Injury is something I have both little and lots of experience with. Throughout my career as a climber and coach, I have been surrounded by injuries, but I have yet to experience the real horror that is being injured to the point of complete shut down.

Injuries in the Blogosphere

Nat wrote an amazing blog on her experiences with injury that touched both myself and many others around the world. It told of her life of training and competing on the Youth European and World circuit whilst dealing with repetitive injuries in her fingers and abdominals.

Much more recently, Mr Macleod himself has been writing some interesting blogs on his currently unfortunate predicament – one which was suffered not due to the commonly caused over-training, but by accident, a mistake really, by falling off the end of his rope lowering from a warm up route.

My friend and boss at EICA, Nic Crawshaw relates to Dave’s predicament with a funny story in which he was lowered off the end of the rope whilst climbing at Cascade sector in Ceuse. Anyone who has climbed there knows what it’s like being lowered over the edge of the main sector – it’s a little hard to judge with the ground being a further 5-10m lower than the point where you climb and belay from. The funny side of the story being the bit where he described crawling back to the campsite to get an ambulance as he couldn’t afford Mountain Rescue having taken out no Insurance! This always makes me think twice…

And finally, what has made me think more clearly about injuries is the very sad and thought provoking blogs of Ailsa Graham, an English lass who started her first blogs and quickly made a very powerful message amongst young climbers out there which was – A tweek might take 6 weeks to recover, 6 weeks might feel like forever, but it doesn’t feel nearly as long as a fully blown rupture when you’ve pushed despite the pain. Listen to your body!

My Life of Injury 

I have yet to suffer something as terrible as what those above are experiencing now. When I first started climbing at 15 I would climb everyday god gave me. I remember being told to stop and rest but like a stupid little kid I just kept pulling until one day I felt a pain in my back… This knocked 3 weeks off climbing, 3 weeks that still I remember feeling like the longest time on earth, but I recovered and have not felt a pain quite like it since…

During my higher exams I remember feeling a slight twinge in my finger – it hurt whilst writing more than climbing, but after a couple of weeks, it was fine…

Last year during a period of very intense finger strength training I noticed a pain once again in my fingers. I was lucky enough to be hitting rock within a couple of weeks of feeling the pain knowing full well that the release of high intensity training would do it good, a couple of weeks of peak training and 4 weeks on rock – I haven’t felt a pain since…

Now, as any of you who follow my blog will know, I have a gammy knee… This isn’t the worst possible injury I could have but it does affect me and my training. First of all, it is painful just to walk on… Secondly, I can’t climb using my right leg without experiencing pain and I certainly don’t want to make it worse so I am avoiding using it in any way that is going to cause aggravation to the damaged ligament.

Frankly, I am incredibly lucky to have had such an amazing run in my climbing career so far without so much injury. I do think that I am incredibly careful with the way I train and have always prepared my body for the excess training and stress I put it under.

Emotional Injury 

Reading Ailsa’s blog, she is incredibly brave to write about her injuries in such an emotive way. To be honest, when I first read her blog I was both saddened by it and slightly put off, simply because of the intense emotional element to the writing. Obviously she is in a great deal of pain both physically and emotionally.

Since reading her blog however, I have been thinking more seriously about the implications of serious injury and how it would affect someone whose life revolves around a sport. Personally, I don’t know how I would react if I had such injuries that stopped me from climbing fullstop… I hope that it would be easier coupled with the fact that I have a strong connection with climbing more than just the physical aspect i.e. my entire social life is based in climbing as is my work.

Me socialising at the crag with fellow... errrrr... climbers?

With Ailsa, she is still very much involved in climbing to a great deal which I think is fantastic and also shows her passion for the sport – it also identifies strongly that climbing is a lifestyle and not simply a hobby for most of it’s partakers.

A Message to Climbers 

In the ending paragraphs of Ailsa’s blog she quotes Edward Whymper, the first ascenionist of the Matterhorn and also a celebrated author and illustrator:

“Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.”

Scrambles Amongst the Alps

As someone who strives for excellence and improvement daily, this quote hit me hard. Remembering the fact that knowledge of what you are doing and why you are doing it forms the base of effective training, forgetting this is the first step to failing at what we are striving for and risks far more than not achieving. We climb because we love it, that’s how we started and it never leaves us. Never forget that whilst you may lose sight of it for a moment, climbing is something that enriches your life not through achieving, but simply through doing. When the endeavour for success makes you forget why you started and forces you in haste to take risks and badly placed steps, try and remember the beginning… think what may be the end…

Me at the tender age of 10!

Somehow - whether it be by luck or through circumstance, I managed to stay injury free for the next 5/6 years. The next obstacle - a femoral hernia - came about not specifically through climbing, but more so through having a genetic predisposition to hernias. In April 2009 I underwent surgery to repair it and had 8 weeks of forced rest. This was the longest cessation of climbing I had had so far, but at the same time I considered it a welcome break from training. I had exams to focus on and so believed it to be a blessing in disguise to a certain extent! However, just 6 months later, whilst competing in a round of the European Youth Cup in Munich, I felt a popping sensation whilst halfway up my second qualifier.  It wasn't particularly painful, but I recognised the feeling. The hernia had returned and I was booked in for yet another operation. The verdict? 10-12 weeks off. I was heartbroken as it meant I had to miss some important events, but I eventually took it in my stride and used it as an incentive to get stuck into training for the World Youth Championships in Ratho. I had just under 3 months to get back to full fitness for this event after my time off, and achieving 10th place in this competition meant almost as much to me as when I had won in Kranj, purely because I had had to fight so hard to keep motivated and pick myself up off the floor!

On top of the EYC podium in 2007

In the run-up to the WYC I had acquired my first finger injury in years. It was a partial pulley tear and gave me more pain than the hernia ever did! Remarkably, it took a year for this to heal fully, and to my mind was the most difficult to overcome mentally. It seemed to pale into insignificance in comparison to what some people have to endure in life, and was positively laughable to the non-climber who would generally consider a finger to be one of the least crucial of the body parts, considering there are 9 more digits (including thumbs here!) at our disposal. To a climber, however, an injury to this small yet crucial body part often means frustration, forced rest and shattered dreams.

I stopped using the term 'training' and resorted to 'climbing'. I resigned myself to pottering around and gradually built my level up over the year. I had sporadic rest periods and equally sporadic emotions. When the same injury occurred again in the same finger on my opposite hand just as the initial one was healing, I just couldn't believe it. What had I done to deserve this? Immediately it felt as though the world was weighing in on me. I must be getting old, falling to bits, burning out. Another good few months of aimlessness and misdirection - not knowing what to do and what not to do. It sometimes felt as though I was making it up, and as though other people didn't believe I could be injured again. Although I enjoyed hanging out at the wall, it sometimes became too much to be around climbing when I couldn't partake in it myself. Talk of training, trips and projects only deepened my disheartened sentiments .

Eventually I switched my focus towards outdoor climbing and learned to transfer the anger and frustration of injury into positive aggression on the rock. I had the best trip of my life in Ceuse last year, and with it both my finger injuries disappeared. Reading into it a little too much, perhaps,  it could have been viewed as some sort of spiritual release as pain left the body whilst I gained the strength and confidence to fight against my predicament. Whatever it was, be it pure coincidence (or magic!) , I welcomed my newfound state of fitness and confidence.

I worked hard, I pulled harder - I was in training for the BLCCs and everything was going well. One day I decided to try a tricky problem with some friends and executed a powerful move from a pinch up to a good crimp. Suddenly I felt and heard a popping sensation in my left middle finger as I moved upwards. I dropped off the wall and stared in bewilderment at my swollen finger - tender and red with pain. I frantically manipulated it, naively expecting it simply to be a friendly 'twinge' or 'tweak' - those terms that climbers use when describing what usually turns out to be a fairly fleeting and insignificant pain. 'Twinge' in this case was very much a euphemism. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt, I thought. It will be fine. Shaking slightly, I attempted to climb. It was excruciatingly painful to bend let alone put under weight, so I ran upstairs to get ice and advice. A pulley tear again. I immediately thought of the competitions I had coming up and wanted the ground to swallow me whole. Not again, not more disruption!

That was October last year and the injury has only begun to settle down this summer. In the meantime I battled against a tendinopathy on my heel, which came about through wearing tight climbing shoes. It was agony to stand or walk in rock shoes, and even normal shoes were uncomfortable. I competed in CWIF with odd shoes that were oversized - not ideal but I was determined to climb! My fingers were getting stronger and at least on the bright side I could pull myself up properly without weighting my feet! I struggled through the CWIF with my gammy feet, but fortunately in the week before BUCS I had the genius idea of splitting my shoes down the heel. It wasn't perfect but made my footwork improve by miles as I could wear my normal shoes. I managed to win BUCS despite having had a very interrupted few weeks of climbing and had overcome yet another hurdle.

My most recent niggle has been a partial tendon tear in my left forearm, just above the elbow. It is by no means excruciating but I've been very cautious about overstraining and causing more damage. After my trip to Yorkshire this weekend it feels much better, perhaps due to the lower intensity of climbing on rock or the magical powers of limestone!

Those closest to me will know that over the years I have really struggled to come to terms and cope with these injuries. I have tried (and sometimes failed) to put a brave face on and not dwell on them. The lingering niggles were the worst - never feeling serious enough not to climb, but always making themselves known and preventing me from trusting and enjoying myself. Like so many other people, every time I recover from an injury there is always the uncertainty as to how far you can push yourself and when. Despite the relief of being injury free, I found myself being too scared to build myself up again with the possibility of being brought right back down once more. Last October I met double Olympic gold medallist Kelly Holmes at a reception in London, and whilst carrying out a bit of research on her career I read a quote of hers which really resonated with my experiences of injury - "You have all those dreams and then something goes wrong, and I just thought everything’s going too good, and it’s just going to go away from me again.” This made her success even more poignant - the struggle with years of injury and disappointment, and her fight to keep running competitively with the fear of injury constantly on her mind. After an almost constant stream of injuries, I found it hard to motivate myself to commit to hard training again, partly because I was fearful of hurting myself, but also as I was reluctant to build my hopes up and get too focussed on a goal which could be destroyed or delayed by injury at the most inconvenient moment. It is easy to get caught up in a vicious circle of negativity in which the worst is always expected, and it's this circle which needs to be broken in order to progress with training. At times I felt as though there was so much inertia in my climbing: I had been so accustomed to doing things and going places and being so active that when this lifestyle was taken away from me I felt slightly lazy and, to put it bluntly, worthless. I think this is very common amongst athletes and indeed anyone who is prevented from leading the busy lifestyle they normally lead - it is difficult to acclimatise when momentum is lost and your usual rhythm is distorted.

I have come to realise that I have developed an efficient coping strategy for dealing with injury, purely by distracting myself from the pain and rewriting my brain's negative perceptions of being injured.
Rather than focussing on the negatives : pain, no climbing, fitness loss, and no competing, I instead take each one and turn it into a positive : pain - my body will get stronger upon healing, the pain is telling me to change something. No climbing- I can focus on other aspects of life and help others to climb their best. Fitness loss - after time off I will be extra motivated to push hard, which will take me further than I would have gone had I not been injured. No competing - I can be inspired by watching others compete and perhaps notice and learn things that would otherwise pass me by. I can learn to enjoy climbing indoors and on rock with no pressure.

Any aggression or frustration is channelled into positive energy for completing a climb or an exercise, not matter how intense it may be. Pulling hard on a project or warming down after a session, the energy for climbing is flowing and the psyche remains intact! Everyone is likely to be affected by an injury of some sort at some point in life, and for me the best advice is simply to change your focus and know that "this day too shall pass". I am a strong believer that everything happens for a reason and what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger - if not physically, there will almost certainly be a strengthened mind to carry you upwards, whatever your goals may be.