Well, if it wasn't bad enough to have been dealing with a jacked up knee, shoulder, and neck over the last few months, I got wicked sick with a bad cold the week before Labor day, and it carried on through the holiday weekend. There have been times in the last few months when I've just been wondering, really, should I even keep doing this? I seem to just keep hurting myself, and getting sick only made my attitude worse. Still, after sleeping all day Saturday and resting on Sunday, Melissa and I decided to at least go to Grandmother for the afternoon. Since I was still recovering I stuck to the easy warm ups, while Melissa pulled of some pretty surprising sends of some tall-ish problems near Throttle. The most exciting part of the day came when I fell off the top of the Chainsaw boulder while manteling a slightly slick top out, missed the pad, and bounced off a big rock, and then landed backwards into a dead tree, tweaking both my wrists in the process. This really helped my morale.The good news is my mood has improved late this week with the cooler weather and some new PT exercises that are really helping my shoulders, making me feel that perhaps not all is doom and gloom after all and that I may just be able to climb more than 5.8s for the rest of my life. If all goes well, I'm gonna try to head back to Grandmother this weekend. Hopefully both the weather and my mood will be improved over last week.
I find that the problem with being passionate about something like climbing and having it be a main motivator and passion in your life is the havoc in can wreak when it's taken away. And I think that idea, more than anything, was the main driver behind my feelings of doubt about climbing lately. I think there's a voice in the back of my head starting to say, "if you don't have this anymore, what do you have to look forward to, what's next?" And I think it's scary not having any real answer to that.
