A long recovery isn’t a slow athlete. It’s a body doing serious work you can’t see.

Healing is active, and it is expensive. Bone laying down, tissue reorganising, a nervous system relearning a movement: all of that is labour, and none of it is visible from outside or even from inside. So a long recovery looks like nothing happening while it is actually the busiest your body has been in months. Measured against training, where effort is obvious, it reads as a gap.

Treat the dull parts as the work they are, and keep a log of whatever you can measure. Range of movement, repetitions, days without a setback. Reading last month’s numbers is the closest you get to seeing it.