I have a passion for awareness, curiosity and learning in many forms.
Yesterday I wrote a brief post, “At the edge of the country“, an appreciation of the joy of my woodland walk to the train station and that I could be from my front door to meet someone in a pub in central London in fifty minutes door to door.
Buckle in, today for some storytelling.
I was at that pub to meet someone who is in London from Canada for the week. We had not seen each other for some twenty years. Way back then, they were my Physio, someone I’d routinely go to when I injured myself playing squash, an occurrence of grinding frequency that happened increasingly often as I aged. I mentioned in my post yesterday that they had “made a massive difference to me in beginning my focus on self-awareness, a shift that has changed my life in many ways since.” That story begins with my history of being not at all self-aware of what I was putting my physical body through as an athlete, then the shift created by my working with this physio.
To go way back, ever since I was in my late teens, I had always “pushed through” injury, whether that be the routine day to day I could treat with heat rubs, ice packs, stretching, wraps, tape etc, or when I did have to go to a physiotherapist, I’d simply task them to “fix” the injury site as quickly as possible, to “Get me back on the court”. When I was 21 I even broke my shoulder in three places in a collision on the Basketball court, but within a few short weeks I was at the physio saying “Get me back on the court”. I was not a star on my team and was concerned that if I didn’t get myself “back on the court” quickly, I would lose my spot on the roster.
Beyond acute injury, those who have competed at a high level in sports will remember the feeling of always operating at what that physio calls a “near acute” level. Put another way, “playing injured” at some level almost all the time, always with aches, pains, niggles, and sometimes through muscle strains and pain. This also relates to other types of elite physical performance. For example, I vividly remember being shown around the headquarters of a national ballet company and seeing quite how much resource and time went into the dancers being kept at work. As the head of the company noted, blithely, “Oh, all dancers dance with injury all the time”. If you are a competitive athlete and are constantly operating just a little injured, I am sure you can relate. If you are not and never have been a competitive athlete, please recognise that everyone you see competing is, at almost all times, operating at less than 100% of their full potential.
So, back to my Physio. They were different from the norm, they were highly curious and always learning, so asked me more questions and had more options to consider for how to treat me. In fact, a few years after our work together they went back to Canada and went “back to school”, completely retraining for a wholly different career, one that now finds them working in London this week. Anyway, eventually, their questions and curiosity shifted my stubborn “Get me back on the court” mindset and I said, “Ok, let’s take the time to work out what is really going on here”.
My recurring injury was a strain of the upper hamstring, one that would leave me limping and, for certain, unable to start playing squash again for several weeks. What was causing it though? I had never looked beyond the fact that I would lunge for the ball, then strain the muscle, over and over as the years went by. This time though, we decided to look for what was “at source”, what was leading to the injury. We began with a full body assessment, going beyond the leg injury to the upper body. Almost immediately, my physio got to my lower back and said “Do you suffer back pain?”. “No”.”Well, you should, your whole lower back is locked up in spasm!”. It turned out that my muscular and nervous systems had gone into “protection” mode and first locked up my injured back to prevent any further damage, then, unusually, blocked out the pain receptors so I didn’t feel any pain in my back at all. Somehow this had never been picked up, and what a finding it was!
Over the next few months, I went to physio several times a week as we gradually loosened up that lower back using acupuncture, traction (an enjoyable pain, I can tell you from memory!), as well as other forms of loosening and stretching it out. After this, my already reasonably long golf shots added at least 10% as my back flexibility had shifted, plus I could now play squash without fearing I would “pop” my hamstring at any moment.
This was all wonderful and full of revelations, though as I was by then 36 years old my squash career was already coming to a close. However, I did say that meeting them and then working in depth “made a massive difference to me in beginning my focus on self-awareness, a shift that has changed my life in many ways since.”
This is so, so true. It first led to me opening up to being curious about my body and how it all connected and worked. Relatively soon after this, I started to practice Yoga, as well as learning more about stretching and the unique needs of my own body (thank you Kate Dunne of Flow!). Later, I began Pilates work with the amazing Sue Merren, a practice I continue to this day, some fifteen years later, both with Sue (when I am in Cayman) and with another wonderful and insatiably curious learned, Rob Filmer, who I am lucky enough to have found in cycling distance from my home. Rob commented to me recently that he enjoys working with me as I am “body aware”, hence I can both follow instructions quickly as well as tune in to my body and activate precisely certain muscles and move them in tiny amounts etc. As an aside, over a decade ago I first went on deck at the Loughborough “Pool of Dreams”. I remember watching Coach Ben Titley working with the (at the time) world record holder in the 50m backstroke, Liam Tancock. They were practising spring turns. At one point, Ben asked Liam to “next time, turn your body 5 degrees more as you push off”. I was astonished. To the outside, a backstroke sprint turn is just a whirl of twisting muscle. To Ben and Liam, they could precisely “dial in” tiny adjustments.
From my now lifelong focus on being “body aware”, after that, I then focussed on my awareness in different ways. I next launched into an intense period of self-development that lasted several years. In hindsight, I spent several years “drinking for a fire hose”, insatiably learning about the human condition and my own self. These days, though, I am more about keeping that level of awareness “in tune”. and now move on to more and different learnings of increasingly eclectic and holistic kinds. Always learning though, always curious. I am very much driven by “people and ideas”, the difference to the me of twenty years ago simply being that I do this from a place of far deeper awareness.
From all of this, part of this finds a way onto the page, with now approaching 2,000 posts and 400,000 words written on this blog, all coming from a place of sharing what I have learned and continue to learn.
So, the story is completed. Thank you to my Physio for being a catalyst that sparked my passion for awareness, curiosity and learning in many forms.