On Getting Hurt And Getting Back Up Again

Everybody gets hurt. That's a fact. What matters is getting back up again - and again and again and again.

When I was younger, I used to do martial arts, and I happened to be quite good at it. Setting aside issues of practicality, one of my favourite things about practicing martial arts was learning how to do all of the extravagant, flashy moves. Sure, they weren't going to be much help in a real fight, but I felt a real sense of accomplishment each time I mastered a difficult technique. But out of all the flashy techniques, my absolute favourites were the jump kicks.

For those of you who aren't familiar with jump kicks, a jump kick is just a kick that is delivered while you are jumping. Two of the most iconic jump kicks are the running jump side kick and the jump spinning roundhouse kick. The former is seen in many kung fu movies, where the hero takes a running start before jumping and throwing a side kick in midair whereas the latter is probably best known as the kick Jean-Claude Van Damme throws whenever he needs to look particularly cool during a fight scene (it is essentially a vertical jump with a spinning roundhouse kick delivered in midair - i.e., a reverse roundhouse kick in midair).

During the course of more than a decade of training, I learned how to throw pretty much every jump kick that exists, and I learned how to throw them well. Ever tried linking together a spinning hook kick, jump spinning hook kick, tornado kick, and sweep, with a jump side kick to finish things off? You should - it's quite exhilarating. In fact, I earned something of a reputation at the club where I trained for being able to do all the crazy stuff, as well as being able to teach everyone else how to do it too (I loved teaching martial arts, and in an age where some kids have an almost non-existent attention span, it helps if you can show them something awesome to catch their eye).

But what I really loved was the feeling I got when I was throwing all those jump kicks. Human beings can't fly, but when you're in the middle of a kick, you're about as close as you can get. When everything is spinning and your whole body is directed towards delivering a single, perfect strike, it's like you're free and the whole world doesn't matter. That's the reason I worked so hard to perfect all those kicks, and it's why by the time I was a teenager, I could easily hit a target two feet higher than my head (I had a very, very big vertical leap, and a very long horizontal leap as well).

But nothing lasts forever. I practiced martial arts for more than fifteen years without a major injury (naturally, I had all of the usual niggling injuries that all martial artists pick up), but in the span of a year, I suffered three consecutive injuries.

The first injury wasn't all that bad. I broke my hand during a training sessions and aggravated the injury by continuing to use that hand for the rest of the training session. To this day, I still don't know what I was thinking continuing to train since one of my knuckles was about an inch out of position and my entire hand was alternating between being entirely numb and agonisingly painful. I went to bed that night with a packet of frozen peas wrapped around my hand and then went off to the doctor the next day. It took more than a month for the hand to heal, and that was during exam period for university. I was very, very lucky that even though the injury was to my dominant hand, I was still able to write.

Still, the broken hand wasn't too bad in the grand scheme of things. I was still able to train although sparring and contact work were out. However, that gave me a chance to step up the amount of teaching I did, which was great, since teaching was something I enjoyed very much, and based on how my students performed, I like to think I was pretty good at it. My second injury, however, was not shrugged off so easily.

My second injury was a broken arm, and this one happened during sparring. Now, sparring can be very interesting if you're as short as I am. Not only do I give away a great deal of reach, I usually give away something like thirty to fifty pounds of weight as well. As you can imagine, this makes things very complicated. I'm faster than most of my opponents, and I've had enough training to know how to get in close where taller people are not going to be able to strike as effectively. However, every now and then you meet someone who is not only tall, but fast, and quite experienced. Those kinds of sparring matches are the most fun, but they're also the most dangerous.

It was against one such opponent that I found myself once again stuck on the outside looking for a way to get in. After a bit of back and forth, I found myself on the back foot, and on the receiving end of a roundhouse kick aimed at my head. For those of you who'v never sparred, here's a hint: getting hit in the head by a roundhouse kick from a big guy who weighs about 230-240 pounds is a very, very bad idea. It was a really, really nice kick - fast, accurate, and strong - so I didn't have the time to try and catch it or duck out of the way. Instead, I did the only thing I really could. I put my arm out and blocked. Yeah, not a good idea, although it did stop the kick and keep my head on my shoulders.

The kick broke my arm, but I didn't realise it at first. In fact, we kept sparring for a little longer, only after a few moments, I realised that my arm wasn't working anymore (i.e., I couldn't throw punches with it, and I couldn't bring it back up into a guard position). At first I thought, I'd just badly bruised it but one trip to the hospital later, I found out that no, it was broken. Joy.

After six weeks with a cast on (during which I endured another round of university exams, although at least this time it was my non-dominant arm that got broken), my arm still hadn't recovered. A trip to the doctor revealed that for some reason, the bone just wasn't healing properly so the only option was surgery. More joy. I ended up with a plate of metal in my arm and screws in the bone to hold it in place.

But even with the plate in my arm, things weren't too bad. Sure, it felt strange for a few weeks, but after a few months had passed, I was allowed to continue training, albeit with absolutely no real contact work allowed that might injure the arm. Given that I'd been out of training for several months by this point, it was a bit of struggle getting back to full fitness, but I didn't mind. I loved martial arts, and if I had to do a lot of training to get back into shape that was fine with me. And then injury number three happened, and if anything, this one was worse than injury number two.

One of the recurring problems I've had with my health is my knees. I first injured them playing sport at school, and since then they've always been troublesome - nothing major, mind you, and nothing that affected my performance in martial arts except for occasionally having sore knees or needing a little extra time to rest them between training sessions. But one day while training, I managed to really injure one of my knees. I was in the middle of a kick - a kick I'd done hundreds, probably even thousands of times before - and then my knee just... blew.

Let me say here that I've taken my fair share of licks over the years. I've broken an arm, a hand, and I've been kicked and punched all over my body by people a lot larger and stronger than I am. But nothing, and I mean nothing, has ever come close to the amount of pain I felt when I blew my knee. I was on the ground in less than a second, and though I wasn't screaming or crying, I did, apparently, go into shock. In fact, I'm told that I began to mumble about how everything had gone purple. To make things even worse this happened in front of people who I'd spent years instructing, some of whom were now teenagers themselves (they were only five or six when I started teaching them, so I'd known them for almost a decade), and I ended up having to be carried off to an ambulance on a stretcher. As bad as the physical pain was, the mental pain was just as bad. I knew, just from the way it felt, that this time I'd finally done something that I might not be able to shake off.

I was right. At the hospital I found out that almost everything you could twist, sprain, or otherwise mangle in your knee, I had managed to mangle. I spent six weeks with a brace around my knee and months working on it to try and get it back into shape. But after all the dust had settled, I realised something very disconcerting. The knee wasn't the same anymore, far from it, in fact. I could still jump, but I couldn't leap anymore, and the "air time" I'd worked so hard to develop was gone. Even worse, no amount of work seemed able to make the knee good enough for martial arts again (walking and running were okay, but any kind of torsional stress was a killer). That was a kick in the guts, and speaking to people I'd known for almost my entire life to explain that I couldn't train properly anymore was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I could have gotten a knee reconstruction, I suppose, but those are always risky (and expensive) and I didn't want to chance it at my age.

But that wasn't the end of things. Since I couldn't practice martial arts as much as I wanted to anymore, but I still wanted to try and strengthen my knee, I turned to other forms of exercise. One of my favourites was jogging, and even if it wasn't quite as good as flying through the air throwing kicks, there was something about it that was almost the same. If you've ever run, you'll know what I mean. It's that feeling you get as your feet pound along the ground and the rest of the world goes quiet and the only thing you can see, the only thing you care about is the finish line and how quickly you're racing toward it.

Running saved my life. After all of the injuries I'd taken, I was in a bad place mentally, and that reflected itself in how I handled myself physically. I was in bad shape and I put on a lot of weight. Running helped me get my confidence back, and slowly, little by little, it helped me get back into shape. It became a part of my life, to the point where i could barely even remember what it was like not to go on a run.

At my peak, I was running for about an hour a day, and I could run twenty kilometres without too much trouble. My knee was feeling good too, the best it had in years, and then I injured my knee again. It was stupid too. I was sitting cross legged on the ground and I went to stand up and my knee just popped. I didn't have to go to the hospital, but I could tell that I'd definitely done something. I couldn't run anymore - it hurt too much - and it took months before the pain and soreness faded, but even then, my knee didn't feel right.

So what did I do then? I couldn't leap anymore, and I couldn't run, so I walked. I walked for at least an hour each day outside of everything else I did to try and rebuild some strength in the knee. It was a big step down from running, and it was humbling to come home each time after my walk knowing that even a year before, I'd have been able to run the whole way. But walking was all right. It gave me time to think about things, big things and small things. Some of my best story ideas came during those walks, and I've made more important decisions than I care to think about after going for a long walk.

But that's not where the story ends.

Last Sunday, after more than a year of only being able to walk because running - really running - hurt too much, I did something different. I walked along my usual route, and on the way back I stopped at a local park... and I went for a run. It was hard, much harder than I remembered, and I couldn't run anywhere near my usual speed, or anywhere near as far as I once had, but it felt good, and after a while, it was almost like it had been. The world fell away and I was alone with my thoughts with nothing but the ground beneath my feet and the sky above me.

When I was done running, my lungs burned, and I was drenched in sweat. My knees hurt too (I've injured my other knee before, but not as badly as the one I blew), but it wasn't that horrible, spiking stab of agony I'd felt before when I'd done something terrible to them. No, it was a good kind of hurt, the kind of ache a muscle gets after being used at long last after months of waiting. I went for a run the day after, and my knees held up again, and I plan on going on another run when I get the chance.

It's been years since I've been able to jump the way I used to be able to, and even now I still can't run the way I want to, but I'm going to try and rebuild my fitness again. I don't know if I'll ever be as fit or as good as I was before I took all those injuries, but that doesn't matter. I'm still here, and I'm still standing. Maybe one day I'll even be able to fly again.