Elbow Update

It looks like not listening to my body finally caught up with me. My elbow on my right side (and I guess on my left too, just not as bad) is in the worst shape it's been in yet. While shoulder pressing earlier I felt it go, and I now realize that working through it will do absolutely nothing positive besides bolster my ego.

Although it's extremely difficult I hope to be able to Crossfit again someday, so I need to just do the right thing and call it quits with straight up Crossfit right now. This lines up well with the idea I had of running a 50km race in the spring (NJ Ultra Festival 50km race on March 19, 2011) and the likely chance that I won't be staying at Springfield college because I don't really like it here. Therefore:

For the next month or two, I'm going to solely focus on things like heavy squatting 1-2x a week (that's the only heavy lift I can do without pain), paired with lots of running, walking, core strength, lower body/abdominal bodyweight exercises, etc. I will probably adopt a more primal style of exercise and not "work out" as much, simply because I cannot motivate myself to do metcons consistently with such limited exercises. I will continue to do CFE 2-3x a week. On weekends when I go home, I plan to do a long run every time on trails in my town to help build up my aerobic capacity. At SC I will do a lot of sprints, intervals, barefoot running to strengthen my feet and build up some muscles to run this race.


My plan is to not change my diet. I cannot function well without eating paleo-ish at the least so I need to continue it and actually tighten it up if I'm not going to work out as much. Extra bodyfat won't help with any running race so I might need to focus on cutting for a while. It'll be extremely difficult but that's life.

Basically if I can maintain my lower body strength and get a little better at running between now and December 22 (when I come home) I think I'll be in good shape to train really hard for the race. I will not do anything at all with my elbow starting tomorrow for 1 month (October 12) and if I'm still not confident it's healthy then I'll re-evaluate from there.

I'll update with any more information.