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Posts tagged ‘recovery’

Oct 24

Exercise balls

Wrist recovery workout for beginners

Before fracturing my wrist I had been to a gym less than 10 times in my life. This situation changed dramatically when regular visits to this chamber of sweat became the only way to keep muscles working whilst sporting a full arm cast.

Should you, athletic creature, find your delicate limbs trapped in a cast, listen what I’ve learnt: It is possible to hit the ground running with some common sense training.

The full arm cast covered my right arm from palm to arm pit, immobilizing both wrist and elbow. I had to rule out any exercises requiring fine balance and use of both hands and arms. Running was not an option thanks to the weight of the cast that bundled neck muscles in a tight knot. As the weeks went by, the shrunken arm inside the cast started moving ever so slightly, and so any pounding just made me worry about the positioning of the fractured surfaces.

Project objective: get back sailing quickly

I had to make choices based on my goal, which was simply:

To recover from the wrist fracture to sailing shape as quickly as humanly possible, and rejoin the round the world yacht race at the earliest opportunity. Read more

Oct 18

Frozen flower
3 Comments

Good news

Visit Finland crew are battling ferocious depressions in Southern Ocean, while I am curling in front of a fireplace with books, tea and tissues. The autumn flu season has arrived with the frosty temperatures outdoors.

My fractured wrist bones are now stronger than ever, based on radiographs taken today. From now on I can put more load on the wrist at the gym and also ignore minor pains. It has been tricky to exercise the wrist when I haven’t been completely sure about the nature of the sharp pain with long term throbbing dullness in it, which paradoxically emerges when exercising too much or too little. In my worst nightmares the fractured bones have broken loose and grinding against each other like in a hand-sized meat maracas. This is not the case – I repeat – my wrist is solid. Read more

Oct 14

Popi ja Lelu

Run!

Just when you thought you cannot run any faster, RUN FASTER NOW!

I rounded the neighbours old stables huffing and puffing after a 5km run, hitting the final stretch back home. There were hoof prints on the sandy countryside road, sun was shining and the air felt crisp. What a nice day for a little ride, I thought while trotting ahead and observing the tiny hoof prints mingling with larger ones. Then the hoof prints veered away from the road, straight to the fields. That’s odd, I thought, and then my eyes met the eyes of Popi, neighbours horse who was indulging in green grass with his ever faithful sidekick Lelu. They had escaped. Read more

Oct 7

Riikka showing the shrunken muscles of her right arm
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Cast off

Five and half weeks ago I stumbled on board a race yacht and broke my wrist. Yesterday the cast was removed, revealing a surprise.

I looked at my arm resting inside the halved cast on the table, while the doctor packed away a cast saw, a tool I did not relish whirling anywhere near my skin. It had taken 30 minutes of persistent sawing to remove the cast, and the arm that emerged from it did not resemble my muscular, supple limb of an athlete that went into it in Rio de Janeiro five weeks ago. Somehow it got swapped for a skeletal arm of an elderly lady. The muscles had melted away, leaving a distinct shape of bone under leathery, brown skin. Read more

Sep 25

Wrist fracture
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Anatomy of idleness

A friend taught me how to slip correctly, more accurately avoiding breaking any wrist bones (as they are notoriously slow to mend).

“Just huddle your arms close to your body whilst falling, then hit the ground and crack a rib. They cannot put ribs in cast, so you could have carried on with the race.” he said. This friend is a qualified medical practitioner. A new lesson learnt, it is preferable to choose damage that does not interfere with the activity, unless of course the said rib punctures a lung, in which case the injury might be an issue for general well-being.

Faced with at least three more weeks of idleness in a small Finnish town, I wish having cracked a rib instead and currently soldering on across Southern Atlantic towards Cape Town with team mates. “What is worth a full fridgeful of fresh food, steady king-sized bed or modern comforts, if you don’t feel alive? I’d rather be cold, wet and eating tinned cat food every day on board with you guys.”I lamented in Rio while packing my kit. “That’s because you’re crazy” Greg suggested. Read more