COLUMBIA, South Carolina – As he prepared to compete in the second Elimination Round of the 2018 Challenge Select in Columbia, South Carolina, Lew’s p
The eight-time FLW winner arrived in South Carolina after a grueling week at the FLW event on the Potomac River. Rose, who started his year with historic back-to-back wins at Lake Guntersville and Lake Travis, had battled a nagging case of carpal tunnel syndrome in his right (casting) hand and arm all season long. He had managed Top 50 finishes at Lake Cumberland, Beaver Lake and the Mississippi River leading into the Potomac, but it all caught up to him on the Potomac.
Rose finished 107th, and struggled mightily with the basic physical mechanics of casting, reeling and setting a hook.
“My fingers were so numb that I couldn’t actually feel the line going out of my reel when I’d cast,” Rose admitted. “I didn’t have the ability to stop my reel with my thumb when I needed to because I just couldn’t feel anything. It got to where I had to actually look at my reel during the cast and mentally tell myself ‘Stop the spool!’ at the end of a cast.”
A visit to the emergency room in Maryland brought Rose little relief, and he arrived in Columbia resigned to a mentally and physically demanding Elimination Round, followed by a rigorous reassessment of his overall health and conditioning.
“I’ve always been an athlete and have thrived on natural good health and the basic conditioning I get from my active everyday lifestyle, but being an angler at 45, I feel like I can improve on a few things,” Rose said. “I don’t get as much sleep as I should – I’ve always survived just fine on five or six hours of sleep, but now I see that my body needs more rest. I feel like I have another 10 to 15 good years left in my mind, but that carpal tunnel forced me to think about things differently in my overall health. Stretching, diet, strength training, it made me set goals that I’d never really set before.”