You don’t realize how serious an injury rearranges your life until you experience it. A great way to look at this is to understand the following saying, “you can sympathize with a person’s situations/experience that you otherwise haven’t gone through, but you cannot empathize with them.

As an athlete I have always had my issues with my body. It all goes back to how tight my body is. When I say tight I mean, stiff, muscle tightness.  I have never really liked stretching, I do it because I have to. You will never catch me saying, “Hey Guys I’m in the mood to stretch!” I do it when I feel sore or before I work out. The problem that arose with that was because my body builds muscle so easily, I was not stretching as much as I should’ve been. I stretched the amount of time everyone else (my teammates throughout my life) did. The thing is, just because 30 seconds for each stretch is enough for the other guy, does not mean that is enough time for me. Unfortunately, I learned that the hard way.

Over the years, I have sprained my foot, my ankle, my back and now my adductor. Out of all those injuries, I have risen above all but one, my adductor. I not only sprained this, but I have an intense adductor strain at the origin.

The area where the doctors say the strain is, is at the adductor longus muscle, the muscle closest to my pubic symphysis.

This injury put me on crutches for a little over two weeks. I have been off the track and out of the long jump pit for over two months. The only thing I am able to do is rehab. I have watched myself get out of shape and slowly lose muscle. This is the longest time I have ever gone without running and as much as I sometimes hate running, it is literally killing me inside. When my trainer said that I would not be able to compete in the first meet, my heart sunk. It really hit me that I might have to red shirt (not compete, but get an extra season added to my college athletic career) my entire indoor season. One question that bothers me every day is,  if I haven’t even been able to start jogging/running, then when would I even start jumping? (Which is what my events consist of). Let me put this in to perspective for everyone. If I was to speed up my rehab process and start running, I could actually tear the muscle to a point where I would then have Athletic Pubalgia (tear of any soft tissue, muscle, tendon, ligament) in the lower abdomen or groin area). When something like that is torn, surgery is required. Even after the surgery, it is not healed, it will continue to bother you. The doctor told me that after the surgery, I would never be able to run or jump the same ever again. In summary, getting surgery for pubalgia basically means you give up your athletic career and even have to limit you’re exercising for the rest of your life.

The worst part about it is dealing with the thoughts in my head. I continue to think about what I would do if I had to give up something I loved so dearly or how my body would look if I stopped sports all together and couldn’t run anymore? This injury has brought so many disheartening results that I am simply not ready to face yet, life decisions that I thought I wouldn’t have to make until later in my life. The questions is do I continue the rehab process with hopes of still running/jumping or continue the rehab process, get better and stop sports all together in order to preserve my body for my future? In other words, do I take the safe and secure path or the unknown path?

QUESTIONS THAT NEED ANSWERS!