A New Perspective: Recovery Month 9 and 1/2

I cannot believe that I have been recovering from this injury for 9 and a half months now. That is crazy! Obviously this tendovaginitis had been building for quite a long time before I could feel the full effect of the damage. When I did it was already too late...like every climber's nightmare.

After taking a full 6 months off from climbing and seeing various doctors/trying many different remedies, I found myself able to climb again in June! I began on easy routes, then easy bouldering in August. With a combination of crossfit, a couple of hard climbing days a week, and lots of rest for my fingers, I found today that I am back to where I was last September! Last week I sent a v8 in the gym and yesterday I was able to climb all of the v6's in an hour. The pain in my fingers while climbing has gone from constant, to every 10 minutes, to every 5 minutes, and now to every 2 minutes. I am hoping that with slow progression, this pain will completely subside.

So with this recent breakthrough, what comes next? Well in my last post I spoke about how I was shifting my focus to my nutrition and overall fitness. I truly believe that if I can get a good routine going with these two aspects of my life, it will have dramatically great effects on my climbing. I figure that this will help my fingers recover and help me reach my big goal for the year.

My big goal of 2012: To make a full recovery in my fingers by December...and to stay un-injured.

December 3rd of 2011 was the first day I had felt the pain in full force. I am expecting this recovery to last one full year (2 and 1/2 more months to go), so I'm keeping my fingers crossed! Until then, I am going to focus on climbing 2-3 days a week and doing crossfit 3-4 days a week.

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A week and a half ago I began my paleo diet challenge. Right now I feel as if my body is detoxing. I do not feel very energetic while working out and I sometimes get headaches. But I knew from the start that this would happen to me. I also know that this will most likely go away within the next week or so. It is just my body's response to such a drastic change in diet.

With this diet I am going to keep close tabs on my body fat percentage and document my results. I had a skin fold caliper test done the other day to see (roughly, since this test is not completely accurate) what percent of body fat I have. The test said that I have 18% body fat. So my fat percentage is somewhere in the vicinity of that.

These are my body shots from Day 1 of paleo. I am going to compare these with the future photos I will take at the end of the challenge.