The Art of Being Broken: An Athlete's Guide to Injury

Currently I’m writing this with a torn calf and an inflamed elbow bursa—the result of what I'd call compensatory stupidity. Unable to run, I fed my addiction with an overdose of gym. The irony wasn't lost on me: trying to fix one broken thing by breaking another.

The Emotional Battlefield Injury doesn't just break your body—it messes with your sense of self. You go from being someone who moves through the world with purpose and power to feeling like a caged lion, pacing restlessly in a body that reminds you: time has not stood still. The mental anguish generally exceeds the physical pain.

There's a particular kind of torture in watching other athletes do what you desperately want to do while you're relegated to the sidelines, swimming in a bittersweet cocktail with a dash of envy and frustration.

The Emotional Cycle

There's a predictable emotional pattern that unfolds with every injury. First comes denial—that phase where you convince yourself it's just a "niggle" and test it 17 times between getting up and making it to the breakfast table, each time hoping for a different result.

Then anger hits like a freight train. This is where I currently reside, furious at my letting it get this far… again. The anger stage can be useful—it's raw energy you can channel into recovery if you're disciplined about it.

Bargaining follows: negotiating with your injury, physio and doctor. As Albert, my physio always said- 3 out of 10 max pain. This is often what separates smart recovery from extended suffering and easier to do, the further the next event is away.

The low phase is the hardest. Every time I catastrophically underestimate healing time. A simple muscle strain takes at least four weeks to heal properly but can easily be more. Broken bones? 6 weeks (weirdly it’s my favourite injury because it generally has such a definitive time line). Plus the hours of rehab make the days feel like they only have 12 hours.

Finally, the high. The first run feeling pain free for me is such a joy filled adrenaline theatre, I wish I could bottle it and carry it with me, like the magic potion of Asterix and Obelix.

Finding Purpose in the Pause

The hardest part isn't the physical limitation—it's the identity crisis. You're forced to confront who you are when you strip away the thing that's defined you. The restlessness is overwhelming, like having infinite energy with nowhere to direct it. But injury teaches patience in a way that no amount of base training can. It forces you to listen to your body with the attention you usually reserve for power meters. Sometimes the most important training happens when you're forced to be still.

The truth about coming back stronger is an interesting one, hard to quantify. A break of several weeks should throw you back, but in reality endurance athletes are often over trained and being forced to recover can actually help, in some way.

Yet mentally is where the iron is forged. The way to come back stronger for me was waking up every day and choosing to believe that this setback is temporary, that I will return not despite what happened, but because of it. In the space between what happened and what you do about it, defiance lives. It’s not the injury that defines you but your response to it. That's the moment when an athlete crosses from victim to warrior. It's not denial—it's defiance. A conscious choice to meet catastrophe with contempt rather than surrender.

In the end no one said it better than the man himself, Kobe Bryant: If you see me in a fight with a bear, pray for the bear.

The Professional Paradox

For twenty years as a professional athlete, injury was existential threat—every setback meant missed races, lost prize money, journalists asking uncomfortable questions. The urgency was real and unforgiving. My livelihood depended on your ability to bounce back quickly, to push through pain that would sideline most people.

Now, in this new chapter, I find myself calmer about these setbacks. The financial pressure is gone, the career implications less severe. There's a strange relief in knowing that a torn calf won't derail a world championship campaign or disappoint a team that's invested everything in my fitness.

Yet somehow, I still can't fully let it go. The emotional response remains disproportionate to the actual stakes. Maybe it's muscle memory—decades of treating every physical limitation as a crisis. Or maybe it's something deeper: the uncomfortable realization that even when the professional pressure disappears, the athlete's soul still rages against any constraint on movement, any reminder of mortality.

That’s all for this week…

I hope you enjoyed this weeks edition with a fine cup of coffee. Until the next…

Jan.

Get weekly dispatches from the raw, honest work of building something new from the pieces of what came before.