The performance of resilience
Athletes are conditioned early to treat injury as a test of character. We’re taught to push through, to stay tough, to recover quietly and gratefully. If we can’t compete, we’re expected to at least perform resilience – to carry injury with dignity, composure, and optimism. And while injury can teach patience and perspective, the expectation that every setback must become a neat story of growth leaves little room for the messier truth.
Injury isn’t just physical. It fractures routine, identity, and belonging. When recovery doesn’t follow a clean upward curve, the cracks begin to show.
In that space, emotional honesty is often the first thing to go, and that’s where something important gets lost.
You’re allowed to be upset
You’re allowed to be upset by it. Injury doesn’t just interrupt training – it interrupts plans, identity, and momentum. And yet sport culture often treats frustration or sadness as a lack of toughness, something to be managed privately or overcome quickly. There’s an unspoken expectation that you should be grateful just to still be involved, that disappointment is indulgent.
However, being upset shouldn’t be mistaken for weakness. It’s a reasonable response to losing something you cared about. Especially when training once structured your days and helped regulate your mood. Reduced training doesn’t just mean less fitness: it means fewer endorphins, less release, and less emotional buffering. Feeling low or frustrated in that space isn’t a mindset problem, it’s human.
You don’t have to minimise that loss to prove you’re resilient.
That expectation to stay composed lives inside the smallest, most well-meaning comments.
“You’re handling It so well”
I keep being told this. I know it is meant as reassurance but, often, it lands as a full stop rather than a sentence-opener. It assumes strength where there may actually be exhaustion, grief, or fear. It praises composure instead of inviting honesty.
What it rarely leaves space for is the quieter reality: the grief of being sidelined, the isolation of being forgotten while the season carries on, the anxiety of wondering whether you’ll ever return to where you were. There’s pressure to slot back in seamlessly, as if nothing happened – and shame when you can’t.
These feelings don’t fit the glossy narrative of triumph-over-adversity, so they’re left unspoken. If praise shuts conversations down, then perhaps support needs to look very different.
Rethinking what support looks like
Real support doesn’t start with compliments, it starts with listening. Instead of “you’re handling it so well,” what if we asked: “How are you really doing?” or “What do you need right now?”
In sport, that might mean checking in on injured teammates even when they’re no longer training. Making sure they don’t feel cut off from the group, welcoming their presence rather than scrutinising it.
At the end of the day, you’re still showing up regardless of whether you’re injured or not – regardless of the pain, regardless of the mental toll a long-term injury can take, regardless of what grief you’re being given by those around you. You’re still there.
In everyday life, it might be as simple as a message, an invitation, or a reminder that someone hasn’t disappeared just because they’re not performing.
Sometimes, a small gesture is enough to break the quiet isolation that so often accompanies injury but, when support is conditional on performance, the cost of speaking up becomes high.
When “how much do you want it?” becomes a threat
During my injury, at the coaches request, I stayed in training far longer than I should have. You’ve got a good seat. You don’t want to lose it now. Think about your crew.
Every request for rest can feel like a negotiation. Asking for 1-2 days to try and calm the inflammation. Even a negotiated lighter session felt like a failure of commitment. I saw my UT2 bike splits go from sub 2 to 2:15 and above within days. My rib twinged constantly. I taped it. I saw physios. I carried hot water bottles not just at night, but to uni, on the buses before training. I was trying to control all the variables I could in order to continue. There was no single breaking point – just a slow erosion of choice.
“How much do you want it?” stopped being a question and started becoming a guilt mechanism.
That pressure is amplified when the injury itself is invisible.
The burden of an invisible injury
Rib injuries don’t announce themselves. There’s no cast, no crutches, no obvious marker of pain, so you begin to feel like you have to justify it – to explain, defend, prove that it’s real.
You shouldn’t have to second-guess your own injury. Early into university rowing, I remember a key quote I keep coming back to, “You’ve been rowing long enough to be able to tell when you can and can’t do something – you know your body better than anyone.” When pain can’t be seen, it’s easier for others to minimise it and easier for you to doubt yourself.
Over time, that constant self-advocacy takes a serious toll.
Medical burnout: when advocacy becomes exhausting
After over ten months of advocating for myself, appointments, continuous constant pain, the expectation to keep going, pressure to slot back in asap – I felt worn down, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally.
Pain → seek help → not taken seriously → pressure to return → more stress → still in pain.
That cycle drains you. It’s okay to admit that you’re burnt out from chasing answers. Stepping back for a short while isn’t giving up – it’s protecting your mental energy. Chronic stress amplifies pain, and sometimes the most responsible thing you can do is stop fighting for a moment.
You don’t have to bend yourself backwards just to prove you’re being proactive about your rehabbing, especially when pain management itself starts to feel dangerous.
When painkillers become a coping strategy
Long-term injury slowly distorts what feels normal. What starts as medication to take the edge off pain can become something you rely on just to get through the day – to sit in lectures, to sleep, to show up to training, to appear functional.
At first, it feels responsible. You’re managing pain so you can keep going. You’re doing what’s expected. But over time, the line between pain management and dependence begins to blur. Relief becomes less about healing and more about survival. Reliance to get you through the sessions, the days.
In sport, this slide often goes unnoticed – or unchallenged- because it aligns with productivity. If you’re still training, still available, still filling a seat, then the method doesn’t matter as much as the output. The question isn’t “are you okay?” but “can you still perform?”
When intervention becomes necessary, it’s sobering. It was sobering. Not because pain relief failed – but because the system allowed things to reach that point. Painkillers shouldn’t be the price of belonging. Yet in high-performance environments, they can quietly become the cost of staying useful.
This part of injury is rarely spoken about because it disrupts the narrative of toughness. It exposes how easily athlete welfare slips behind results when pain can be chemically managed.
This is rarely talked about in sport. But it should be.
Because at the end of the day, the longer injury drags on, the more it takes from you.
Loss of identity and motivation
Rowing wasn’t just something I did casually, my daily routine and plans entirely revolved around it. Injury didn’t only stop me training, it disrupted my routine, my sense of purpose, and where I felt I belonged. Training has been my social life, my structure, my way of measuring progress. You don’t have to be exceptional at something for it to matter, you just have to care about it.
In rowing, the pattern is familiar. Winter is hard and repetitive: indoor sessions, ergs, getting through floods and dark mornings; you put up with it because summer racing is the reward. I got through the winter and did the work, but then I wasn’t able to race. The season moved on without me, and the effort suddenly felt disconnected from any outcome.
The hardest thing was waking up and realising that the routine I’d built my life around was gone. No sessions to plan the day around, no clear next step, just time where something used to be. When the payoff disappears, so does a lot of the motivation, not to mention when it becomes clear how easily you can be replaced.
Reduced to a number
The only person who reached out in the duration of that injury wasn’t to ask if I was okay, it was to ask me to come back for a race, simply to make up the numbers.
There’s a strange feeling of utter humiliation in that moment. The quiet urge to justify yourself, to reassure people you weren’t always like this, to say, half-jokingly, “I was a good athlete, I swear”, as if past commitment might still earn you credibility.
That moment clarified something uncomfortable: in this system, care is entirely conditional. My welfare mattered only insofar as it preserves capacity. Support is offered when it maintains performance, withdrawn when it doesn’t. When you can no longer contribute, you become administratively invisible until you’re needed again.
This is the quiet logic of transactional sport culture. Athletes aren’t supported as people with bodies that break; they’re managed as resources whose value fluctuates with usefulness. Injury doesn’t just sideline you physically, it temporarily suspends your worth.
In that framework, painkillers make sense. Staying in despite injury makes sense. Silence makes sense. The system doesn’t reward honesty, it rewards availability. I wasn’t valued for my wellbeing. I was valued for my seat.
That realisation forces a reckoning.
From welfare to worth: what the system prioritises
Taken together – the pressure to stay in, the normalisation of pain management, the absence of genuine check-ins – a pattern emerges. Athlete welfare is framed as an individual responsibility rather than a collective one. You’re expected to self-manage pain, advocate endlessly for care, and absorb the emotional cost quietly.
Support, when it exists, is often instrumental. It asks: “Can you still train? Can you still race? Can you still deliver?”
Rarely does it ask: “Are you safe? Are you supported? Are you okay?”
I remember as a junior, one coach commenting on the only time you should miss or not train was if you’d broken your arms or legs, otherwise it was just an excuse. Though this isn’t about one coach or one team, it’s about a culture that confuses endurance with health and commitment with self-erasure, where care is reactive rather than preventative, and where athletes learn quickly, being honest about pain risks being perceived as difficult, replaceable, or weak.
A welfare-first culture would look different. It would treat rest as responsible, not indulgent. It would protect athletes even when they’re temporarily of no use competitively. It would understand that long-term performance depends on long-term care.
Until then, resilience will continue to be performed rather than supported.
The people who kept me going
In all honesty, I think injury might have and has been my lowest point. It’s incredibly isolating. At the end of the day, what has carried me through wasn’t rowing. It was the little things that reminded me the world didn’t end at the boathouse: friends back home, my boyfriend, housemates this year, dog walks that got me outside, checking up with genuine care, messages and calls that didn’t demand updates, Strava stats or splits.
This is for them. The ones who pulled me out of the house when I couldn’t move myself, who reminded me that life and connection exist beyond training. Their support was quiet, persistent, and absolutely lifesaving.
After giving so much to the sport, it was startling to see how narrow my life had become. Scrolling through social media, watching friends at dinners, trips, and ordinary moments of joy – while my own feed was just rowing – the contrast was there.
It was in that contrast, that gentle insistence of care, that I found the strength to keep going, even as others began questioning my persistence.
“Maybe it’s time to call it a day”
Being asked if it’s time to stop at 21 does strange things to your sense of perspective. It’s not quite a career, but it’s apparently long enough to be over.
I was asked recently whether it might be time to stop. To call it a day. It sounds practical, even caring. But it carries an unspoken suggestion: that prolonged injury is a personal failure, that if you really wanted it badly enough, your body would have cooperated by now.
When athletes are told to “call it a day,” it’s rarely about how much they’ve already given. It’s about whether they’re still useful. Whether the system can move more smoothly without them. Walking away in that context isn’t weakness; it’s often the last boundary left. And yet sport leaves little room for that truth, because quitting is framed as failure, regardless of cost.
Maybe one day I will stop. But if I do, it won’t be because I didn’t want it enough. It will be because care mattered more than proving endurance.
Choosing this on my own terms
At some point, the question stopped being whether I was still doing enough, and became who I was doing this for.
I’m still here, but not to prove anything to anyone. Not to justify pain, or earn my place, or demonstrate toughness. I’m here because I choose to be. And if I leave, it will be on my terms, not because I was worn down, or guilted out, or made to feel expendable.
Sport teaches you that staying is strength and leaving is failure. But there’s a quieter strength in deciding when something no longer deserves unlimited access to your body or your wellbeing. That choice doesn’t erase what this meant to me, it honours it, and it reminds me that commitment isn’t measured by how much you’re willing to endure, but by knowing when care has to come first.
There is strength in vulnerability
Perhaps real resilience isn’t about enduring quietly. It’s about telling the truth. Injuries will always exist in sport. But if we learn to value honesty alongside perseverance, we can shift the culture around recovery. “Handling it well” shouldn’t mean staying silent. It should mean being given space: to struggle, to heal, to exist fully.
Sometimes, the simplest act of checking in is enough to remind someone they’re still here, still human, and still enough.
