My first sign that my shoulder injury was bad news became evident when the doctor handed me a pamphlet portraying an elderly woman lifting a kitten out of a low-hanging tree branch. Forget pulling down gnarly 5.10s or punching my ice axes into phantom-blue plastic ice, I would have to work up enough strength to refill the ice cube tray. My heart sank when asked how long the recovery time would be; I was braced to hear 4-6 months. The actual recovery time: 2 years.
It wasn’t a horrific leader fall or over-ambitious session on the monkey bars that lead to my injury, rather a chronic series of small tears from: baseball, volleyball, ultimate frisbee, climbing, bowling, ice climbing, breakdancing, pole vaulting, high fiving and any other semi-violent swinging of the arm that resulted in adhesive capsulitis, AKA frozen shoulder. At the time of the diagnosis, 2 years seemed like a prison sentence but I was determined to not sit around all day playing video games–which I couldn’t because it hurt too much.
Rather, I put my energy into hiking, running, biking and eventually mountain biking. I had two snowboarding seasons where I was vigilant not to fall on my shoulder, often using my head as the crash pad in lieu of the crippled shoulder. I stuck to my seemingly wimpy P.T. exercises, building up to that exciting day when I too could easily hoist a 6 lb. kitten from a tree. I watched National Geographic specials on orangutans with a special bitter envy as the simians effortlessly swung from vine to vine in the Borneo jungles. But I never stopped moving and did my utmost best to follow doctor’s orders.
And so here we are, just over two years later. My lame shoulder has regained most of its previous mobility, though it is cursed to never have the strength potential it once did. It was in the climbing gym, going vertical for the first time in over 730 days that the complete enervation of power became apparent. Not only did my bony forearms wilt on crimpers and throb on jugs, they were grossly imbalanced with the strength in my legs–legs had probably tripled in power from the time of my initial diagnosis. Stranger still, almost every element of climbing seemed foreign. Leading was a baffling ordeal, even on modest 5.7s. In short, all my years of climbing were reduced to a fuzzy set of memories that were slowly being illuminated as I relearned how to reconfigure my admittedly not-ideal body shape to ascend the plastic crags.
But you know, in a bizarre way it’s been… really fun. In learning to climb all over again, I’m remembering the joy of mastering knots and anchors, the focus of plotting out the cleanest lines and the semi-fearsome thrill of being high off the ground. I’ve committed the winter months ahead to regaining the confidence and skills needed to tackle my favorite routes in the coming spring: fun, remote, low-grade alpine routes. Instead of lamenting what has been lost, I’m enjoying the rediscovery of the joy of movement. Even at my strongest, I was never a rockstar but I was strong and competent enough to blend my climbing skills with my true love, mountaineering. I’m eager for long hours in the gym, over-inflated 120 PSI forearms that can barely grip a pencil and a return to the modest vertical world I forced into dormancy some 17,520 hours ago.
