I would really appreciate some advice/input/motivation from the collective minds of Slowtwitch in relation to getting some form of fitness/function back after some significant injuries and illnesses. I am finally, hopefully, coming through the other side of things now being two weeks after my last operation.
By way of background, I am a few years off 50 and have had just under a decade in the sport of triathlon, having come from a primarily cycling based youth. Everything is all relative I guess, but in that time I have raced most distances and in the period where my major injuries etc kicked off I had just completed a 140.6 (10:4x) followed by a 70.3 about 10 months later. That 70.3 I was 4th in my age group and did get a World Champs invite (I know, not all its cracked up to be).
To cut a long story short, soon after the 70.3 (my 3rd over that distance) I fractured my tibia which was, fortunately (I think) able to be managed conservatively. However, about 6 months later during some strength and condition work in the gym I managed to get a massive prolapse of my L5/S1 disc. What followed has been 2 years and 4 prolapses in total of the same disc. Which each prolapse I stopped running, kept riding and swimming so could maintain some fitness. However after the 3rd prolapse I was told to stop running completely and then unfortunately about 4 months ago I had the 4th prolapse of this same disc.
I am a medical specialist by trade so have decent contacts in the medical and allied health realms and was able to manage all of the prolapses up until now with interventional pain blocks, some decent drugs and a decent amount of just getting on with life. However, after this last prolapse I couldn’t do any training because both the pain was nasty as anything and my mental health suffered not being able to do the things I have really enjoyed. We finally made the call to go in surgically and get rid of the disc fragments that were causing such severe nerve compression and I am now coming through the other side of that.
So, now I find myself about 4-5 months out from having to stop exercise virtually completely and feeling like I have basically zero baseline fitness. At the moment everything seems so hard, like there is a big mountain to climb to reach even 50-75% of where my baseline fitness used to be.
I was really keen to hear from people who have been on a similar path before, or who have helped people who have been down a path like this before. How did you get back into things? Any tips, tricks or advice you can give on what you found worked and what you found didn’t work?? I will freely admit that I feel like I have both a physical and a mental barrier to making a start. The physical one being dealing with the aches and pains of my current post-surgical state, the mental ones being focused around how far I have fallen from my usual baseline because of everything that has happened and wondering how I will ever get back to where I used to be (baseline that is, not talking race fit).
(I realise there may be a few threads on similar topics to this already, so apologies to those who think I am too lazy to do a forum search)