December 12, 2018 was a life-changing day for me. It changed me physically, mentally and emotionally, it changed my life forever. I was riding back home from office in the evening. It started drizzling near a crossroads and I throttled up the motorbike. And all of a sudden, a motorbike from a left lane zipped past me. I braked hard and a car from behind hit my bike, flinging me across the road.
Some people ran over to help me and then, one of my colleagues just driving behind me saw my bike lying down on the side of the road. He immediately rushed me to a nearest orthopaedic hospital. I had sustained multiple fractures in my left elbow and a major fracture in the left ankle. This necessitated a surgery wherein I had silicon plates, screws, and wires inserted to hold my elbow and ankle joints in place.
It was a traumatic injury that caused me emotional, psychological, and physical distress disrupting my ability to function normally in day-to-day life. I was feeling completely lost. Being confined at home, I would spend some time thinking about the ways to work on my health and fitness along with the recovery process. I tried to explore different ways to stay positive. Reading self-help books and watching health and fitness videos had become my only recourse. Reading self-help books helped me process things at the mental level and for physical fitness, I started doing yogasana which helped me heal faster.
In the meantime, I joined a fitness group on Facebook, which had just kicked off a "30 days’ plank challenge".
I missed out on the initial three days of the challenge thinking that I would not be able to do that properly. Nevertheless, I mustered courage and started out from Day Four. Initially, I’d feel tremors in my core and could hardly hold the plank position for 20 seconds or so. However, 30 days into the challenge, I could hold the plank position for more than four minutes without tremors. That plankathon journey saw me from being a passive member to the most active member of the group.
Besides, I also started going out for a walk in the morning and after a few weeks into the walking exercise, I tried out running. I began by running 1 km, and gradually 2 km and 4 km. I slowly and patiently worked my way up to run for 5 km with reasonable pace.
While I was trying to build my running endurance, one day, one of my senior colleagues exhorted me to participate in a 10-km running event being organised by a local fitness group. Though I had never run for 10 km in my life before, I was so motivated that I decided to give that a try. I not only completed the run but also covered the same within 57 minutes. It was a big morale booster for me. Since then, I participated in many running events.
The next challenge before me was knocking down my run timing. For that, I started focusing on my strength training, hill training and high-intensity interval training. That helped me improve my timings gradually. Consequently, I went on to set my personal best in a 5 km, 10 km and half-marathon and was also counted among the top runners in the city in my age category (39-45).
After years of no exercise, I had become a real runner and more fit than I ever would have been without that accident.
What I learned from my own experience through this journey is that there can also be a bright side to an injury. If you make the most of your recovery process, you will definitely come out stronger — both emotionally and physically.
