Author Archives: amyreinink

“I wasn’t even supposed to be here today.” —Dante, Clerks (spotted on a motivational sign along New Jersey Marathon/Long Branch Half-Marathon course on Sunday, May 5)

I spotted this quote from Clerks, that quintessential Monmouth County, N.J., movie, near the end of my 6.9-mile leg of the Long Branch Half-Marathon Relay on Sunday, May 5. I almost laughed out loud, thinking about how I almost didn’t run the race, and about what a mistake that would have been.

I went into the race with no expectations, hoping to feel strong and steady but prepared to feel shaky and pukey. I ran it because my mom was there to cheer me on, and because Steve was there to run the relay with me.

I ran so I could exchange hugs and good-luck wishes with my lovely friend Alexis, running her second half-marathon, at the start line.

And I ran so I could surprise myself, which I did.

It was a perfect day to run, in the 50s and overcast. It was a perfect course, pancake-flat and scenic, filled with bridge-crossings and spectators. And it was an incredibly well-organized event, with the perfect amount of time between corrals, well-spaced aid tables and seamless parking/expo plans.

My leg of the relay was over before I knew it—in part because I ran much faster than I could have imagined, but mostly because I was just having so much fun. As Steve and I hugged and chatted at the transition point, I kept thinking: I could run more! In my mind, that’s the best way to feel upon finishing a race: hungry for more, and eager for the next challenge.

I hadn’t even planned to check our results. You can imagine my surprise when Steve told me that we finished pretty well, 11 out of 65 teams in the mixed-open category. Isn’t it nice when results are just the icing on the race cake?

11 20287 Steve Is My Llama                   MIXED OPEN       1:55:43

“People would say to me in the grocery store, like, ‘You must feel cursed,’ and I would just be like a) ‘That’s not helpful,’ and b) ‘So are you, if you think about the fact that you’re a human being and you never know when chaos will find you.’ So it made me just realize how deeply phobic we are of this idea that chaos is really a reality in this world. It is the thing that can touch and will touch us sometime in our life, and that doesn’t mean that we’re bad people or we deserve bad luck or that we’re even unlucky. It just means that that’s what happened.” — Emily Rapp, author of ‘The Still Point of the Turning World‘: A Meditation On Mothering A Dying Child.

If you are a runner (or a human, really), you have followed the news in Boston for the past two weeks, and you have struggled to make sense of what happened there.

In the hours and days after the bombing, I kept thinking: Chaos, man. Total, utter chaos. If there is something about me that has changed since losing three parents/parents-in-law over the past couple years, and since sustaining just as many weird, random injuries (statisticians who tell me these are not connected except for in my mind can go suck an egg), it is the understanding that we are not even guaranteed the rest of today. It is the understanding that anyone, no matter what that person has already endured, can, at any moment in time, face the kind of unbelievable heartache and chaos that changes everything in an instant.

We all know this logically, and we all grow to understand this on a personal level at some point in our lives. Still, it’s never easy to accept when we see it manifested in the world, especially when the chaos is as brutal and random and wide-reaching as it was in Boston.

The only thing I know is that we can look fear and doubt in the face and run anyway.  We can’t overcome or go around the chaos, but we can run through it to get to the other side.

Recently, my broken elbow—an absurdly minor trauma, by comparison—has served as a visual and visceral reminder of the fact that chaos can strike at any moment, even when you’re doing nothing more than walking from your front door to your car. So it was only fitting that I started to move through, and past, the chaos in my own life by tackling the thing that scared me most: a return to the slopes following my last elbow-checkup appointment April 12. That’s why, at the last minute, I crashed Steve’s trip to see his brother and our sister-in-law in Colorado, moving my life and my deadlines to Colorado for a few days for the chance to make just a few more turns this season.

Did I mention that I purchased new ski boots for the trip? It makes perfect sense. I promise.

The last time I tried a comeback, I rushed to Whitetail within 24 hours of getting my doctor’s approval, then gave myself a colossal scare by banging up my elbow, which turned out to be fine after a sleepless night waiting for an X-ray to confirm that. This time, I felt a huge rush of fear before I took my first turn, and fought a low level of anxiety for the rest of the morning. But then, slowly, I eased into feeling normal again. By the end of the day, I was racing downhill to catch one last chair up.

My skiing wasn’t perfect, form-wise, right out of the gate. But it was full of joy.

I think this is the best we can do: Keep taking it slowly and accepting that it’s terrifying until it suddenly feels normal again. And until then, trusting that the normal will come.

Forgive me runners, for I have sinned.

It’s been three weeks since my last real run, a five-miler with Steve and a dear runner-friend in California on March 24. I managed one easy downhill jog on our last full day in Hawaii on April 8 (it was so short, we didn’t even time it) and one 30-minute slog around Travis Air Force Base while waiting for a flight back to D.C. on Wednesday night. All told, I went two and a half weeks without running.

I would like to blame it all on the fact that an early-trip, post-beach-day hike led to the most insane blood blisters I’ve ever experienced on both feet, making running prohibitively painful (public health announcement: be really, really certain you’ve wiped all the sand off your feet before lacing up your hiking boots).

But the truth is, I’ve been worshipping other gods, those of cross-training. I did not let the blisters prevent me from donning hiking boots again to journey through a volcanic crater in Hawaii’s Volcanoes National Park, or along the unpopulated tip of the North Shore of Oahu, or to the remote green-sand beach at the southernmost point of the United States, or on a number of other incredible hikes we did.

The blisters also didn’t stop me from squeezing my feet into flippers to snorkel in Hanouma Bay Wildlife Preserve, or from wearing sand-filled water shoes for hours on end to SUP in Waikiki, Pulilau, Bellows and pretty much everywhere else we went. (I might be a little obsessed with stand-up paddleboarding now.)

As you can see, I wasn’t exactly laying around—just not running.

I swam, unafraid to be the only cap-and-goggle-wearing geek at posh, tourist-filled Waikiki (and believe me: I was definitely the only cap-and-goggle-wearing geek at Waikiki).

I paddled, skipping a potential blister-free run day early in the trip trying to keep up with a canoe full of Marines who invited us along on their Polynesian-style paddling journey around Kaneohe Bay.

I surfed, shaking off my fears that I’d somehow hurt my elbow and catching a few waves in the shadow of Diamond Head.

And I spent a lot of time staring at the water, letting the 25-foot waves on Oahu’s North Shore and the gentle swells on the island’s leeward side lull me into a deep, meditative state. I could spend the rest of my life watching waves pound against volcanic rock on the Big Island, shown below.

Was I subconsciously trying to sabotage my training for the New Jersey Half Marathon on May 5, which I’ve been cramming for thanks to my broken-elbow-rehab hiatus in February? Maybe. I still haven’t given up on the idea of the race, and think I’ll at least commit to running it until the 6.5-mile point, the relay changeup point (does it still count as a relay leg if I don’t pass the baton to anybody else?).

Or maybe I was subconsciously trying to boost my elbow rehab. All that stand-up paddleboarding and swimming had a completely amazing effect on my elbow—though it felt incredibly sore and swollen immediately after each workout, I woke up each day with more strength and mobility. As of today, my last post-op doctor appointment, I’m happy to say that my mobility is back to 100 percent, with my strength not far behind.

Or maybe I was just giving my heart what it needed: A period of calm to rebound from the pain and chaos of the past few months (or past few years, for that matter). In that sense, the trip was a big, beautiful success.

If you have the chance to go to Hawaii, go. Before this trip, I understood its Technicolor beauty and aloha spirit only in the most cartoonish form. Now that I know how gorgeous and rugged the islands are, and how kind and loving its residents are, and how amazingly delicious the pineapple, coffee, chocolate and fresh fish are, I’m amazed I found the willpower to actually get on a plane to head home.

But here I am. I’m ready to get back to regular showers (did I mention that we camped on the beach for large parts of the trip?) and working at desks rather than C-17s (did I mention that we took advantage of the military’s Space-A flights to get there and back?). I’m ready to start again.

They are all alike, and they are all different. The beginning is slow and painful, fraught with self-doubt and exhaustion and resistance. There are shin splints and other aches, body parts that crackle like fireworks when you stretch. The beginning lasts longer than you feel it should. The aches and pains and struggles to regain mobility and strength are always different, the frustration always the same.

Then, seemingly overnight, there is a breakthrough—a run that feels effortless and smooth, a swim that makes you remember why you loved this sport to begin with. You feel the beautiful coordination of muscles working together rather than the strain of trying to get a muscle to work when it doesn’t want to. After weeks or months of swatting away the question: “Why am I doing this?” you are suddenly simply doing it.

On Saturday, I entered the second stage of this current comeback on a five-mile run through the sunny streets of Silicon Valley, where Steve and I stopped to visit a dear runner-friend en route to Hawaii (Yes, Hawaii! More on that in a bit). I went into it with a backup plan to turn back for an easy three-miler instead. I kept going, and to my surprise, it was fine—slow but uneventful, easy and conversational until the very end.

It was the kind of run that surprised me by being a non-event, and that made me feel like the New Jersey Half-Marathon is still within my reach. The race is five weeks from the day of my five-miler, meaning I have just enough time to work up to the distance before I toe the line on May 5. I plan to train my usual way: two days of shorter tempo runs or speed workouts, three days of cross-training, one long run and one rest day. Here’s how long runs should go

March 31: Seven miles

April 7: Nine miles

April 14: 11 miles

April 21: 13 miles

April 28: 10 miles

May 5: Race day

I write this with the knowledge that a successful training plan includes base mileage and stepback weeks and other things that this does not include. I also write it with the knowledge that 11 might turn into nine, and 13 may turn into 10. But right now, today, I feel confident that the rest of my comeback could be as smooth as the first part.

This week, cross-training will mean swimming and stand-up paddleboarding in the Pacific Ocean—on O’ahu, where we’ll be spending the next several days! We have a few weeks left of being able to fly on the military’s Space-A flights, or cargo planes that take passengers if they have space available, and we intend to take full advantage of the privilege.

There’s working remotely, and then there’s working REMOTELY: I cleared some backpacking time for myself by working on the five-hour flights. This one was on a C-17.

We’ll be camping and backpacking and generally trying to live off a shoestring budget (the flights may be free, but lodging and food certainly aren’t). And we will be healing—perhaps the comeback’s most important component of all.

Last Tuesday, at my most recent doctor appointment, I got cleared to ski. Naturally, I headed up to Whitetail at my first opportunity on Thursday night.

The late-season snow was cruddy, with giant piles of what we refer to as “death cookies”—big chunks of ice the size of those jumbo cookies at Starbucks. With hindsight being 20-20, I can now see that I should have stopped after my first run.

I didn’t, and midway through my second run, when I stopped to wait for Steve, I fell into the hill into a gentle hip-check before rolling onto my bad elbow. It was the kind of non-fall fall that happens all the time, the kind of non-event that would be a non-issue if it weren’t for the doctor’s instructions that I would be fine, just fine, as long as I didn’t fall directly onto my elbow.

I watched it swell up and bruise. I fell silent as I realized I couldn’t flex it anymore without pain. And I spent the next 12 hours wide awake, in a state of panic and self-loathing while I waited to see the doctor.

On my way to my appointment that next day, Steve asked what I viewed as the best-case scenario. “I don’t know—that the doctor can get me in for surgery first thing on Monday?” I replied.

So you can imagine my surprise and glee when the doctor showed me this X-ray:

“Where’s the break?” I said, suspicious.

He grinned. “There’s no break,” he said. “You’re fine.”

I grabbed the man and hugged him. I fought back tears of relief as he explained that I had just bumped the fluid-filled sac between the bone and the skin, that the swelling would likely go down quickly, that again, I was FINE.

And he was right. I spent the weekend babying it and icing it and reminding myself that skiing one crappy run would not be worth another scare. On Monday, when I headed back to the pool for the first time since the fall, I had my best post-injury swim yet: Of my 3,000-yard workout, I kicked only 700 yards, swimming the rest.

This was just a dramatic example of the scare that happens during any post-injury comeback: The mid-run twinge of pain in an overuse injury you thought was healed; the hesitation to jump into the pool after a long hiatus from an ear infection. It’s terrifying to trust your body again. But once you do so and come out on the other end unscathed, you learn the most important message you can learn going forward: That you are stronger than you can possibly imagine.

I had planned to include some triumphant first-ski-day-back photos in this blog post, but that will have to wait until I’m feeling a bit more solid. Instead, I’ll show you a photo of Steve at Whitetail’s annual pond-skimming competition, in which people celebrate the last ski day of the season by attempting to ski across a man-made pond in costume. I helped organize the competition instead of participating; given that the water was 28 degrees, I was perfectly happy to be on the sidelines.

Have you guys heard the brilliant, beautiful Tig Notaro stand-up set about the worst year ever? The gist: Notaro, a comedian, was diagnosed with cancer; lost her mother to a freak accident; survived a breakup; and almost died from an intestinal condition. Then, she stood up on stage and talked about it all, turning the most awful parts of it into comedy. In the set, she says that given all that’s happened, she simply couldn’t stand up on stage and talk about a bee going down the 405 (one of her more popular jokes).

Similarly, I feel like I can’t sit at my laptop and tell you about how my first couple of runs back were tough, but how, golly, things are getting easier now! That’s true (yesterday, I managed my first post-injury 30-minute run without stopping), but my heart’s just not in it.

I was actually all set to write about that first run today until I read Katie’s most recent post on Run This Amazing Day. She writes about how her blog, which started as a place for her to talk about running and injuries, and to poke fun at her own inadequacies, was turned upside down, along with her life, when she faced a tragedy of her own last summer.

She writes:

“I was overwhelmed by the graciousness of the human spirit … that situation dragged me out from under my rock and pinned me to the wall, naked, an apple on my head and a bulls-eye taped square over the softest part of my heart.”

If life is full of loss and tragedy and sadness, then the thing that keeps us afloat, the barely-visble upside, is the fact that we get to experience the kindest side of human nature in the aftermath of those losses and tragedies. We also find a more tender, compassionate, authentic self waiting to emerge to meet that kindness.

Take, for example, the (relatively minor) tragedy of the broken elbow I’m now rehabbing. Here are a few examples of the graciousness of the human spirit I’ve experienced as a result of my (relatively minor) struggles:

The lifeguard who offered to loan me his goggles after I angrily threw mine on the pool deck upon realizing my arm didn’t work quite yet on my first day back in the pool after elbow surgery; and the fact that this lifeguard has applauded my progress every day in the pool since then, saying things like, “Wow! You would never know you’d had surgery!” The brother-in-law whose post-injury message was not a light-hearted joke meant to minimize the situation, but a heartfelt: “You’ll get through this. You’re one of the strongest women I know.” The friend who cancelled her dinner plans to spend some time on the couch with me when she heard I was laid up. The barrage of cards from my mom at various stages of my recovery.

And yes, it is also the feeling of victory after the first time you run 30 minutes in a row without stopping after a long hiatus, or the first time your injured arm can manage a feeble, blessed stroke through the water.

My physical therapy appointments start and finish with my PT measuring how far I can flex and extend my recently-repaired broken elbow. Usually, I leave his office feeling buoyant and optimistic after netting 10 percent gains in either direction after an hour of hard, focused work, especially in the elusive extension category.

Last Wednesday, I was thrilled to clock in at 20 percent extension at the beginning of the appointment, meaning I only have a 20-degree bend in my arm when I try to straighten it like a normal human. After an hour of painful, frustrating exercises, I expected to break 20.

“Twenty-one,” my therapist said, turning away to write the number on my chart.

“What?” I said. “No! How is that possible?”

“You’re reaching your end point now,” my therapist said. “You know how to push your elbow as far as it will go. That’s a good thing. But now, we’ll see progress as gaining a degree or two week by week.”

As a runner, swimmer and skier, I’m familiar with how it feels to arrive at a plateau like this one, where progress becomes a game of inches or seconds rather than miles or minutes. It’s the difference between learning to ski as a beginner, when you can find yourself on intermediate slopes at the end of the day, and tinkering with your technique as an expert to address tricky, hidden bad habits. Or, it’s the difference between your first year of distance racing, when every event brings a PR, and racing several years into your “career,” when you wonder if you’ll ever break your own PR again. Either way, I recognize this fine-tuning stage as the place where the hard work really begins.

As a result, I’m refocusing my expectations, and reminding myself constantly that tiny improvements can lead to transformational outcomes. I’m trusting the process and doing the work I know will lead to long-term success. As always, I’m trying hard to develop patience.

In the meantime, I’m making sure to express gratitude for the gains I am making. This week, those gains included my first successful post-surgery swim! I tried to swim on the first day I was allowed to in mid-February, but ended up kicking for an hour instead after learning that my left arm simply didn’t work yet. Last week, I was thrilled to discover that I could manage about 500 yards of gentle freestyle, broken up by lots of kick sets—huge progress!

I also ran for the first time post-surgery. I’ve been allowed to run for weeks, but my doctor was correct in guessing that it “probably won’t feel very good.” But I felt stable enough on Friday to manage four half-mile repeats on the treadmill at 8:30-minute-mile pace (which felt like a sprint … sigh). Progress!

Whether I’m training for a PR or rehabbing an injury, as I am right now, I strongly believe in the motivational power of self-compassion. So you can imagine my delight when this TEDx talk from Kristin Neff, who I interviewed for Go easy on yourself: Cutting yourself a break once in a while can help you cut weight, turned up in my inbox just a few days after I broke my elbow. It’s worth a watch, no matter where you are in your training or rehabbing efforts.

Also motivating me this week: Continued progress in my efforts to rehab my recently repaired broken elbow. I can put my hair in a ponytail with ease, and I’ve eked out a few more degrees of flexion and extension in physical therapy.

My first swim last week was pretty demoralizing. I discovered that I can’t manage a single pull with my injured left arm yet—not in terms of strength, not in terms of mobility, not in terms of anything. So I tossed (OK, angrily threw) my goggles onto the pool deck and spent the next hour repeating a long kick set, feeling bad about my elbow. When I got out, the lifeguard stopped me and cheerfully said: “You’ve got incredible leg stamina! How many yards did you just get in?” It led to a lovely conversation in which he made me feel awesome about my efforts and encouraged me to keep up the good work with my elbow rehab. The whole encounter reminded me of The Human Scale, which Cheryl Strayed, the author of Wild, wrote for the advice column Dear Sugar. She writes:

“In your darkest hour you were held afloat by the human love that was given to you when you most needed it. … You learned that your idea of God as a possibly non-existent spirit man who may or may not hear your prayers and may or may not swoop in to save your ass when the going gets rough is a losing prospect. So it’s up to you to create a better one. A bigger one.  Which is really, almost always, something smaller.

What if you allowed your God to exist in the simple words of compassion others offer to you? What if faith is the way it feels to lay your hand on your daughter’s sacred body? What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through your window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway?”

Read the whole column about the rafts of human compassion that allow us to live through suffering here. What’s motivating you this week?

What a difference a week makes!

I went to the doctor for my first post-op appointment on Valentine’s Day, and got a present way better than flowers or candy: I got news that the titanium plate holding things together in my elbow is working beautifully, meaning I got to shed the monster splint I had been wearing since my surgery. I also got cleared to start occupational therapy, and to get back to some light activity, with the addition of swimming this Thursday.

I’m smiling because I’m about to shed my splint and sling.

You will be unsurprised to hear that after that appointment, I drove right to the gym and took a spin class, which felt better than anything I’d done all week.

I also got to start occupational therapy, which was both exciting and humbling. And, of course, painful. I could go the rest of my life without having to sit in another room full of therapy tools, trying to bring a sleeping muscle back to life. This time, it’s my triceps and biceps impeding my post-surgery recovery progress, and my lovely, kind therapist, who speaks with a thick Scottish brogue, sympathetically described the exercises that will help me regain my mobility as “murder.” He also said it’s almost impossible to do these exercises too much on my own, so I’ve been spending every waking minute flexing and extending my left arm as far as it will go, which means I spend a lot of time wincing and making strange little whimpering noises.

Giving me optimism is the wide range of stuff I can do again, which includes taking care of my basic needs without pain or struggle (I can almost manage a ponytail, which I now consider to be the holy grail of arm mobility and fine motor skills), taking spin classes, lifting with my legs, running (though it feels a little too jarring on my arm right now), and, as of Thursday, swimming.

Also giving me optimism is something my OT said during my initial appointment on Friday. In his list of questions about my pain level and daily life, he asked if I play sports or work out regularly. At the time, I was wearing my Bolder Boulder 10K “Sea level is for sissies” T-shirt, and carrying a water bottle with the National Ski Patrol logo on it. When I told him that yes, I play sports and work out to a level that may be described as obsessive, he replied this way: “Good. Athletes usually have the best outcomes. They’re motivated to do what they need to do to get better, and they know how to work hard.”

I still have a long way to go. But today, I’m full of hope that I can work toward that best outcome.

I’ve struggled at times to know how to approach this broken arm of mine.

It is a minor injury that was fixed with a quick surgery that will leave me with a super-strong forearm reinforced by titanium screws and plates. It is a grievous injury with a long recovery that has at times left me in the most severe pain I’ve known. It is a small thing compared to what we’ve been through over the past three years, during which we have lost three parents, Steve has deployed once, and I have suffered two other injuries with longer recoveries than this one. It is the straw that broke the camel’s back, considering all that has come before it, considering the fact that I’ve had three ski-season-ending surgeries in the past four years. It is all of these things. It is none of these things.

What I know for sure: For an athlete of any kind, an injury of the season-ending sort represents a loss. That’s what strikes me most when I read through all the comments from all the athletes who have responded to Motivational quotes for injured athletes, which is by far the most-read post I’ve ever written for this blog. An injury represents a loss of opportunity and a loss of a sense of identity and a loss of a source of strength and support. It takes away your confidence, your mojo and your standing Saturday-morning plans. And like any loss, it needs to be grieved and mourned and honored and reconciled before the griever can continue life as usual.

In the past, I’ve been a bit slow to realize this, and have pushed forward under a fake smile and some absurd justifications for why everything’s just fine (While limping through ski-patrol training after tearing my ACL in 2011: “It’s not cancer! No reason to get dramatic about it!”). The trick, though, is to find a way to mourn and grieve and honor your loss while also keeping it in perspective, and without going to the dark side. In other words, acknowledging that you are, in fact, going through something hard, and honoring your feelings of anger and fear and loss, while realizing that the correct response is not analysis or judgement but instead just self-compassion.

Wouldn’t everyone rather look at this post-op picture of Lindsey Vonn?

I don’t know why I broke my arm so badly, so randomly, after everything else. I don’t think it’s useful to ask this question right now. And I can’t quite bring myself to post photos of me smiling and giving a thumbs-up in a splint post-surgery. I’m instead going to share a few lessons I’ve learned about coping with injuries (if I haven’t learned a few lessons after three of these stupid surgeries, I don’t even know what to say for myself).

Accept yourself as you are right now. It helps me to remember that I’m not only rad when I’m skiing powder in Austria, but also when I’m reading a book on the couch. It’s also helpful to remind myself that it’s OK to feel sad and angry and a little bitter–that I’m not choosing to feel this way, but can choose how to respond to it.

Practice self-compassion. I’ve been a huge proponent of self-compassion–the act of talking to yourself gently during times of trouble, as you would to a friend–ever since writing Go easy on yourself: Cutting yourself a break once in a while can help you cut weight
for WeightWatchers.com’s men’s site last year. It’s a hugely helpful life skill that’s especially important during times like these.

Focus on recovery. Your doctor will give you instructions. These instructions, whether they are “PT three times a week for a month” or “Try not to move too much until you see me again,” are your new workouts. Treat them with the reverence you would a long run, or a difficult skiing drill, and believe that treating them this way will speed your recovery. For me, that means taking things very, very slowly until my first post-op doctor appointment later this week.

Do what you can. I feel lowest when my friends are skiing and I’m not. I feel highest when I’m thinking about the things I can do–such as swim, in just a few weeks, which sounds simply amazing to me right now. And though they were never my thing before this injury, I’m also looking forward to taking a few spin classes during my recovery. And of course, I’m taking some solace in the fact that can still work in the clinic or man the radio to stay involved with the ski patrol.

Connect with others who have coped with similar injuries. In 2010, after breaking my right wrist, I connected with Gary Anderson, who found this blog after suffering a nearly identical wrist break, wrist surgery and post-surgery recovery to mine around the same time. Anderson, also a runner, is race director of the Clifton Caboose 5K, and after months of commiserating about our injuries, we met at the race later that year. After tearing my ACL in 2011, I found it helpful to follow pro skier Michelle Parker’s recovery from the same injury. I’m looking forward to meeting others who have fractured olecranons and had open-reductions with internal fixations to fix them (Anyone out there break their elbow and get it put back together with a chunk of metal? Anyone?).

Posing with Gary Anderson post-race in 2010.

Surround yourself with positive reinforcements. I’m a big fan of quotes that nail the way I’d like to feel. Right now, these two from Mary Anne Radmacher are my favorites:

“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says, ‘I’ll try again tomorrow.’”

“Speak quietly to yourself and promise there will be better days. Whisper gently to yourself and provide assurance that you really are extending your best effort. Console your bruised and tender spirit with reminders of many other successes. Offer comfort in practical and tangible ways — as if you were encouraging your dearest friend. Recognize that on certain days, the greatest grace is that the day is over and you get to close your eyes. Tomorrow comes more brightly.”

Find out how others have coped. Here’s where you come in: What’s your best post-injury coping mechanism?