@Nomad:
My priorities changed. I went off to college, went to grad school, traveled, and had an all around amazing 20’s. You get back to your normal life and you get really busy and forget about LL and rehabbing to recover your lost abilities. Your day to day life is so normal you forget you can’t run a mile as fast as before or whatever. I was also told by a PA of my original surgeon that high impact activities might damage the lengthening mechanism of the Precice nails in my bones (this was 2014 and they really didn’t know), so I really didn’t want to be in a situation where they cut the bones and the nails didn’t work. Also I wasn’t on the forum or checking out advances in LL so until this year my knowledge of LL was stuck back in 2014 haha
Plus I had several different long term girlfriends that I lived with over those years and I was too embarrassed to any of them tell about my surgery. It’s not like I could just disappear from my girlfriend when we were living together and drop tens of thousands of dollars when I was broke in grad school to extend those nails the final inch.
When I was 27, I finally confided in the girl I was dating at the time about having the surgery. To my surprise she was extremely supportive and understanding. Then I started telling other people in my life and they were supportive too. Now that I am 29 and have a stable career, this fire has been reignited in me to get strong and in amazing shape again and really get the full amount out of life. Especially, with my work as a therapist listening to people talk about their regrets in life and never stepping out of their comfort zone to take chances.
Amazingly after not really running for like 7 years, I have probably recovered about 90+ percent of my athletic ability. Literally the first time I really sprinted a couple months ago, I almost fell down from lack of balance and now I would say I run short distances decently but am still improving rapidly. The body’s ability to heal is truly amazing. And of course I have to add even while I was abstaining from high impact activities, I was extremely active doing low impact things, and I had a background as a soldier in an elite combat unit, so I am sure the muscle memory was still there
Anyway long story short, that’s why it has taken so long to recover...