Miraculous Recovery? (or just lucky)

One thing I’ve learned over the last several years is that occasional injuries are more or less a given for the masters athlete. I mean, they’re pretty much a given for the younger guys who heal quickly and have expensive rehab facilities, so it should come as no surprise that we older amateurs, who are somewhat more brittle, are going to have to deal with them at least as frequently. Given this, “injury management” becomes a critical component of any masters athlete’s season.

The only reason I bring this up is that I’m entered in 5 events at a track meet tomorrow morning, and I find myself with an injury, so I’m debating my next move. It’s not a real serious injury…I suffered a muscle pull in my left calf while practicing on Monday, and it’s not yet back to 100%. It still feels tender and tight when I walk, so I’m a little apprehensive about what’s going to happen when I try driving off of it with full power and under the load of the various implements.

Tomorrow’s meet is one of the more important meets of the year…at least it’s always been important to me. But next week…just 8 days away…is an even bigger meet. The last thing I want to do is to go to this meet tomorrow and have my performance hampered by the injury, AND injure it even more, AND ruin my changes for next week. On the other hand, I hate to be a wimp about it. Clearly, if tomorrow was the last meet of the year I would be there, but it’s not, and I have the 3 biggest meets of the year coming up – the Texas Masters Championship, the USATF Masters National Championship, and the Texas Senior Olympics State Championship.

I’ve always been the kind of guy who would just keep going until the wheels fell off, at which point I would be terribly depressed about not being able to compete for the month or so it took to mend. But I’m starting to think like the real athletes out there, the ones who make their living at it, the ones who rehab their little injuries so they don’t turn in to season-ending problems. And then when they do come back, they come back strong. Barring a miraculous recovery in the next 20 hours or so, it’s starting to look like I won’t be at the meet tomorrow. I hope this strategy pays off next week.

POST SCRIPT – I woke up Saturday morning feeling pretty good so I decided to make the trip to Austin after all. I limited my participation to Discus and Shot Put though. Javelin was what I was doing when I hurt my calf originally, so I figured that was out, and the wait for the Hammer and Weight Throw looked like it would be 2- 3 hours after the Shot Put. Reasoning that the temperatures would be close to 100 degrees at the start of those events, and that if I left immediately I could be home in an air conditioned house by that time, I passed on waiting and headed for the highway (my mamma didn’t raise no fool!).

Everything worked out well, because I didn’t aggravate my injury, and I got in 4 pretty decent Discus throws (all were within a meter of each other, and the longest was 39.34m). Shot Put was not all that great, but nothing terrible. I take that back – it was terrible, but for me it was fairly typical (10.29m). No matter what happens for the rest of the year, this season has to be viewed as a success. Currently my competition averages for each of the throwing events are very near or are above last season’s best marks.