Bad news of any capacity triggers a “fight or flight” response in us, flooding the brain with a number of chemicals designed to fill you with a desperate need to flee the situation – because that is not a space that our helpful little brains want us to be.
To any athlete focused on their sporting endeavours, bad news is a regular guest; we’re accustomed to gritting our teeth and welcoming it across the threshold – a bombed race, a session plan unfulfilled, injury, sickness, or simply not performing to full capability. A situation fewer athletes are faced with is one in which they are completely unable to continue in their chosen sport. Needless to say when presented with this news, the fight or flight chemicals flooded in – and I fled.
It was winter in Australia, following the most successful season of my 12-year rowing career. But, despite the highlight reel I sent to my parents, my body was falling apart. I was regularly going completely numb on the left side of my body, rendering me virtually useless following erg tests and races. My heart rate and blood pressure were committing acts most acrobats wouldn’t dare dream of, and I was a complete insomniac – not the most ideal base for an athlete training for 20-odd hours a week. After months of MRI’s, emergency room presentations, and psychological examinations, my neurologist and cardiologist together decided that rather than continuing down a path of treating things carefully, they were going to throw me in the deep end – a VO2 max test.
So, I maxed. I maxed the only way I know how to max as an athlete, and came back to consciousness on the floor of the hospital, having collapsed on one of the perplexed nurses next to me. There are many places in this world where your heart rate plummeting in a vasovagal syncope is met with concern, and a cardiac clinic is certainly closer to the top of that list than it is the bottom. In the middle of my hazy vision, I was all too aware that with the crowded room around me, I was an extraordinarily popular hospital guest who desperately wanted to be anywhere else. Three days later, I answered the phone call asking me to return to the clinic to discuss my results – and my fight or flight response laced her shoes on.
My cardiologist gently explained that my respiratory system dragged its last breath in an extraordinarily long time before my body stopped moving – meaning I was pushing to continue in my brain, but my body was no longer part of the battle plan. It was rendered unsafe for me to continue in a sport where an intensive workload was required from my body, especially in one where I coaxed it to continue for 20 hours a week. It took one sentence from my cardiologist for my world to shift off its axis – and I desperately tried to re-centre it.
I questioned. I begged. I pleaded. I sought alternatives, and was told to potentially try long distance, slow-twitch events as long as I wasn’t too concerned with the finishing time (or even finishing at all). Completing a race as fast as possible simply couldn’t be my prerogative, and for a rower who defined everything on their bowball crossing the line first, reality struck hard.
My fight or flight kicked in shortly thereafter, and the following two years were spent flying as far as possible away from that reality. I signed up for a marathon, unsure of who I was outside of sports. I applied for jobs and quit them after mere months, never feeling as fulfilled as I did when I was racing. I consistently went from goal to goal that I never really wanted to achieve, all to try and fill a void that my sport created. Needless to say, my efforts to escape were unsuccessful, and eventually my fight or flight response could no longer fly – it was time to fight.
To any athlete in this same boat, the fight will come. I couldn’t give more hypocritical advice than to “start processing straight away” because it’s on a foreign plane to my lived experience. Allow yourself the time to flee, and when you’re ready (or you simply cannot flee anymore), fight. Speak to everyone you comfortably can, grieve, and fight your way through. It’s a tough, non-linear, and brutal journey of finding out who you are without the sport previously used as your definitive reason “why”.
During this journey, however, you have the privilege of discovering you’re so exceptionally grateful for the fight itself. I continuously find a deeper appreciation for those finish lines crossed (whether in victory or defeat), the personal best erg times I gave my all for, the feeling of a gold medal being placed around my neck, and most of all, the best friends I got to experience the highest highs, and the lowest lows with. For something to hold so much pain in saying goodbye, existing in it in the first place makes it one of the most fortunate pains I’ve ever experienced.
Truth be told, I’m not there yet. I’m a little unsure where there is, but I don’t feel comfortable admitting that I’m on the other side of this fight. The days that I wake up exceptionally angry that the world took away my sport are fewer and further in between, but they do still invite sunrise onto them. I’m teaching myself how to hold onto a recognition for myself, for what my body did for me then, and for what my body allows me to do now.
That understanding of how appreciative I am to have experienced every second of my rowing career makes the fight worth it every time my instinct tells me to fly.
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