Coming out of Nationals, I decided to take the week off. It was nice to have a lot of flexibility after work. I met some colleagues for drinks, had dinner with my parents, and sat on the couch after work and wondered what the hell to do with myself. What do people do with unstructured time? Did I need a hobby? I stared at an adult coloring book that I bought on a whim but had barely opened. That Friday I discovered I wanted to go back to the gym, so I did and had a very gentle workout.

By the first week of November I had started to get past the initial shock of returning to training, by which I really mean adjusting to safety bar front squats, which are a new favorite exercise, as well as belt squats. Both of those felt a little icky, which is my technical term for when a movement feels uncomfortable in my joints or uncomfortable on one side more than the other. This is different from the discomfort of lactic acid build-up in my muscles or feeling like I’m grinding equally with both legs or arms — those are the good kind of hurt. I started far below Sam’s estimate of where I should be on front safety bar squats, which always feels a little bad, but 15 days after Nationals capped off a compressed and intense competition season, all I cared about was getting healthy and improving muscle imbalances and weak points.

All of the rest of my training was fine. Well, for the most part — I had some nits, which is my word for sub-injuries that are painful, not improving, and could eventually blossom into trouble. My left hamstring at the origin (a most awkward spot . . . basically right at the bottom of my ass) had been troubling me since March. I also had a spot in my right shoulder, roughly in the area of the serratus (which somehow sounds as rude as my hamstring issue) that I had been systematically ignoring for months, which required a couple adjustments to my bench-related movements. But we operated flexibly and under the goal of letting things recover.

I got together with my physical therapist, Eric Lehman, to come up with a plan for healing. He designed a program for me that included hamstring curls and a focus on strengthening my external shoulder rotation. Both showed deficiencies from one side to the other, so rebalancing was necessary.

Here’s the interesting thing: I had not done hamstring curls since 2017 because they were a contributing factor to my meniscus tear. I learned in 2017 that when one ignores excessive crackling and snapping that you can feel deep in your knee but that causes no pain at the time, one may still be doing damage. I was nervous about these but discovered that at light weight on the machine in our apartment building's gym, I had minimal crackling. I was intrigued, and I continued with them.

That encouraged me to try leg extensions, another exercise that my knee surgeon had said would be verboten for life. I will note that in early 2018, I did what is considered in the U.S. to be an experimental treatment in which I had stem cells (bone marrow) removed from my hip and injected into both of my knees. I followed that up with one treatment of plasma-rich platelet therapy. These treatments are designed to promote healing, specifically of cartilage, a substance that medical science has struggled to find ways of healing. Not all doctors believe in these procedures, but I think they helped me, a lot. I also think that slowly progressing my training over the last two years made a huge difference. I didn’t reinjure those joints and so now a lot of the stabilizing muscles are a lot stronger than they were before I got serious about strength training. I got my knees in a virtuous cycle, and they seem to be staying healthy.

So now I can suddenly do the one exercise that focuses entirely on my quads. Oh, and by the way, my quads seem utterly impervious to getting sore. It doesn’t matter how many front squats I do, they are unimpressed. It’s not that they are not helping — rather, I think they are nasty strong from years of sprinting.

Please imagine my utter and complete delight at finally doing something that actually targeted my bastard quads wholesale. It was sheer joy.

But at the same time, I began to get anxious that I was taking too long to return to “serious” training. To give my spine a break from being loaded, the only thing I put on my shoulders was the safety bar for front squats, and the weight for those was way, way, way lower than my max squat. I also had stayed away from competition-style bench pressing because of another nit I had developed -- namely, a sore vertebra that was cranky when I got into an arched position.

What if we stayed in the recovery phase for too long and I lost too much strength? What if I showed up in South Africa as a total weakling and couldn’t even hit my previous PRs? What if we didn’t realize that because I’m turning 47 in April 2020 (WTF????) we needed to keep my weights high or my age would sap my strength like some wraith from the Witcher? I was worried.

My motivation took a hit, too. “Sam, I’m a little worried that I’m not on fire about South Africa,” I said.

“It’s four months away,” he answered. “I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.”

“Why? I was on fire about Nationals basically since February 2019 when I found out I wasn’t getting the spot for Sweden.”

“I know, but I can’t help thinking that kind of intensity isn't healthy to maintain for too long. It’s exhausting.”

He had a really good point. I worried a little that my blah-ness about South Africa was an indication of burnout. It may well have been, but at the same time, I had been through this experience before. At the end of each college track season, it was always about a month before I would start to feel excited about doing another heptathlon. Apparently, after doing two or three heptathlons at the end of the season, I was consistently pretty baked, and it would take a little while before I had some fire in my belly about doing another one.

But I was still worried that I wasn’t on fire yet. I had wanted to compete in Sweden so badly, and now that South Africa was going to happen I was disquieted that I wasn’t bent on the destruction of my enemies already. I told myself to stuff it, listen to my better half, and remember my own previous athletic experience: Let your brain have a break from battle mode. It needs to recover from obsessive focus just like your body does.

As if to prove the point, my official invitation for the team showed up, and right on cue, my heart soared. I'd been as certain as I could be that it was on its way, but there was something really special about seeing it in writing. I wrote to Rampage, and we started planning for some amazing travel.

Not long afterward, I had a follow-up with Eric. I'd made some progress in my strength, but the discomfort continued. He confirmed that my external shoulder rotation was vastly improved, as was my hamstring strength – both of which I knew, but I enjoyed the external validation nonetheless. We switched up my exercises and off I went with a new plan.

A few weeks later, I started to notice that my shoulder wasn’t hurting on bench. It would squawk a little if I didn’t get my scapula locked down, but if I corrected that, it was happy. I also realized that the external rotation exercises I was doing felt good in the shoulder joint. It would go from feeling a little stiff to a little itchy to feeling warm and relaxed. Something similar was happening with my hamstring spot. I could feel it a little uncomfortably on the first set, and it was always noticeable, but as it warmed up it stopped being painful in a really bad way.

My nits were healing.

And by the end of December, it was on. Oh, was it on. Sam gave me a two-day transition to heavier sets of five for the big, compound lifts. Knowing how temperamental my body can be about rapid changes in training protocols, he gave me target weights but allowed me to see what weight felt right for each set. Psychologically, that was magic. Allowing me a very aggressive transition week and having me be in charge of it with a goal in mind but focused on how my body felt — it was fantastic. I felt positive and happy about pyramiding sets up to my target weights.

Oh, and no I was not doing RPE!!! (I support you whack jobs who learn how to handle RPE-style training, including my amazing partner in life, but I loathe this approach. It requires too much decision-making after work.)

By January I was feeling like I was in a good place. My injuries were healing, I was feeling strong, and allowing myself to build up through a couple pyramid-style sets was building my confidence. I was in a really good place to start transitioning to a strength block, and I was excited about it.

2020 was off to a good start.