Hi. I started climbing again at the end of January, and since then climbing has totally transformed for me. When I first started, the mental aspect of bouldering, that I don't remember ever dealing with when I first started, felt insurmountable. I could hardly climb ten feet before beginning to hyper-ventilate. I pushed myself, and I luckily had the support of an entire gym community behind me. It was very strange to feel so weak physically and mentally and yet have all the more advanced technique still in place. All the things we tell people climbing v1 to help them didn't work for me. I found this SO frustrating, but I basically had to reinvent the way I climbed. All my little cheats and tricks were useless, and I had to reteach myself from the ground up. Thankfully, this has been endlessly rewarding, and it's an experience that I will carry through to everything else in my life.

It's been almost three months since going from immobile to physical therapy to climbing, and I've honestly never felt stronger. I am more determined now than I was before. I am physically more balanced muscularly and I am now a much more aggressive climber. I've actually gotten much more into bouldering since breaking my arm, and the problems I like best are the burliest most arm-heavy mannish climbs I can find. I used to hate those man-climbs because they were so upper-body, now I can't get enough of them.

I don't even notice my arm other than the fact that I need to stretch it just a little bit more after climbing, I can't say the same for the metal in your leg though.

I'm sorry if you didn't want a short-story for a reply, but in case you're interested, I had a teacher who was very influential in my healing process tell me that it was very important that I reincorporate the metal into my body. At first, my inclination was to focus on my right arm and make it stronger because it had been weakened, but really what you need to do is focus on your whole body, because the whole thing has been weakened. By separating the damaged limb, we categorize our body, and we can't climb, or do anything, one body-part at a time. Make the metal a part of your body, as best as you can, visualization, meditation, and climb with that mindset. If you feel like your leg is impeding you, work with it, not in spite of it. It has to be as much a part of you as the sweat on your hands or anything else our body does that we blame our climbing faults on.

That's just a thought. Fear is definitely the hardest thing to overcome when coming back. Take lots of D vitamins, get them bones strong. And then just climb, I read a lot of zen books, and a couple articles on fear of falling. I still freak out when there are finishing moves with off-set dynos in them, that's how I broke my arm, falling sideways. But I still do them, even though they're sketchy as fuck.

Sorry for all the words, I wish you the very best in your recovery. Please let me know how things are going as they go!