The long journey towards recovery is near the end.
Thousand hours of stretching and strengthening and my legs are almost as
good as pre-injury. For all those who don't know, I had torn my ACL in my left knee last september and underwent ACL reconstruction surgery to repair the damage last december. The surgery was just the begining ,I had to undergo the grueling process of rehab for the past 9 months.
The toughest part of this process was never the physical pain and strength, it was the mental dilemma of whether I should go through this pain to reach the end of the tunnel. Yes, playing that game that day one year ago, was the reason for all stress, pain and physical and mental torture I had to undergo while pursuing a career in research. However, thinking of that game every day and my pro-days back in college, it was equally responsible for pushing me through all this pain and help me become a stronger version of myself in the past year. Everyone gets into a zone when they are involve with some activity, well playing soccer/football is that activity for me. I would never give up on that, it taught me so many great life lessons.This whole process of recovery also taught me valuable life lessons, I also made a lot of friends who had/ or have been undergoing the same ACL recovery. I won’t lie, there were some instances that I had given up and said enough and enough, but then this particular dialogue ran through my mind:
The toughest part of this process was never the physical pain and strength, it was the mental dilemma of whether I should go through this pain to reach the end of the tunnel. Yes, playing that game that day one year ago, was the reason for all stress, pain and physical and mental torture I had to undergo while pursuing a career in research. However, thinking of that game every day and my pro-days back in college, it was equally responsible for pushing me through all this pain and help me become a stronger version of myself in the past year. Everyone gets into a zone when they are involve with some activity, well playing soccer/football is that activity for me. I would never give up on that, it taught me so many great life lessons.This whole process of recovery also taught me valuable life lessons, I also made a lot of friends who had/ or have been undergoing the same ACL recovery. I won’t lie, there were some instances that I had given up and said enough and enough, but then this particular dialogue ran through my mind:
I started to hit the gym real serious after my doctor
cleared me for lifting weights. I started slow but I know in my heart that if I
want to play in the future I had to transcend my previous fitness and go a
level higher. I started doing all kinds of leg and body workouts. Here is a
short video of me hitting a PR in deadlifts (315 lbs. conventional, body weight:
136 lbs., not bad eh?) . ( Instagram link : https://instagram.com/p/7Gpnd3Jyir/?taken-by=aswinreva )
After 4 months of physical strengthening, I went to the
soccer field to start practicing with my old team. For 2 months all I did was
just standalone exercises and drills by myself.
At the 6 month mark, when I started playing small games the limitation
was clear. There was a mental block in my mind, I literally froze on the spot every
time the opponent ran towards me. The first thing I had to do was to get rid of
this fear. Time and more practice helped me with getting rid of this mental
block. I started running and also doing a lot of body weight exercises, I could
see my strength level increase each day. Going through the pain of surgery and
recovery made normal training pain seem laughable. Here is a video of me doing
L-Pullups in my home. ( Instagram Link : https://instagram.com/p/7boWvxJys4/?taken-by=aswinreva )
So I decided to push
harder, but I was also doing a lot of stretching and yoga to balance things
out. So after all this, where am I now? My leg strengths are almost back to
normal. So I started playing in small tournaments couple of weeks ago. We even
reached the finals of the Purdue world indoor soccer tournament, but lost narrowly with one goal difference. Here is picture of my team at Purdue. ( From Right: Ashish, Aswin (me) , Alix , Don ( Goalie) , Tridib, Horeh, Gillian,Jose)
Then the time
came to decide whether I should play in the out-door 9v9 tournament? This is
the same tournament I got injured exactly one year ago. Why not? I said to myself,
this is why I went through all that training. We won the first two games in
last two games. I can feel that I am still not giving my 100% in these games
but I know I am getting there. The demons and monsters are never outside, they
are always, always, causing havoc inside the head. One has to learn how to tame
them and make them your pets. The challenges that push oneself out of the
comfort zone help in this process. I
know I still have a long way to go, but I know it’s going to be alright. Life
is a mixture of experiences and all we as human beings got to do is just live
it! Joga Bonito folks !
PS: My writing skills have been kind of poor as I haven’t written
a blog post for almost a year and I was in a hurry to go for a practice game,
so don’t mind the wrong grammar that pops up once in a while during this blog
post. I will be writing more frequently from now on so I assure you that the quality of this blog will improve. :)
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