Back to Normal - ish WARNING: GRAPHIC

Skeleton is over for now, and strangely I'm not really missing it. Yet. The yet is important, but for now I just feel relieved.

That's what happens when your entire season is crammed into two months. You need to step back and take some time off during the season, but feel like you can't since "there's only 2 months left" or "there's only a month left" or "there's only 3 weeks left." Yay. Brad and I were sliding so much that it consumed us. I backed off to only 4 days a week (which was still too much), and Brad was usually hitting 5 or 6, (I think).

We're paying for it now as well. Brad split open his heel in Calgary in mid-February, which pretty much finished his season. He still raced and trained for the last week or two of the season, but couldn't get a solid push to save his life. Stitches right where the back edge of the shoe presses? Heaps of friction on fresh stitches? Yeah, not fun. He also spent a lot of time at Physical Therapy during the season for a calcified bruise in his quad. Yep, that's right, a bruise calcified and turned into a solid mass in his thigh muscle. Fun. He gave up quite a bit of time on his pushes while that was going on.

Brad's saga:

On his push, in the load step, he put his left foot too close to the sled, and ran into his heel/ankle with his sled bunk, a round metal bumper that protects the sled and slider (somewhat) when the sled hits the wall. He didn't realize how bad it was, and actually took another run, then noticed that his sock was bloody. Off to the clinic he went...

Look at the boy, so comfy, getting his 7 stitches. Grin.

And, the stitches:

As for me, I'm seeing a chiropractor twice a week, since my neck and upper back are super stiff and sore all the time. Limited range of motion on the neck. Also, I'm in pretty intense Physical Therapy for my knees....turns out that my family has a genetic predisposition towards tilted and out-of-place kneecaps! Would have been a nice thing to know ahead of time, but hey, we can't have everything. Summary: my kneecaps track sideways instead of up and down, since they are tilted and are pulled outward by a too-short tendon on the outside of the knee, which also results in them sitting outside rather than inside the appropriate groove on the femur. Being aggravated by the sprint training and weight training, they've caused me a lot of problems. Problems being translated as pain and inability to: run, lift, sprint, push fast, etc. I lost 3-4 tenths on my pushes when the pain came. Shrug. The pressure and friction cause a lot of swelling and stiffness, and is slowly breaking down the cartilage in my knee.

Verdict: 2 months of PT to see if we can get the kneecaps back in the right location by manually stretching the outer tendon and strengthening the inner thigh to pull the kneecap in the other direction. If after 2 months there's no improvement, guess who gets to have surgery! Hooray for me.

Anyway, the last week and a half, with no skelly, has been a nice reprieve to say the least. The stress of the grievance and politics was terrible, plus the frustration of not really having any coaching this season (due to a lot of factors) and feeling like we weren't progressing like we should have, along with the seemingly constant injuries. Allowing our bodies (and minds) to recover and rest and enjoy time in other pursuits has been quite pleasant! By the time we go to Lake Placid in a couple weeks, I think we'll be amped up again and ready to slide. Our minds will be in a better place.

Anyway, that's all for now. I'm off to Denver today for a work conference - one of the better perks, eh?