When I was 17, I tore the labrum inside my left shoulder while fooling around in a boxing ring. The tear caused instability and weakness in the joint, and for a few years, I would often get the sensation that my arm was “popping out of its socket” when I was, say, delivering a big tackle on the rugby pitch. Unfortunately, the abominable thing would also sometimes pop out when I was doing something completely innocuous — such as reaching up to grab a cup from the top shelf.
For a while, I thought I’d never fully heal — but in my early twenties, after gaining some significant upper body strength and gradually working on my pull-ups until I could do a max set of 23, the shoulder magically healed! I haven’t had the shoulder “popping out” sensation in years. The human body really is an amazing thing.
Well, I turn 36 one week from today, and things are going . . . less well. Somehow, in just the last few years, injuries have started to accumulate, and I’m starting to get the feeling that I’m not going to just snap back and heal up as I could have 15 years ago.
About two years ago, I pulled a muscle in my hip while coming out of the hole on a deep squat. That injury has never healed, and let me tell you: It sure lets me know it’s there whenever I shoulder a pack and step out on a foot march or the morning after dead-lift day. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that spending a few years in the infantry is just rough on your body — in a way that sometimes leads you to regret all your life’s choices! — because now I have what I call “the foot thing.”
You see, at one point, in 2020, I managed to give myself a stress fracture in my right foot during a foot march (I finished the movement thanks to about half a bottle of Motrin). I healed up alright after wearing one of those ridiculous walking boots for a month or so, but now the injury is back! During weeks when I run more than four days (I love to run), I wake up with my foot throbbing. I used to run six or even seven days a week (usually 5–7 miles per day) with no ill effects at all. Now, suddenly, there’s an upper limit that my body will tolerate.
As part of my daily routine, I usually crank out five sets of ten pull-ups in the morning, resting maybe ten or 15 minutes between sets, while I make breakfast and help get the kids out the door. As I discovered a decade ago, if you casually do 50 pull-ups per day, the Marine Corps Physical Fitness Test, which includes a max set of pull-ups, is never going to be a problem. Well, unfortunately for me, I can’t do pull-ups seven days a week anymore: When I do, I start to feel pain in my right elbow. I’ve had to drop the pull-ups down to every other day. (We’ll see in the spring how that reflects in next year’s annual PFT score.)
This week, I somehow broke my left pinky toe by smashing it into a coffee table while trying to chase down the two-year-old — he was making a run for it when I was trying to wipe down his Nutella-covered hands.
Pain in my right elbow. Pain in my hip. Pain in my right foot. Pain in my left foot.
My friends, if this is how I feel at 36, how in the world do y’all get through the day at 46, at 56, at 66?
They say that age is just a number, but I’m starting get a sneaking suspicion that it’s not!
(I’d have more to say on this topic — but it’s time for dinner, and I can already see the golden glow of bedtime for the kids in the near distance and my chance to surrender to sweet, sweet slumber. If I can only make it to 8:30 . . .)