow or the next day, depending on what the partners want to do. The 7c+ I tried is the perfect climb to try to regain and build up fitness for here on, whether I can TR or lead it next time – it doesn’t have any huge left-side presses or dynamic moves, and it’s pumpy and more than 100 feet long. I figure I’ll just keep warming up and trying that bad boy until my body feels more evened out and I feel more faith in my left side again and more balanced overall. I felt like I was limping up the rock yesterday, overusing my right arm just as a person who’d twisted an ankle would favor the uninjured side when walking. But there was joy in just being able to climb, for sure, and confidence is on the rise today as I type with more ease than I have in two weeks, after two climbing days, no less.

I have work to do today, but I also have a whack of photos I want to share with you and a new Training Talk following up on that Training Tip about handling injuries…we’ll see how far I can get. But there’s more to look forward to now, both here in my blog and on my trip to Spain overall. I truthfully already feel like it’s more worth it to me, even if I just got the tiniest little taste of the climbing here – it’s better than starving completely, no matter what happens from here on out.

This makes it easy to sit out climbing day after climbing day here. I’d rather miss a bunch of climbing days now and be able to climb hard later than struggle stubbornly up easy routes with a half-usable hand now and risk throwing my entire year ahead of me away. The cold temps help me stay disinterested, too, honestly, making me glad it’s been an unseasonably cold February here. Knowing it’s too cold for me to climb without my hands numbing out is a wonderful motivator for keeping me on the couch.

I feel like everyone expects me to struggle with this time off, but after the paralysis scare, I don’t feel like it’s much of a struggle at all. It takes however long it takes for my hand to regain full mobility, and I feel quite accepting of that. I’m not worried about “losing everything” because I know from past injuries that this doesn’t happen. I may lose a tiny bit of real strength/muscle if this drags on for months, and I’ll surely lose some endurance fitness and neuromuscular connectivity, but those latter two will return relatively fast when I start climbing again. The former, the strength and muscle, are elements that are relatively tough to gain and therefore pretty tough to lose in any huge way. Bodies don’t want to give up all that work quickly, all the energy that goes into building muscle and strength – so they take a long time to lose. I’ll just lose the opportunity to make gains in these areas while I convalesce, and so be it. I’d rather be whole in the end than make stupid and shortsighted decisions now.

Even being able to write out my experience a couple days ago proved cathartic; I hadn’t realized how stifled I’d been feeling – or no, that’s not quite accurate – I did know I felt suppressed and unable to express myself, but I hadn’t quite realized how much better I’d feel after sorting out my frustrations and fears a bit more. I did realize that having significant improvement in my hand mobility would help lighten my mood, and it has helped tremendously, more than I even realized it would. Being able to make dinner last night on my own without worrying about chopping my fingers off or inadvertently flinging vegetables and sauces onto the floor made me quite pleased. Being able to mock the earlier severity of my injury with my friends was nice too (you gotta laugh at this stuff). Because I did throw some stuff on the floor and almost chop some fingers off last week…among other little injury-related mishaps that of course didn’t strike me as humorous at the time.

That’s the thing that I really needed, though, to feel okay and upbeat about the rest of the rehab time, even if it takes my entire Spain trip (or even longer) to happen – I needed my left hand and arm to be good enough that I can use them in daily living tasks, like cooking, typing, brushing my teeth and such. I can deal with not climbing much more easily than I can deal with my left hand being a useless flopping appendage. I can savor the experience of Spain with great friends, gorgeous locales, different/interesting food and people and architecture and sights, and I don’t need to climb to be happy and have a good time, so long as I can at least use my hand without it making me feel totally inept in every task I undertake.

It helps, too, to know for certain that I won’t regret my choice to stay here while I work toward rehabbing it – my greatest fear was that I’d stubbornly stay here only to discover that in doing so, I’d make permanent what could have been a correctable issue if dealt with by going home straight away (an idea planted by the ER doctor and some frightening internet reading on my part).

So, onward! I’m still not even contemplating climbing again until my hand passes three normalcy tests I’ve established for myself, and I’m nowhere near those yet, though I’m much closer to them than I was when this started. It’s funny, though, for me to realize that since I didn’t really have particular climbing-related goals for this trip, seeing as I’d never been to Spain before and didn’t know what to expect, it’s actually the easiest part of my climbing year for me to let go of mentally and emotionally, in terms of that “needing to climb” feeling I sometimes have or that “running out of time to achieve goals” sensation. I also think that the fear of losing use of a limb critical for living normally outside of climbing really puts it all in perspective as far as rushing back into climbing – I really do value the ability to do daily living tasks on my own more than I value climbing, and I’m willing to wait as long as it takes to make sure the nerve is healed enough to handle climbing, rather than rushing back into it and risking round three of “flopping dead hand.” No, thanks!

And one thing I really finally internalized through this past year is that it’s not what I accomplish in a climbing season or at a climbing area that I remember and treasure most of all in the end. It’s more about the people I’m with and the experiences we share in those places and seasons, and how we handles our failures and setbacks as much as our successes and progress. I got way too serious about my summer project and let it determine my experience/enjoyment of climbing and people too much, but I actually learned from that, and I’ve since been far less attached to outcomes and goals impacting my psyche. The fall at the Red was successful in terms of climbing for me, but Kevin’s injury and our consequent inability to share in the climbing experience definitely took away from the joy in that trip for both of us, just as I’m sure my current situation impacts his enjoyment, though I’m trying to support him and encourage him to embrace climbing here as much as he can. It’s just always not quite what you wished for and wanted when your main partner can’t participate with you.

The best time I’ve had climbing recently was the time I spent this winter in the Octagon in Wyoming, with Kevin and Gabe. Neither Kevin nor I sent our projects, but it didn’t matter. We got close and made progress, and that was fun. But the real fun was the laughter and shared joy in the experience of climbing incredibly fun, challenging routes in an amazingly inspiring outdoor setting with loved ones.

For me, that’s the epitome of perfection in rock climbing, when you share your days at remarkable crags with people you love, supporting each other’s efforts and pushing one another, but never taking it too seriously and always remembering that the whole point of this silly human game (of all human games!) is to have fun and share that fun with others. Right now, even if I can’t climb, I can still certainly have fun and share that with others. The climbing will happen again soon enough, in its own time, whenever my body is ready for it again, whether it’s here in Spain or beyond.