Back to Swimming

This is Patrick taking the helm again at Melanie's request.

Natalie is finally back to swimming with her club team, as well as the neighborhood team. After the physical therapist asked me to get her swimming a few times before our appointment with the sports medicine doctor Wednesday morning, I was fairly certain that she would be getting back in the water again. I didn't know what the restrictions would be, or what the plan would be to get her back to swimming at the level she was before.

Natalie's relief and excitement showed up almost immediately in the form of her being her chatty self talking about whatever random topic popped into her mind (she was hungry and cold at the doctor's office). The doctor got a chuckle out of it as I tried to keep her focused.

It is strange to think that we are relieved to again be driving her back and forth to practices, but we are certainly happy with the change in her mood. Right now she can swim her neighborhood practices (and join the neighborhood meet on Saturday) but she has a number of restrictions on her club practices (and other swimming too).
First, no breaststroke until she is swimming 100% in practice for all 3 other strokes (butterfly, backstroke, and freestyle).
No Dry Land training until she is 100% in training on breaststroke.
She will start practices at 50% in terms of time/distance. This means she needs to swim hard in practice but will only do half of the normal practice to build up endurance and to make sure she doesn't re-injure anything. This will slowly increase over time.
We are hoping that in 3-4 weeks she will be swimming full practices as she was so many months ago before the injury occurred.

I guess this is a fairly short update, but we are all excited that Natalie is back in the pool--it is much harder for her to be grumpy at us when she is in the water.