I took about 12 weeks off from volleyball after a collision on the court took out my shoulder. I’ve had pain just when extending to the edges of my shoulder mobility that just won’t go away.

After a deep massage in London 1, things have felt better for the last week so I decided to play for 90 minutes last night.

  1. Good lord I’ve lost a lot of cardio stamina going from playing 5-6 hours over 3 nights a week to nothing.
  2. Fuck me, my shoulder made it through, but it is super sore this morning. More sore than pain, but it’s still not what it was.

I know nothing serious is wrong— I can still lift weights and have full mobility in most planes/alignments, and the pain is specific versus radiating and diffuse. But it’s absolutely insane that getting knocked, and not even that hard, required 12 weeks of rest and still isn’t right. I have a feeling I’ll be rehabbing this for a year. I’m going to try just playing 2x a week and see how I can tolerate it. I have too much fun and really need the cardio.

I will now make this the standard travel plan for red eyes going east to Europe.

  1. I made an inspired decision for our travel to London. We had a miserable early arrival in Paris last fall. We landed around 7am, dropped off our bags at 8am, and tried walking around the city as much as possible. We made it until about 10:30am when we were just too tired to keep going. Our room wasn’t ready until 2pm, and we ended up sleeping sitting up on a hotel lobby couch. This time, our flight was a little later, mercifully, which helped us each get at least a little sleep on the ride out. But realizing we probably wouldn’t get a room, I had us book a couple’s massage at the spa for about when we should arrive. We made it on time, dropped our bags, went right into a massage, and then took a nice long shower and changed our clothes. The combination of relaxation, a hot shower, and clean clothes made waiting for our room pleasant and changed my energy for the whole trip. ↩︎