An injury, and reviewing the first half of 2023

Welcome back! The first half of 2023 recently passed, so it feels like a good time to review what all went down. We’re going to do that.

Before that, I’ll get you up to speed on the major event of the last few weeks.

The Shoulder Injury of 2023

As it will be known for years to come - I hurt my shoulder since the last blog post. It’s a bit of a mystery still. One night, my left shoulder tensed up and became really painful - like 7/10 or 8/10 pain even with me just sitting still and not moving. Couldn’t really sleep, could barely move. It was one of those little stretches of your life that you will remember years later for how bad it was.

I went to the doctor and got Rx’ed opiates and some Lidocaine patches (a numbing patch you put on your skin). I also got told the ‘real’ amount of Advil I should be taking to treat this - which is exactly double what the Advil bottle says is the maximum you should ever take.

So that’s the first generally useful piece of life knowledge I got from this - you can take 800mg of Advil three times a day if you’re in extreme pain. Now you’re an insider, like I am. I perhaps should have become an insider before adopting power lifting as a primary hobby, but more on that in a minute.

The combination of the Advil and the patches helped bring the swelling down and after 3-4 days I got my pain down to 1/10, comfortable territory. I managed to not take any of the opiates, though I did watch several videos interviewing opiate addicts to help prevent me from doing so. A sports injury is the start of many, many a heroin addiction. I watched multiple videos that interviewed a heroin addict or recovered addict where like 10 minutes through the video it was revealed that the genesis of the addiction was a shoulder injury while pitching in baseball or something. It’s not cool.

So the whole remembering-the-opiate-epidemic thing was depressing. Anyway, I managed to get an MRI scheduled for July 31. I have an initial appointment to see a physical therapist the day after that.

So, while waiting on these things to happen, I’ve been at home. The arm is slowly waking up. At first, I couldn’t move my arm at all. I couldn’t lift it over my waist. I couldn’t take my shirt off, or move, really. Around 4 days after the injury, it at least stopped being painful. Around 15 days after the injury, I could once again lift my injured arm over my head. After ~20 days I could start doing the dishes again. It’s still working its way back.

Spooky Connection to Weightlifting

In the days leading up to the injury, I had worked out 82 days in a row, with the only exceptions being days that I was out of town - in SF for a wedding, and Cleveland for a bachelor party. Almost all 82 of those days, I lifted weights. I’ve been cruising on the workout front. In that sense, combined with the fact that I turned 35 since the last blog post, it seems reasonable that I could get injured. Maybe even expected?

The thing is though, while I was living out all those lifting days, I held an awareness of the injury risks. I’ve been lifting for 7-8 years at this point. I lift with an eye at longevity. I almost never increase the weight I lift anymore. I’m not trying to get as huge as possible, and am very quick to stop lifting if I feel like something might be wrong.

Around 40 days before my shoulder injury, I started to feel VERY mild strain in my left shoulder. My arm was totally functional, but I could feel a little strain if I reached my left arm across my body. In response, I stopped bench pressing and also stopped any accessory lifts that move the shoulder a lot (no curls, no pulldown, no rows). Perhaps notably, I continued doing the overhead press, as it felt 100% fine to me.

12 days before my shoulder injury, I stopped doing the overhead press. Not because the discomfort had gotten worse, but because the original, very mild discomfort hadn’t healed. So for the last 12 workout days the only thing I did that interacted with my shoulder in any way was the deadlift. In total, I was lifting leg weights, deadlifting, and running.

The day of my shoulder injury, I deadlifted 5 sets at my usual weight of 225. I felt totally fine during the lift. Weirdly, there was no moment of ‘oh shit, that felt wrong’ during the lift. I’ve had those lifting injuries. I would actually prefer this had been one of those...because then I would at least understand what happened. Part of what is unsettling about this injury is this fact that there was no acute moment of injury. I didn’t start experiencing the 7/10 pain in my shoulder until 12 hours after deadlifting. In the interim, I felt totally fine.

We’ll learn more after the MRI and physical therapy, but that’s the backdrop that makes the connection to weightlifting spooky. It’s not clear to me how it could have been avoided, and so it’s also not clear to me what my lifting future is. It makes me reflect that, yeah, lifting heavy weights for fun clearly has risks and downsides no matter what you do.

Unfortunately, lifting is one of the marquee things I do. It’s even a social benefit - with my daily routine right now, lifting at the Fitness Factory is one of the few times that I interact with other humans. I’m always there, so there’s a comforting consistency in seeing the regulars. Lifting is also just part of my identity at this point. It’s been my biggest hobby outside of video games for a long time.

This is also me typing DURING the injury. Maybe this whole thing will just not be a big deal. Maybe I’ll start doing some new stretches and get back to lifting and it’ll be like this whole thing never happened. We’ll see. Either way, this 2023 injury has put a 2-3 week stop to pretty much every good habit that I had going on. It’s annoying.

The first half of 2023 in data

Weight Loss

First of all, this is a body-positive blog. I do strive to be educated on diet culture, eating disorders (I am a textbook binge eater as a means of self-soothing) and that whole side of things. No fat shaming! I also understand the horrific food system that the US has, and how almost everything about that system steers all of us toward unhealthy lives. I sympathize with people unhappily ensnared in the modern day’s many junk food traps and loops. I also support bigger folks who have no interest in ever losing weight. Do you, y’all. With that said though, I personally have not been happy with my weight since the pandemic took off. Eating junk food was one of the most accessible comforts during lockdown, so by the start of 2023 my weight had moved from 180 to 225. It resulted in a personal desire to lose weight. None of my cool clothes fit!

At the beginning of this year, my 7-day average weight was 225. Every morning of this year I have woken up, weighed myself, and recorded it. The figure I look at for feedback on where my diet is leading me is the 7-day average of those weights. The daily weights and the 7-days from Q1+2 are here:

The two spots where the graph breaks are first when I went to that wedding in SF, and second when I went to my brother’s bachelor party in Cleveland. The chart shows the 7-day weight move from 225.0 at the start of the year, to 196.0 the day I got my shoulder injury.

I’m down 29 pounds over 24 weeks, for 1.2 pounds lost a week over the first half of the year. Boom.

I really couldn’t be happier with the progress! My goal for Q3+4 is to get back down to that original 180, which is where I’d like to hang out long-term. If you’ve undergone your own weight loss journey at some point, you know it takes a lot of deliberate decisions and small exertions of effort over a long period of time. I’m happy to have made lifestyle changes to this end. I’ve also cut down my binge eating, self-soothing tendencies over this time period - a major contributor.

Fitness

Here’s the workout data for the first half of the year:

A workout is defined as either lifting weights (if you want an idea of what my routine is, look up “PPL” in the context of weightlifting), or running a 5k. The chart above shows the number of workouts per week. Since some of the numbers are higher than 7, you can tell that sometimes I will run and lift in the same day. This chart ends exactly when my shoulder got injured.

In 166 days, I worked out 127 times (77% of days)*

*but not really since some days I work out twice, but close enough.

I’m personally impressed looking at this workout data. Granted, as mentioned, I did hurt my shoulder at the end of it. That does murky the waters a little bit in terms of how to measure the success of working out. Then again, maybe it doesn’t…I’m missing tons of workouts with the hurt shoulder, so even if I am trying to maximize the number of workouts, it is in my best interest to try as hard as possible to not get hurt.

Also, I’ve already shifted away from some goals that I feel are more likely to get myself hurt. For example, I used to strive to join the ‘1,000 club’ - a lifting term for someone whose max bench press + squat + deadlift adds up to 1k. This got abandoned a while back specifically in an effort to lift in a way that promotes longevity.

As I type this I just got back from running to the Polish Hill public pool, ‘swimming’ a little (I use quotes because with my shoulder I can’t really swim right now…but I can a little), and then walking back. So, workouts are already looking different than they used to. We’ll see what fitness life looks like after I start going to physical therapy…but regardless, I want fitness to have a similar role in my life the second half of this year that it did the first half. How to do it sustainably is the question.

Game Dev

Here’s what half a year of game dev has looked like:

The unit of measurement here is the pomodoro, taken from the pomodoro productivity method that you’ve possibly heard of. Long story short, one pom = half an hour. It’s a great way to immediately feel like you’ve done twice as much work as you really have. I recommend it.

In 166 days, I did 272 poms, or 1.6 poms per day, or 50 minutes of work per day, or 5.7 hours per week.

This is data I feel less happy about, though I also have a very hard time contextualizing this at all. On the one hand, 5.7 hours of work a week doesn’t sound like a lot. On the other hand, I haven’t given up on the project, and still have a lot of interest in it. Also 5.7 hours a week ain’t nothing. Idk.

My goal is to move these numbers up in the second half.

Baking

Baking isn’t really being tracked. This is occurring to me as I write this post. Longtime readers of this blog have seen many of the baking projects, and I do intend to keep my foot on the baking pedal. I enjoy it and it’s fun to make food my family can eat. I’ll have to figure out how to track this in a meaningful way, but for now let’s just say the goal is to keep baking. I’ve recently made a return to baking after hurting my shoulder, but I’ve just been pumping out my standard sandwich bread. Soon I would like to turn my eye back toward getting a sourdough starter going.

Speedrunning on Twitch

Longtime readers of this blog also know that I have the third fastest time to complete Donkey Kong Country 2 getting 100% of the collectibles in the United States (26th overall, which is why I always quote my time relative to the US).

Speedrunning was intentionally put on the backburner. My last stream was January 14th, and all the data covered in this post starts on January 16.

I think about returning to speedrunning fairly frequently. I first started speedrunning in 2016, and have had an off-and-on again relationship with it since then. I think I feel my next comeback brewing. We’ll see what the second half of the year brings.

Thanks for reading! Have a great day.