Author: The Injured Athletes Club

“I’m continuing to struggle months after my stress fracture is ‘healed’ with new pain areas and fearing it is a recurrence of the original injury. How do I mentally get over that hurdle?” —Liisa   “I’m currently in transition from return to function towards return to play and every little flare gives me the jitters,…

“That experience helped me to realize to cherish every relationship, to cherish your responsibilities, to cherish your opportunity when you have it, because it’s not guaranteed tomorrow. You can be the hardest-working player, you can do things right,  you can be a great person and all of those things—that does not guarantee that you will…

“While I am not a professional athlete, I am a chef who has gone from 1 hour intense daily workouts and working 10 to 14 hours a day to doing nothing. Exactly one month ago today I fully tore my pectoral major off my humerus while bench pressing. I am itching to finally have my…

“The greater lesson of this is that I’ve helped open the door—a lot of people have opened the door—to talk about what running on the other side looks like, or not running, what the other side of that looks like. You can still have a creative, active, badass life without pounding on your body, if…

“I had arthroscopic surgery for FAI/labral tear six years ago, and it’s been a long, slow road of recovery. I think my rehab program didn’t focus enough on building back strength and mobility before I progressed back to running, so I’ve dealt with a lot of lower body injuries from overcompensation and bad movement patterns…

“When you think about it, how often is your mind completely absorbed in the task in front of you? How often do you catch your mind wandering off task? Our brains, you know, they like to wander off. Mindfulness helps us bring it back, rein it in, back into this moment.”   When you’re injured,…

“What do you say to people after you get injured and their comment is ‘maybe your body is telling you something?’ This phrase irritates the heck out of me. Of course I’m always looking for something to be learned from an injury but how do they know what MY body is telling ME? I’m reading…

“I remember not knowing whether I was going to be able to race that day. I felt so emotional, I was crying. I had tears on my face and I was just thinking about just how weird the circumstances were, and just feeling how it was taken from Daniela, but it wasn’t from me.”  …

“I find it difficult to keep up with daily PT after all these years of rehab and feel like I let myself and my PT down in recent months. This is not the state I want to stop and I want to keep getting better, but the vision of that seems hard to see some…

“It’s so important to pay attention to how you are talking to yourself, because your words influence everything. So you really need to understand your self-talk and start to dive into it a little bit and know, OK, is the way I’m talking to myself right now—is that helping me or is that actually hurting…