I understand what you mean when you say that you’re injured

My whole life I have played sports and I never fully and completely understood what people felt when they suffered from an injury. I was always taught to just get back up and walk it off, put some dirt on it, that I would be fine until it actually happened to me.

In January, it will be a year since I was first injured during my first year as a college rower. I had played softball for 12 and a half years, I never loved anything else. When I had to walk away from softball, I was determined to find a new sport that I could try to love as much as I had for the previous 12 and a half years of my life. When i first started rowing, I knew nothing, like a lot of people that aren’t from somewhere in the world that it is a major sport. Even if you’ve been an athlete your whole life, you don’t know hard work until you try joining a crew team and remembering thinking that it looked so easy. People also seem to think that it more upper body than it is lower, but they would be wrong. You use a majority of your leg strength to push and gain momentum to move the boat along with everyone else. I learned this and thought everything was going great, I found something that I was good at, until it came crashing to a halt after resuming from winter break and at the start of winter training. The main season for rowers is in the springtime, so you go through hard training in the winter time. On the first day back from winter break, I hopped onto an erg and not even 10 minutes in, I felt a small pop in my right hip/upper quad. For the next four months, I thought that it was only a sever hip flexor strain. I started rehab exercises right away. In late February, I thought that everything was back to normal, I went slow getting back into it. This was the wrong thought, the very first practice back at what I thought was 100%, I had then taken 10 steps back again. I returned to rehab and go x-rays and ultrasounds. They didn’t find anything alarming except for a minor irregularity in the shape of the bones in the head of my femurs and bottoms of my pelvis. After continuing rehab and nothing seeming to make it feel better, I got an MRI which then showed the minor tear that I had in my right hip. The irregularity in my hip and the constant compression of my hip together going through the rowing position had caused the small tear. I immediately started more rehab and by this time it was summer so I did physical therapy all summer. By the beginning of my second year of college, I had to make the decision of whether or not to get surgery or to live in pain during daily activities. I decided to get surgery which went very well and has been successful so far as I am almost 3 months post op.

I also never understood how hard an injury is mentally. I have had to struggle with watching my teammates surpass me in fitness because I have fallen so far behind as I can’t even run again yet. I haven’t even approached the hardest mental struggles of my physical therapy or my recovery but the one major thing that I have learned from it is that you have to take it one day at a time. I now know what the obstacles are that come with getting inured, especially because I have been active my whole life and now suddenly I can’t be until I heal more.