This ain't no place for no hero

September 19th marked 6 months post-surgery on my shoulder. For the most part, I'm happy with my progress. It's hard to not rush anything. I can also say the few times I did push too hard, I HURT the next day. I don't mean just sore muscles. But this deep, inner ache - nothing terrible, just really annoying. It's not anything ice and a few days off won't fix, but man, it sucks to hurt deeply.

It's weird being as young as I am and having to be so careful doing certain things. And not just working out things, but daily movements. The ability to be carefree and be able to simply just DO something overhead is gone. Want to put those plates that in the dishwasher away? Certainly not as easy as it once was! Want to put that shopping bag up on the counter? Haha! Think again - although I can partly blame that on height! Want to hit a bag? No matter how light the punches are, you'll need take the entire next week off from working out. Seriously.

I've started to add in movements that I've either avoided or am not sure I'm really supposed to be doing. Why? You can't let fear rule your life. And to avoid something that causes minimal discomfort is being a coward. What do I mean? I've started rowing on the erg here and there. Never fast, at a high resistance or for long. A few 250m rows and 500m rows mixed into some metcons has been a great change from either biking or running. The full range of a pull without any heavy weight is probably good for me too. Rowing only sucks because it sets my shoulder blades on fire - not a bad thing, but from all the PT stuff I do they get tired quickly. Last week I played around with some band-assisted pull-ups. Again, more pulling with A LOT of assistance. I'm not sure about chin-ups because of the internal rotation, but pull-ups with as much assistance as I used and a very controlled ascent and descent didn't hurt at all. No crunching or grinding either.

I do have goals set for myself, but have not relegated myself to a timeline. I have literally to move day-by-day and see how I feel that day to plan I can do. I'm no longer in a place where I can plan my entire week's workouts. I have good and bad days, but mostly good days and way more pain free days than I've had in the last year, so that if I did set dates to far out in the future to complete something to, I'd most likely fail at reaching it.

Since I'm talking about goals, here they are, in no particular order of importance:

• Deadlift 225
• Deadlift 245 - because I want to lift the hundred pound plates
• Squat 200 for reps
• Squat over 200
• Complete 10 minute snatch sets on the 8, 10 and 12kgs
• Compete internationally for kettlebells
• A powerlifting competition - yeah, I know, I'm not supposed to bench, but I have a theory - my shoulder slips forward, so if I'm on a bench AND wear a bench shirt, it might just work

I'm sure more will pop up along the way, but these are good for now. I also have to remind myself it's ok if these aren't met. My shoulder is indeed stupid, so I'm just trying to see where it'll take me.

I posted the image of my MRI a while back, but here it is again. Let's see where I can go and what I can do.