Sometimes it’s hard to practice what you preach

Trigger warning: this post contains brief mentions of weight gain and chronic pain.

Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I was talking about being patient with myself, because I have all sort of stuff going on with my body? (I hope you do - it’s my most-viewed blog post!) Turns out that’s easier said than done.

This week, I started rock climbing again for the first time in many years. It’s also the first time since wrist and elbow surgery, getting diagnosed with asthma, and gaining a fair amount of weight, and boy is it hard to be okay with how much worse I am at climbing than I was the last time I went.

I’ve now been twice - the first time, my forearms were absolutely exhausted pretty much straight away, which I expected. I haven’t been using those muscles, but they are there somewhere. Yesterday, my forearms held up much better, but I have absolutely no grip strength in my fingers. I suppose that’s to be expected. I had hand and wrist pain for 3+ years before finally having surgery, which was mostly successful but took close to a year of recovery, which means 4-5 years of really not using my hand or wrist for any sort of physical challenge. I still have trouble with weight bearing on that wrist, so I wasn’t sure how climbing was going to go. It seems to be going okay, and I might just push through the pain because I’m tired of not doing things. (Please don’t be like me!)

On the one hand (Ha! Hand! Get it? Cuz I’ve been talking about my hands…), right after surgery, I couldn’t even bend my wrist more than a couple degrees, so this is amazing progress. On the other hand, last time I went climbing, I was climbing pretty difficult routes (I think 5.8s and occasional 5.9s, for those of you who are interested in that kind of thing). I’ve been bouldering instead of top-roping at the climbing gym so the rating system is different, but I’ve only been able to do VB (the B stands for “basic”) and V0s. Gosh, it’s frustrating. It would also maybe help if I actually remembered to bring my inhaler with (oops).

For now, I’m trying to remind myself that I climbed 5 routes on Tuesday and 6 routes yesterday, which is 11 more routes than I climbed last week, or the week before. Incremental progress is still progress, and maybe someday I’ll be back to climbing at the same level I was before. Or maybe I won’t. And that’s okay too.