Peyton Manning still can’t feel his fingertips. But he does feel like last year’s problems are behind him.
Manning told Peter King of TheMMQB.com that he still doesn’t have feeling in the fingertips of his right hand, after the 2011 surgeries to repair his neck problem.
“I can’t feel anything in my fingertips,” Manning said. “It’s crazy. I’ve talked to a doctor recently who said, Don’t count on the feeling coming back.
“It was hard for me for about two years, because one doctor told me I could wake up any morning and it might come back. So you wake up every day thinking, Today’s the day! Then it’s not.”
While that’s alarming, it’s also not completely unexpected. But his numbers haven’t necessarily dropped off, except for the last month of last season. Manning said those struggles were related to a stomach bug he picked up before a game at San Diego, which led to dehydration. That led to the quad problems that bothered him the rest of the year, and made him look like a guy who was reaching the end.
“I threw up all night,” he said. “Then, in the game, I moved to the right on a simple scramble and my quad cramped on me. It lingered. I couldn’t shake it the rest of the year.
“I really studied it hard this offseason, whether it could linger into this year or whether it was isolated. I just think I got dehydrated, and that caused it. I don’t think you can blame it on my age. It was just an isolated thing. I’ve made it through every other season, and this off-season I went through a state of the union physically, if you will, and I started training earlier and made some dietary changes.”
Approaching that process as thoroughly as he prepares for anything might help him know the issues. But he might not be able to account for the simple impact of age, which even he can’t control.