Facing an athletic injury dashed my sports dreams, but taught me how to move forward.
When I was 15 years old, I had one dream: to run track in college. I didn’t know then that the point of my dream wasn’t reaching that goal. It was confronting the obstacles along the way.
As a freshman, I joined the track team simply because my friends were on it, and I wanted to stay in shape for basketball. But after the first few weeks of practice, the coaches decided that I was fast enough to race varsity. I was hooked. I got faster each race, and I kept getting closer and closer to winning.
Toward the end of the season – in May – while running broken 400s in practice, my shoulder started to feel funny. My hand tingled, and then pain set in until I couldn’t move my arm.
Athletes deal with injuries all the time, whether it be in high school, college or the pros. Case in point: Michael Jordan’s “flu game” where he led the Chicago Bulls to win game 5 of the 1997 NBA finals while struggling with the virus. Pushing through to compete is a universal experience, whether it be in sports or in work.
After practice, I went home and didn’t think much about my shoulder pain. Running track would bring me aches every now and then, so I thought this would resolve by morning. It didn’t. The next day I went to urgent care and the doctor guessed it was a tweaked rotator cuff and with a few days of rest I should be fine. But when I started to compete again, the pain didn’t go away. Yet I still ran the conference meet and then sections.
The section meet was at Wayzata High School, which had a parking lot the size of my high school’s entire complex. I ran my race in front of thousands of people, and I was 10 seconds slower than usual because of the pain. In the 800m, that’s a lot of time. I came in last and was so slow that I got the pity cheers from the crowd.
Over the summer, nothing improved. I hoped rest would help, but it did nothing. Physical therapy didn’t help. When school started, my cross country coach didn’t let me compete. She kept me on a bike as I went through more physical therapy, different injections and nearly weekly doctor appointments.
.
One month into track practice, after continued rehab, I finally had the opportunity to race again. I ran my race and led for most of it. One of my friends caught me at the finish, and as I laid on the ground afterwards, I was euphoric. I had proven to myself that I wasn’t broken. I could still compete. Maybe I could build on it.
During the very next race, a 400m, the fire in my shoulder returned on the last 100m. That was the last race I ever competed in.
Accepting that I couldn’t compete anymore was the biggest challenge. For my entire childhood I was competing in sports, from track, basketball, soccer to MMA. I didn’t know where to put all my energy without that competition. In the 90-degree summers and frigid Minnesota winters, I was running outside to stay in shape, waiting for the time when the pain finally went away and I could compete again. But the pain stayed.
Career-ending injuries can cause a lot of physiological damage to athletes, not just physical damage. When you put so much time and energy into a sport, it becomes part of your identity. A career-ending injury yanks that out from under you, and suddenly you’re lost.
Research suggests three actions athletes can take to deal with such a loss. One is to find a hobby.
Eventually, I found an outlet for my energy, which was photography. It’s given me opportunities that I never would have dreamed of when I was still focused on competing in sports.
Another action is to cultivate a diversified friend group. Again, I was lucky with this one. My friends included people with a wide range of interests.
The final recommendation is to seek personal growth by reflecting on the experience. I have to admit, this is something I haven’t really done until now.
This essay is the first time in years that I have thought about my experience around having an injury like that. It’s something that I just try and ignore most of the time.
But now that I’m thinking about it, I realize the injury set me up to do what I love. Instead of running track in college, I’m now attending the University of Minnesota and studying journalism. The experience of competing through injury taught me how to persevere through the challenges this throws at me. Sometimes a source will bail on me. A deadline will move up. A story is harder than I thought.
Meanwhile, the pain in my shoulder is sometimes still there. It hasn’t physically stopped me from writing or working a camera, but it’s a reminder of when I had to stop doing something I loved. It’s also motivation to work harder at this new thing I love.. I want to be able to be successful at something again, like photojournalism, so that I can prove to myself that, even though I’m in pain every day, I have something that I can be proud of.