I spent this past weekend in Houston at a CrossFit seminar for coaches who train adaptive (handicapped) athletes. It was an amazing chance to learn about how others function in a world which isn\u2019t necessarily designed for them, and how to best help them with their ability to function within their own lives\u2026and to do CrossFit because we love it and it\u2019s fun.<\/p>\n
Saturday morning, I sat down at a breakfast table where two of the lecturers were deep in conversation about prosthetic limbs. Both guys work with and are wounded veterans, and one of them is an amazing athlete who happens to have a prosthetic leg. It was a compelling discussion on the functionality of different types of legs, and how the size of the stump determines the kind of prosthetic, and very often the user\u2019s end mobility. (I learned that amputees prefer to call it a stump and not a residual limb. It feels weird to me to, but if that\u2019s what they prefer I\u2019m going with it.) It seemed to be a common frustration between them in getting the guys they work with to opt for mobility when they were making decisions about amputation.<\/p>\n
Wounded vets often arrive back in this country needing surgery to \u201cclean up\u201d what was done during emergency medical procedures in the field, and they or their families have to make gut wrenching decisions about where to take off the damaged or diseased parts of limbs.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I could just get these guys to understand that sometimes they\u2019ve got to just let go of a little bit\u00a0 more in order to have a better life, but they don\u2019t listen.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNope. They will fight like hell to keep knees that don\u2019t bend, stumps that aren\u2019t the ideal functional lengths, you name it. They\u2019ll scream in your face about how you\u2019re not taking another inch that belongs to them. They act like we\u2019re trying to steal something precious away from them, and we\u2019re really trying to give them the best possible outcome.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI know it. There are so many cases where I see these guys, and if they\u2019d let them take the knee they\u2019d be fully functional in life, and they just don\u2019t care. It means the difference between life with a nasty limp and a cane, and being able to run.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t tell them though. They\u2019ll celebrate like it\u2019s a gigantic victory when you let them keep those extra three inches, and it won\u2019t be until years later that they realize the mistake they made in holding onto them because of pride, or fear, or whatever. We can maybe fix it then, but it\u2019s so much harder than if they\u2019d let it go in the beginning.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The whole thing just got me thinking about how much of life is just that way. How much of it is spent hanging onto the diseased, twisted, and corrupting because they\u2019re \u201cmine\u201d, and \u201cI\u2019ve already lost so much, they\u2019re not taking an inch more\u201d when letting that be taken from us, albeit painfully, would be the difference between limping along and being able to fly?<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I spent this past weekend in Houston at a CrossFit seminar for coaches who train adaptive (handicapped) athletes. It was an amazing chance to learn about how others function in a world which isn\u2019t necessarily designed for them, and how to best help them with their ability to function within their own lives\u2026and to do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1979,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[18,8],"class_list":["post-3127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crossfit","tag-life-lessons"],"yoast_head":"\n
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