In-depth Blog Post #3

 

I have learned a lot over the past few weeks. Not only have I continued to progress, but I have learned how to overcome obstacles like injury, stress, fear, and struggling to find motivation. At the beginning of winter break, I strained a tendon in my left ring finger during a climbing competition. After resting for a week or two, I returned to training as normal, but this only made the injury worse and forced me to take more time off climbing. I would rest, my finger would feel better, and I would climb again, but the injury would gradually get worse again and the cycle would repeat itself. As a byproduct of not using my left hand as much, I put too much stress on my right hand in my climbing and aggravated an old wrist injury as well.  

Injury is always tough to deal with as an athlete, because your passion for your sport is so strong, but you know that if you keep going, it will only get worse and force you to not train for even longer and lose that progress that you have worked so hard to gain. Two weeks ago, I hit my breaking point. I was having no fun at training and felt dejected after every session because I couldn’t do my best, and my finger and wrists were only getting worse. I decided to take a larger break. After two whole weeks of rest, I saw no improvement whatsoever. I was missing climbing so much, but I was making little progress towards recovery. After all, I need to be fit for upcoming competitions and I was stressed over missing so much training.  

Yesterday, I had an appointment with a physiotherapist to try and find a way to speed up my recovery. I am so glad I made this decision, because it showed me what I have been doing wrong and why it wasn’t working. Just resting for a few days and going back to normal won’t help anything. In order to fully recover, you need to retrain your muscles and build strength slowly. Hopefully, with certain exercises and moderate, love volume training sessions, I can build back my strength and go back to training as normal. 

This whole ordeal has been very stressful, and it has stopped me from progressing as fast as I would like. By not doing what I love, I lost the motivation to push myself in what I can do for fear of making things worse. This journey has taught me a lot about myself and my body, and I can now use this knowledge and experience to make sure that I am responsible and effective with my recovery, when injury occurs in future. 

In terms of parkour, I have definitely been limited to what I can do because of my injuries, but I am confident that I can start to train hard very soon, getting back on track by pushing myself to continue perfecting what I already know, and learn more new skills in the coming weeks. 

Thankfully, I have been able to talk to my mentor about the next steps for my training, and he is ready to help me learn some more advanced skills. Because of my injury, I have only been able to train twice with my mentor in the past two weeks, and I wasn’t able to acquire any new footage for this post. In my training, I have been continuing to perfect and connect my skills, and I have been feeling more confident than ever and ready to build off this foundation and learn new movements. I have also discussed with my mentor how to best learn the front, back, and side flips, and we have decided to take one week to ease back into training before starting to train these flips. After this period, we will create a revised timeline based on my recovery level. Below is part of my timeline once again and my responses to some of the questions regarding these mentoring sessions. 

 

Combine all tricks, work on transitions, and continue to get more comfortable with movements.  February 21st-27th  
Start planning how/where I will practice the front, side, and back flip. Set a goal and timeline with mentor.   February 28th  
Work on front flip progressions.  March 1st-20th   
Work on side flip progressions.  March 21st – April 10th  
Work on back flip progressions.  April 11th – May 1st  
Practice each movement in different environments until comfortable.   May 2nd-15th  
Connect all movements and continue practice.   May 16th-22nd  
Prepare and practice for the celebration, demonstration, and presentation of my learning.   May 23rd-30th 

 

  1. What went particularly well during your mentoring sessions?

I am so lucky to have a mentor that is a family member. This makes mentoring sessions so much easier and more relaxed than they would be if I were meeting with a stranger. My brother and I have a pretty good relationship, so it is quite easy to communicate effectively most of the time. I have had a lot of fun training with my brother and learning from him. He is very good at explaining things in a way that I can understand, and he takes a very efficient and scientific approach to sports. I know that every mentoring session will be beneficial and valuable to help me achieve my goals. 

  1. What three strategies could improve the quality of your mentoring interactions?

Though our meetings have gone quite well thus far, there are a few ways I think that we can improve. Though my brother is very helpful to learn new techniques, he often has a hard time understanding my stress and worries about my performance. I think that being more open and honest with him will help us both be more empathetic towards each other in these situations. Secondly, since we are so close, our meetings are very informal and flexible. While this could be a good thing, I do think we would both benefit by trying to meet in a more professional manner with set times for discussing training to maximize the quality of content in our discussions. Lastly, during some training sessions, especially if were in a new place, my brother tends to get caught up in training himself and having fun by doing tricks. This leads me to do things on my own, and when I do need help, we have little time left in the session for him to help. I think that by delegating certain time periods for having fun as well as time for dedicated mentoring would be a good compromise, My brother can still enjoy training, and I can benefit from his coaching. 

  1. 3. What is the action plan for implementing each of the three strategies?

There are a few ways that we can implement these strategies. Firstly, I think that sitting down with my brother, and talking honestly with him about what is and isn’t working in our training and ways to improve would help us both understand more about what we need to do. Maybe a meeting of this nature could happen at the beginning of every month to discuss goals for that month and ways to maximize our benefit from the training. Secondly, by keeping a calendar with both our extracurricular activities and events, we can plan training more easily and concretely, knowing that both of us will be able to make the training session or meeting for the specified amount of time. This will help to make the meetings seem more important and less flexible, forcing us to make full use of the training time. Lastly, to help delegate time in training to what is the most beneficial to both me and my mentor, we can make use of the calendar again to mark out different portions of the session according to what we wish to accomplish in that time. This will also help us have a better gauge of progress and will help us create an accurate outline of each session and its content. 

Though these past couple weeks have been tough, I am excited to travel the road of recovery once more and get back to doing what I love. Hopefully, I will be back to learning new skills and progressing in this sport once again very soon.

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