I’ve been getting some questions about how my knee is doing so I figured I’d do another little write-up about it. Let me start off by saying how stoked I am to be back on the water! All in all I feel like a million bucks and I am taking my time getting back to charging it again. Physically, I feel pretty good. I can ride cable and boat again and I am still working on getting my strength back up to 110%. I just need to be careful to not ride too much as my knee tends to get sore if I do. My PT tells me its because I had 3 surgeries during a short period of time so the joint capsule needs some time to recover and therefore gets irritated easily. Basically, I just need to be patient and keep building strength.
My biggest surprise coming back to wakeboarding was the mental aspect. I was sure I was going to feel frustrated of not riding at the same level as I was right before the injury straight of the bat and was sure that my level would be so low. I also thought I was going to be scared of wakeboarding and re-injury. Luckily this was so not the case!
As soon as I got back behind the boat I felt like it had only passed about 2 weeks since my last boat set. I feel like I could go out and do all the tricks I used to do again and the fear is almost none existent. (I think maybe going straight out of Rehab to the O’Neill Hit the Road winch trip without a knee-brace might have helped with that haha). The only part about boat riding I’m not comfortable with yet is landing in the flats as I don’t have the same strength as before. I’ve been taking my time working on building the strength back before getting back into trying my more advanced tricks but in my mind, they feel just like before. I guess we will see in a couple of weeks 😉
I’ve had days behind the boat where I got a bit frustrated and felt like things were never going to work out. I guess this is just natural, I’m only human. One day after a bad set and getting mad at JB for no reason I went home, had some food and went to sleep. I was back to normal again and the next day I had the best set yet. I’m heading back to Sweden in a few days to ride my first contest back: the Swedish Nationals. I’ll keep you posted on how I go 🙂