Over the Edge, and Back

On Monday, a week ago, I felt a sharp pain in the thumb pad of my right hand when I pressed on the hand.  I was just starting my morning hand flexibility routine.  Sometimes a random pain will quickly go away, but this didn't.  Gently testing to see how localized the sensation was, I found that pressure on any part of the palm would cause the pain, so I modified my routine to give it a complete rest.

I can't pinpoint anything I had done in the previous day or two that would cause the pain.  It may have just been an accumulation of stress from my practice.  Whatever the cause, I had pushed too far over the edge.

Tuesday night the hand felt fine, but after doing a hand stand - which felt fine - it flared up again.  Oops, over the edge again.  Since then, I have avoided any major strain on it.  The past few days I have eased back in with some push ups and a yoga class.  The pain has not recurred, so I think I'm back on safe ground now.

The question for me is how to gradually move back toward my practice, including hand stands and back bends.  The difficulty is that I don't know where the edge is.  I don't know whether my hand will hurt until it does.  I wish the body came with a good warning system -- "Caution, if you do another hand stand, you will injure your hand," -- but it doesn't.

Over the years, I have been an off and on runner.  I enjoyed running, but eventually an arch, or an Achilles tendon, or a shin, or a knee or a hamstring would begin to hurt, and I would have to quit for a few weeks or months.  The longest recovery was from a bout of plantar fasciitis.  That took over 4 months.  The last couple of times I was intentionally being cautious about building mileage too fast, and was running 3 to 4 times a week instead of every day.  Eventually though, something gave way.  So I never figured out how to sense an injury coming and back off before it happened.

I hope that I'll have better results dealing with my hand. All I know to do is to be slow and cautious in rebuilding my practice, and to lay off at the first hint of the pain recurring.  When I was running, I would often push on even with discomfort, thinking that it would work itself out.  Sometimes, it did, but too many times it resulted in an injury that made me stop running for a while.

My intention now is to try to avoid an injury by not pushing to the edge.  But that can be difficult, as there isn't a clear sign marking where the edge is.  In the event that I go too far after all, I need to be aware, and prepared to back off at the first sign of trouble.