Injured

Now what?

For the past few days, a forgotten hockey shoulder injury has flared up; for all intents and purposes, you can still carry out your life at 100%, but there is some pain involved.

But the question is… do you keep training for the marathon? Because you have no doubt in your mind that the running contributed to this.

If you were a professional athlete, this would be a no-brainer. You’d simply suck it up, play through the pain, and carry around your battle scars with the pride of knowing you sacrificed for the greater good. Andre Agassi did this during his last US Open by famously taking cortisone shots after each match, as did Curt Schilling with his bloody sock, as did millions of other athletes who you’ll never meet or hear about.

But for you… you are not sure. You are not a professional athlete, and the only reason this injury is remembered is that you decided to train for a marathon. When you started, you remembered a few old battle scars, went out of your way to address them, and they have not given you any problems yet.

So the question is… if you took similar care with your shoulder, would there be a long-term health risk? And if there is long-term health risk, is this run even worth doing? Because in general, playing sports is not very important to you.

The other side, of course, is the experience of it. Running has taught you stuff. You’ve learned that the hardest part of training is actually getting off your butt and spending the time; that lesson has translated directly into your studies, where you are now halfway done with Chapter 6 (of 13) of your high school chemistry. Giving maximum effort is part of it, but not as big a part as actually putting in the time.

This is a pretty important lesson to internalize; you’ve learned it in only a couple months of training. If you can internalize something similar in the next four months, that will be worth something, shoulder pain or no shoulder pain.

In the meantime…

A number of people have contacted you regarding business school information; your blog is generally a personal blog in an Australian business school setting, which may not be that helpful. So, now the tags are reworked, and each post is sortable from the links on the left into two categories, B-school and personal. You hope that will help address the blog’s changing demographic.

^_^