The tingle was familiar.
I lost focus during a deadlift, let my form go bad for one repetition, and felt it in my lower spine. It was not the full pain yet. It was the warning that the full pain would arrive within about a day.
This had happened a couple of times over the previous three or four years. I knew the sequence. The first sensation was small enough to leave room for denial. Then my back would tighten, mobility would disappear, and ordinary things would become complicated.
The warning was right. By the next day I was in a ton of pain and barely walking. I have a pretty good tolerance for pain, but functioning at work went from bad in the morning to impossible later in the day.
I was still trying to work. Reonomy had been my full-time job for only a couple of months. We were moving offices, hiring, and sorting out the product and engineering systems. My available strategy was to lie on a couch at the office, stay relatively immobile, and answer whatever I could.
That was not really working.
I sent a long message asking whether I could get a quick appointment or a better recommendation. I apologized for the length, which is funny because the message was mostly a detailed argument that I already knew exactly how badly this would go.
The injury was my fault in the plainest possible way. Deadlifting was not a surprise. My back history was not a surprise. I lost focus, used bad form, and felt the consequence immediately.
The larger problem had not landed yet. Lake Placid was close enough that I was already worried about the training. A back injury serious enough to make walking difficult was going to change more than one workweek.
For the moment I just needed to get through the day, get off the office couch, and find out how much mobility I could get back.