The Road Back from Rotator Cuff Surgery: Racing Again

By Terry Laughlin

As I write this, it’s exactly four months since my surgery for a complete tear of my right rotator cuff,
the experience of which I’ve been describing in this space for the past eight months since my injury, while lifting weights, on Sept 30. The day after I was “scoped,” my surgeon told me to stay out of the pool for three months and to expect full recovery of my shoulder to take nine months to a year. As I’ve previously written I resumed swimming, with TI drills emphasizing range of motion without pressure, less than six weeks later, and was swimming full Masters practices, albeit well below my usual intensity, by the time those three months had elapsed.

I swam my first race, a 1650-yard free, at a Masters meet on May 20 in Ballston Spa NY. Despite having done just three weeks of gentle whole-stroke swimming at that point and only 600 yards of race-effort repeats (the evening before the meet) I still managed to swim a time of 21:30 for this mile-equivalent race, within three seconds of my best time from 2004. I was hugely encouraged by that, and by the fact that my shoulder felt great throughout the race.

I can’t say precisely the same for the rest of me. With just three weeks of full training in the previous 13 weeks – and virtually no race-intensity repeats since my injury eight months previously – I had to endure significant “oxygen deprivation” discomfort to swim the time I did. Because my conditioning was suspect I began the race at a very conservative pace, swimming the first 550 yards at 14 SPL and a time of 7:20. I increased to 15 SPL and a pace of 7:10 on the middle 550 and finished at 16 SPL and 7:00. The final 550 involved a good deal more pain than I usually experience in a mile race, but my time for it – which projects to a 21:00 pace for a full 1650 – was enormously encouraging. Even better, I felt no shoulder pain, though I could feel my catch slipping on the right as I increased my stroke tempo and pressure, an indication that my shoulder muscles were still weakened and deconditioned.

I returned to training with renewed optimism. Where three months earlier, I had despaired of being able to participate in the open water season, or at best might “race” gingerly and slowly, I was now looking forward to racing as well, or perhaps even better, than last year, which was my best open water season in 30 years. And the successful test of my shoulder – racing as hard as I could without so much as a twinge – gave me the confidence to ramp up my intensity in training.

On June 4, I swam my first open water race of 2005, a 5K in the ocean at Hilton Head SC. We swam on a 1000-meter course between two buoys, 50 meters from shore. The seas were moderately choppy as we started and got steadily rougher as the race progressed. Things smoothed out somewhat on the south-to-north leg, on which we had a following wind, but going north to south the sea felt like a washing machine. I fell into a group with two other men from about 2000 meters on. I enjoyed their fellowship so much – we chatted briefly and compared notes as we rounded each buoy – that once or twice on each leg I helped them set their bearings to hold a good line to the next buoy.

One, Joe Green of Hilton Head, pulled 25 meters ahead between 3500 and 4500 meters, but I caught him in the final 500 by pouring everything I had into “diagonal power” – slicing my hand forward on each entry with maximum hip drive drawn from a synchronized downbeat of the opposite foot. We swam shoulder to shoulder as we stroked through the surf to shore. But, at low tide we faced a long run through the shallows and up the beach and my right calf betrayed me by cramping. Still I limped to the finish line 10 seconds behind Joe, happy with a placing of 5th overall and 4th among men, far better than I'd have dreamed possible a few months earlier. Though my time of 1:35 was 23 minutes off my best 5K of last year, the very rough conditions account for most of that. The overall winner, a very fast 25-year old woman, was just 14 minutes ahead.

In the past week I’ve resumed training in the “sky lakes” on the Shawangunk Ridge. A spell of 80-degree days has raised their temperature to an unseasonably warm 70-plus and I’m ecstatically swimming two miles in Lake Awosting at 0600 most mornings. My stroke and shoulder feel so good that I’m not sure I can even describe what I’m doing as “rehab” anymore.
My next race will be the Mashpee Pond 5K June 25 on Cape Cod. Last year I swam the second fastest 5K of my life there, finishing in 1:12. I’m now thinking I might swim nearly as well this year. Read all about it in the next issue.

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