Got full clearance on the wrist last week. No more “let’s check again in a few weeks.” Cleared, full stop.
It’s a scaphoid — a small bone at the base of the thumb that’s notoriously slow to heal, something I didn’t understand when I first fractured it. That slow timeline meant weeks of the doctor not ready to say “you’re good,” which meant weeks of me testing it long before I had permission to.
The first time I hit a fast descent again — weeks before last week’s clearance, still very much in “we’ll see” territory — my hands found the brakes before I told them to. Nothing was wrong. That’s what they remembered doing last time.
The clearance doesn’t erase that. The body gets paperwork. Trust doesn’t come with a form.
The IT band added its own version of the problem. Every twinge on a run got a second read: normal fatigue, or the thing coming back? For months I couldn’t tell the difference, so I backed off. Every time. Better safe felt like the right call, and often it was.
Two different injuries, two different flavors of the same doubt. One made my hands flinch. The other made me overthink every sensation until I couldn’t tell training from injury anymore.
To be clear on something: caution isn’t the problem here. Backing off on a real signal is the right move, every time, and healing slower beats getting hurt again. The problem is when you can’t tell a real signal from noise, so you back off from everything, out of fear instead of information.
Here’s the distinction I eventually landed on: pain that stays in one place and sharpens as you go is a signal to stop, full stop. Dull soreness that moves around or fades once you’re warmed up is training doing its job. Not medical advice — a rule of thumb, built from getting it wrong enough times to notice the pattern.
Getting back in open water for the first time since both injuries was the real test. Not because the swim itself was hard. Because there was no controlling it the way I could control a bike descent or a run pace — no brakes to reach for, no pace to dial back mid-stroke. Water doesn’t negotiate. I either trusted it or I didn’t.
I didn’t. Not fully, not that first time. I swam tight, breathing a beat early, watching my own stroke like it might betray me. The hesitation was still there. Quieter, but there.
Here’s what actually rebuilt it: reps, not decisions, and not a rush. Nobody wakes up one day and decides to trust their body again, and nobody should try to force that in one session either. I stacked small pieces of evidence instead, slowly. One descent taken at speed, on a day that had actually earned it. One run finished without backing off at a twinge that turned out to be nothing. One swim where the stroke felt like mine again, not something I was managing from the outside.
None of those fixed it alone. All of them together did.
This isn’t unique to a wrist or an IT band. Whatever version of comeback you’re in — an injury, a slump, a long stretch off — the instinct to prove you’re back overnight is the same instinct that gets people hurt twice. Trust isn’t something you power through. It’s something you earn back, on its own schedule, and the ones who respect that timeline are the ones still standing at the end of it.
Where’s the doubt still louder than the evidence for you?
— Iggy
Trust isn’t something you power through. It’s something you earn back, on its own schedule.
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