Joraaver Chahal

Making Sense of My Injuries: A Lesson in Humility

Last year, on this day, I had ACL surgery. My fourth surgery to date. My third surgery due to sport or physical training. My … I’ve lost count of the number of injuries. The last few years haven’t been pleasant for my body. I thought today would be an appropriate day to publish a reflection on my training, what I’ve been through, and what I’ve learned.

I’ve always been athletic. My twin and I never needed coaching to be the fastest sprinters on our soccer team. But who knew that a thumb fracture at eight years old would be only the start of a tortuous journey with injuries. Unbridled athleticism combined with naivete is a dangerous concoction. After all, I fractured my thumb because I knew that I might be able to reach the ball if I gave it my all. Understandably, I was asked why I attempted a dangerous last minute slide tackle at tryouts, when there was little at stake. What kind of eight year old makes these decisions? Now I understand that my decision making process never matured; I never paced myself and always tried to give each moment my all. It’s this black and white mentality that has literally brought me to my knees and kept me there for more times than I choose to remember.

As time passed the consequences of my injuries grew. As I pointed out, stubborn foolishness is a driving force in a lot of my injuries. But as I grew older, I knew that about myself, and yet I still got injured, so it clearly wasn’t the only force. So why, six years later, did I keep trying to play games with excruciating hip pain until an avulsion fracture kept me from playing at all? Many factors now come to mind. Fear of letting my team down by having to sit out . Not wanting to worry my parents with another injury (by the way, you don’t control that). Not wanting to be lectured again (they don’t want to lecture either, but fear, stress, and a mixture of emotions doesn’t help). Utter disbelief that my body kept breaking down whenever I wanted to excel. A torrent of feelings and questions that I didn’t know how to confront made playing through the pain the easiest option, until my hand was forced.

“Listen to your body” is cliched. It doesn’t address the root of the problem. The problem is the mind. The body is hurting, but what does the mind want to do? It wants to catastrophize. In the mind of a teenager, not playing for a season is world-ending, but stopping while you’re still physically able to play is equally world-ending. Playing through pain was never a question of “what might happen to me?” but rather “what will happen to the team without me?” I believe an honest conversation with an experienced coach could have realigned my perspective and helped me understand that staying healthy only benefits the team in the long run. Unfortunately resources like this are a premium. A lot of coaches are only dedicated parents. Most have no experience working in sports psychology. It’s not an easy solution, but in this age of increased focus on mental health, I see opportunities for this line of work. Remember, this only applies to self-inflicted injuries. Nobody knows what will happen in full-contact sports. My twin had fractured his ulna and the end of his tibia due to horrible fouls on the pitch. Nothing could have prevented that. But for the injuries that are preventable, the ones we do to ourselves, it’s a matter of letting go of what could have been and focusing on what still could be.

I say this because, while I could hold myself accountable, I’m not unique. I’m simply a statistic when it comes to the injuries suffered by teenagers in sports. Training strategies aside, if everyone could “check their ego” that easily, we wouldn’t have an issue. My story is only unique because I carried that poor mentality into college and beyond, until I had two major surgeries—a bicep tendon reattachment and an ACL repair—done within the span of a year.

The bicep tear was pure carelessness and immaturity. I used to train the back lever, a gymnastics exercise, with relative ease. After a session of Olympic lifts at a friend’s space, I saw a pair of rings and decided to jump on and try it. Three seconds into the exercise, I heard three snaps, dropped off the rings, and knew my bicep tendon had torn, likely clean off the bone. I was right. At this moment in time, I was almost done recovering from a rather painful battle with patellar tendonosis. It came about because I started playing football for two hours on Saturday, volleyball for three hours on Sunday, and soccer for an hour during the week. I just couldn’t say no, knowing how much value I would bring to people who asked me to play. Soon enough, I couldn’t play at all. I couldn’t walk up the stairs without pain. Fast forward thirteen months (four of those due to bed rest after my bicep surgery) and I was pain free. Unfortunately, on the day before my twenty-sixth birthday, in the nineteenth minute of a game I had vowed to play for only twenty minutes because I was still returning to proper fitness, I tore my ACL.

That was a miserable year.

Experienced sport practitioners know injury is not really a matter of “why” but of “when.” For all of the preparation, knowledge, and the precision with which we try to plan our growth, we are unable to fully prevent injury. Basic training relies on the principle that our muscles are healing from the micro tears of the previous training session. So rather than run from it, we do our best to keep it at bay, training cautiously to push our limits without exceeding them. Why do I say this now, after mouthing off about my litany of injuries? Because experience comes with mistakes. It takes a mental beating to think differently. You don’t know what it means to be helpless until you can’t get out of bed without asking for help, a shell of the person you once were. And when I got there, I asked myself, is it really worth it? Is witnessing the “beauty and strength” of which my body is capable really worth it, Socrates?

After my second surgery, a labrum repair for my left shoulder, I was cranky, irritable, and upset by how dependent I was on others. After my fourth surgery, my ACL repair, I was thankful to have such a caring family. I was mentally distraught for a day or two before getting back on the wagon. To me, that’s when you become an intermediate practitioner. The difference between me and the truly experienced practitioners is actual strength, realized through proper, methodical progression. It’s not enough to have experience. It’s the awareness, through a healthy reflection of the process without catastrophizing it, that allows us to try again, and try differently. To admit that you need a coach rather than believe you could be your own coach. I’ve watched friends, who as beginners my twin and I helped inspire and coach, greatly surpass me in strength levels because they were focused on one goal, checked their egos at the door, and in general displayed a level of maturity that I simply did not possess. They model how seasoned practitioners behave. I learn from them now.

Identity can make or break a person, and it takes time to reorganize ourselves in a way that enables us to grow while ensuring that we don’t completely collapse when we inevitably enter the rougher patches of our growth. To brazenly answer in Socrates’s stead, yes, it is worth it, if only one would take the time to realize the body’s potential.

I find writing about my injuries has helped mature my programming and development. I frequently journal, but these essays are a chance to formalize my thinking. Writing about training and injuries has been on my mind for quite a while, and I’m glad to have finally published my twist on it.

I hope to continue training for decades to come, and I hope to encounter injuries more and more infrequently.

Thank you Ting Wang for proofreading and editing this post.