Grieving is an intense sorrow or despair in the absence of someone or something you love. An injury is every athlete’s biggest nightmare and an awkward conversation killer. Everyone fears it and once you live it you learn that there’s a whole journey in grief. A total of five steps, and yes – you experience it during injuries. In this short entry, I’ll take you through my newest addition of injuries I’d rather not have again – an Achilles injury.
Injuries are like angry, dooming full stops on an athlete’s journey. It’s hard to acknowledge them at first. You’re unstoppable. Invincible. You ignore the pain and barrel through it. Little can break you, yet your body has had enough and you blame it for failing you. You may try to deny that there’s anything wrong, but the X-rays tell another story. Facts in black and white. Your doctor is skeptical about you playing in a tournament, but they see you’re too stubborn to be stopped.
When you go to the tournament, it dawns on you that perhaps they’re right and a few physio sessions won’t do the trick. Painless walking is not the same as sprinting, and three days of ultimate frisbee can be a challenge even for a healthy athlete when played at 100%.
You play your first game and fail to catch an easy pass in the endzone. Even a graceless layout could do the trick but in the short decision-making window, you know you shouldn’t risk it. You realize the Achilles injury might be more than you gave it credit for. You wonder if it affects your ACL injury from a few years ago (strained, not torn!). During your second game, your teammates begin to question if you should be playing at all. At the same time, you know that if you don’t play there are just four female players left for the day at the outdoor tournament. You don’t want to fail anyone. After the game and a talk about an Achilles injury and the consequences of ignoring the pain, you’re sure you hurled yourself into some serious rehabilitation and pushed the recovery a few weeks back. Hopefully not months. Still, your sports life and tournaments you won’t attend, flash in front of your eyes in angry monochrome.
The science says that when you’re injured you enter the stage of grieving. It’s often compared to losing a loved one. You’re going through 5 stages (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) and sometimes it’s a merry-go-round of all five.
Truth be told, it feels like losing an important part of your identity and what defines you. Ultimate Frisbee shamelessly devours all of the available time that you’re willing to commit to it. When it’s gone you’re left with a gaping, raging hole. It’s hard to replace it with all the other hobbies. There’s something addicting about it and it’s hard to fuel it with the same serotonin rush you get whenever you’re chasing an airborne disc.
It’s hard to fill the space your team occupies, especially when you don’t live in the same city and don’t get to meet as often as before. At the same time, you have no guarantee when you’ll be back, and all your off-season plans were whipped off the board. The perspective is “a little bit” gloomy, to put it mildly.
Finally, you pick yourself up, ask for help, and listen to advice. It’s time to start from scratch, stop at first, and do absolutely nothing to let yourself heal. At this time, you try to eat healthy, drink lots of water, and progress with greenlit activities. You have your friend’s support and checkups before moving on to next goals.
But that’s not easy, and you’re jittery with all the energy with no release. You suddenly realize that adulting memes didn’t joke when your friends still need three months in advance to make plans with you, and when you finally have the time for dating, that backfires too. You live the life of Instagram dating reel memes. All of the important projects are on indefinite hold due to out-of-control circumstances, and you go too fast through all your hobbies to fill all the free time you have now. Training is still a mythical idea too absurd to explore. The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony“, SOAD’s “Lonely Day” and Linkin Park’s “What I’ve Done” become the soundtrack of your life.
One day, you are finally able to start doing slow jogs. They’re painful at first, and you keep spinning through all five stages of injury grief again. You give yourself credit for fighting for it, and you get encouragement from your teammates.
Maybe you can’t see the end goal. Perhaps you need checkpoints along the way. It could be run at a slow pace in the next three weeks. Then, after a month, a workout with bodyweight and then weights. Maybe ultimate frisbee training in a month or two? A tournament? Well, let’s see how the recovery goes.
In this whole journey, nothing is as bleak as it sounds. Even though you might feel bad about missing out on all the tournaments and invites to play, it’s not the end of the world. Let yourself grieve and let yourself work through the trauma. You realize that pushing through injuries, colds, and all the times you should have given yourself space were the breadcrumbs leading you up to this moment. Being stubborn and not listening to your body lead you to this. The solution seems so simple and absurd at the same time. It’s actually something that you have to learn while playing Ultimate. Just one more game, just one more point. It’s always that one more thing before it’s too late, and you’re left with another lesson and anger at yourself. Being stubborn can sometimes be good, but whenever your body gives you a signal to take a moment for yourself, drop out from that one tournament. The world doesn’t end there.
When you accept things as they are, it’s time for consistency, patience, self-care, and listening to your body. You need to give yourself the time and let your body heal; otherwise, you’ll be putting off the return to what you love most. Let yourself grieve. Let yourself be angry. Accept what happened and let that little warrior within you prove to yourself that with little time, you can overcome this obstacle and come back stronger.
