Learning Lessons

Here I sit, very late at night, in a race against my laptop battery to write a bit of a blog. Let's see how this goes. If it suddenly stops you know what happened.

Why so late? Well mostly because of that reason I wrote yesterday, I have a lot of coaching to do this weekend and I am trying to get through it. A bit of a dent today, but more to go.

On the coaching side of things, a bit of a sad occurrence today where an athlete had to pause their training to get over an injury. The injury was a pre-existing one that they thought was nearly healed but apparently wasn't. As a result they have unfortunately needed to take a break, even though they have only really just started. Sad, but these things do happen as I know from personal experience.

It was interesting talking to the athlete today because the process they had been through was such a familiar one. I have been through and I suspect many other athletes have too.

They had a niggle and told themselves it was nothing. They kept training until the niggle was too significant to ignore. Once they could no longer ignore their niggle the saw a doctor. The doctor told them what to do, but in proper athlete fashion they only followed some of the doctors advice. Pushing just a bit harder, for a bit longer.

Of course pushing above the Doctor's orders had a fairly predictable outcome and that is that the injury continued to get worse until it has sidelined the athlete all together.

As I have said, I completely understand the mentality that most athletes have or ignoring a niggle. Sometimes they really do go away and so that encourages us ignore them all the time in the hope that they will sort themselves out. The other reason athletes ignore niggles is just through pure denial, 'if I ignore this thing then it means I don't have to stop'.

However, ignoring injuries rarely ends well. Similarly ignoring, or only partially following the advice of medical professionals usually has a predictable outcome. It is a lesson that athletes all have to learn, some learn it the hard way and some learn it the easy way.

I would strongly suggest learning it the easy way, it saves a lot of pain and heartache in the long run.