Russell Wilson said he worked nearly around the clock to ‘break records’ in his rehab and return to Seahawks

RENTON — Mr. Unlimited might be able to live up to that self-given nickname Sunday when the Seahawks play the Packers in Green Bay.

Five weeks after he suffered a dislocation and ruptured tendon in his right middle finger, Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson took the podium at the VMAC on Thursday and pronounced himself as almost fully recovered.

“I feel great,” Wilson said, in what were his first comments to the media since his injury. “I feel really close. I’m not 100 percent yet, but I’m pretty dang close. I would say in the 90 percentile if not higher. I feel great. I’ve got great conviction about what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. My mindset is better than ever, ready to roll and ready to go.”

An hour or so after he made that comment, Wilson was in pads and practicing as usual, taking another step toward returning to play Sunday at Lambeau Field.

The team will have to make a move by Saturday to get him back on the 53-man roster. But that seems like a formality at this point.

“It looks great,” Seahawks offensive coordinator Shane Waldron said after Thursday’s practice of Wilson’s passing. “It’s like anything else; he’s coming back into his rhythm. But he’s been making all of the throws and had done a great job of doing it today. Each day has been better than the one before, so he’s been great.”

Assuming Wilson takes the first snap Sunday it will have been 38 days since his injury, about as quick as anybody could have expected after he suffered the injury Oct. 7 in the third quarter against the Rams when he smashed his finger into the arm of LA defensive lineman Aaron Donald while following through on a pass.

Wilson said he initially did not think the injury was as bad as it turned out to be, one reason he stayed in the game for one more series before going to the sideline.

“At first I just thought it was just dislocated,’’ Wilson said. “So I tried to put it back in place; we tried to put it back in place. It didn’t go and then I was like, ‘Eff it, I’m gonna go back out there and try to see if we can keep going with it.’ And then threw another pass, I think I played another couple plays or whatever, and then kind of just trying to figure it out cause I was trying to figure out what was going on.’’

As Wilson explained it Thursday, he suffered not only the tendon injury, or Mallet finger — an injury to the thin tendon that straightens the end joint — but also a dislocation and what he said were also two little fractures.

Wilson said he got “four or five” different opinions before deciding on surgery Oct. 8.

“I said, ‘All right, let’s do this,’’’ he said. “I prayed about it, then next thing I know, I woke up out of it, and I felt like I had a new finger. My finger was straight, it wasn’t crooked and going left to right anymore.”

Wilson said that he was told it would be a six- to eight-week recovery following surgery, but that he set a goal to “cut that in half.”

That required working almost round-the-clock with a team of physicians and trainers.

“We probably spent 19 or 20 hours a day working on this hand, trying to break records with this thing,’’ Wilson said. “It was a pretty severe injury in the sense of how many things happened. I think for me, my whole mindset was to cut the time in half, and that has been my mindset since the moment that it happened.”

His plan included attention-getting workouts on the field before each of the three games he was forced to miss. In each, Wilson ran plays by himself without a ball, conducting two-minute drives up and down the field.

“Yeah, that was a big part for me, because I have always believed that if you want to be great at anything, no matter what the circumstances are, no matter what is surrounding you, you have to do what it takes to be great,” Wilson said. “I think a lot of people choose not to, because it’s the easy way. It may not be the cool thing, but when you love winning and the process of it all, you will do whatever it takes.’’

Once the games started, Wilson was forced to retreat to the sidelines. He stayed busy, going out to midfield for coin tosses, and wearing ear devices to hear the plays and talking to coaches and teammates throughout, giving particular guidance to his replacement, Geno Smith.

They were the first games he missed since his freshman year in 2008 at North Carolina State and snapped a streak of 149 straight regular-season starts in the NFL and 165 overall.

Wilson admitted losing the streak was a big deal.

“The first game (at Pittsburgh) was the hardest game, because I had a goal in my head to play the most consecutive games ever,’’ he said, an apparent reference to Brett Favre’s record streak of 297 consecutive starts. “But sometimes things change, life changes and things happen.”

But his spirits were buoyed by the recovery progressing as hoped. A key moment came Nov. 1 when he had the pin removed at the beginning of the team’s bye week.

“Really, the bye week was perfect timing for me to simply go into a shell,” he said, with the bye also meaning he will likely end up missing only three games instead of potentially four.

He began a throwing program almost immediately, which led to Monday and his return to the practice field, and to now almost certainly being back again quarterbacking the Seahawks on Sunday in Green Bay.

“The thing in rehab, just in the general process, has been to take the next step, the next breath,” he said. “That’s been a cool journey.”