You Decide When You’re done, Not Your Injury

Too often clients tell me that they were told they should never run, bike, ski, or do “X” again. This often leaves the client feeling devastated and lost. I always cringe when I hear it and I’m challenged for two reasons.  

First, as a clinician, this idea creates limitations on someone’s expectation of recovery. It perpetuates the narrative that someone’s body is not strong or coordinated enough to do an activity and that their body is not resilient enough to ever do it again. And in my experience, people who don’t think they’re going to get better generally don’t. If the activity is one that the person loves to do, this can literally be life changing. 

Second, as a person who loves to move and engage in a variety of different active hobbies, I can imagine how traumatizing it may be to be told that you should never do the thing that you love to do. Imagine being told that you’ve skied your last run or run your last trail. The magnitude of this news may be even more devastating in your 20’s if you envisioned 30-50 more years of skiing or running. 

Ultimately, telling someone that they should abstain from an activity for the rest of their life disempowers the person to do their own risk/benefit assessment and make their own decision. Sure, the advice may be considered a medical opinion, but there is great potential for a lack of understanding of what it takes to do an activity, how risky it is, and the skill to develop a plan to help someone return to it, even in a modified capacity. For this reason, the Mountain Sport Clinic approach is to empower people with the knowledge and tools to make an informed decision regarding whether to return to a sport, and the roadmap to do so. Unless there is a justified medical reason that someone should not participate in an activity, we believe that it is up to the person to decide for themself if the benefits outweigh the risks. Life is risky and you decide the limits of your risk tolerance. 

In other words, you can twist a knee or fall and break a bone while walking downhill on a gravelly sidewalk or stepping on a crack in the road. The possibility of something like this happening may increase with an existing injury that decreases your balance and strength. While running and biking is riskier than not running and biking, the value of it may be worth considering.  

Activities can foster community in addition to cardio and mental health. They can be a constructive output for energy and be a tool for stress management. There are many reasons to find a way to continue your activity, if you want to. 

 So just how much do you love doing your activity? Enough to work hard enough to try and mitigate the increased risk? Enough to take the remaining level of risk required to do it anyways? You might decide that it’s not worth the increased risk. Maybe you liked trail running but didn’t love it, and that’s fine. Maybe you’re happy finding a different, less risky activity to fill your time. The difference is that you decided this for yourself. The difference is that you didn’t stop because somebody told you that you should never do it again.