Doctors Don’t Have Answers For You

We’ve dealt with some health concerns in the household over the last few weeks. Along the way, I realized how bizarre a 34 year-old athlete is to the medical establishment. If you’re still in sport after college and you’re not a professional, you defy every bit of statistics that a doctor has to reference.

Consider this: the vast majority of adults in the United States don’t meet the recommended daily allowance for exercise which is little more than 30 minutes of walking each day plus a low dose of resistance exercise each week. Walking up stairs is included in that resistance exercise recommendation…so sports performance training on the field or in the gym is strange stuff.

If you choose to lace up your cleats or to grab your implement, then go out to compete once a month, you’re already special.

If you choose to throw on running shoes or to grab your lifting boots, then drive to the gym every day to do work that’s specific to performing in your sport, then you don’t exist on the bell curve anymore.

This investment of time and energy and effort that you’re making in yourself to be better at something doesn’t produce any material rewards. If I win the hurdle race at an all-comers track meet, I might get a cool photo from the race. If I set a facility record, I might win a t-shirt. My competitors might give me high fives. But I will walk out of that arena with nothing tangible to reflect the volume of work I did to get to that point.

I will have both the emotional and psychological satisfaction of having busted my butt at 6 am and 6 pm and of having dragged my implements down to the field when I didn’t even feel like going outside. Doing work will have produced a result that’s meaningful to me.

You can capture that same feeling. Actually, you already do!

But here’s the other part: because you and I don’t exist on the bell curve and because we do not fit any medical norms, it means that a lot of doctors don’t know how to help us.

My Recovery Is My Responsibility

My revelation last week was that I have to stop being bitter when a doctor doesn’t understand that I’m having an issue they’re only used to seeing in inactive people 30 years older than me! It is no fault of the doctor or of their training that they can’t hear the whole context I’m presenting.

When I say, “this injury bothers me” and they respond, “well, do nothing for a little while,” that answer would be logical if I were a couch-bound person just trying to get through life. However, when the goal is performance, I have to remember that I’m the only one who knows the goal.

I have to become the project manager of my own care. I have to recruit the right people to my care team, then I have to direct them so that we’re all working toward the same specific goal.

I have to be the one that holds them accountable for the results that I expect from the project: complete recovery and superior performance.

How To Manage Your Care Team

I was talking to a project manager at work recently (remember, coaching athletes is not my full-time job…yet). We talked about how difficult it is to be an excellent project manager.

An excellent project manager has to be great at remembering the project goal, no matter where the team is in the execution process. They have to be great at redirecting when milestones aren’t being met. They have to be diligent about stating the scope and objective, then communicating status to everyone involved.

I have to be the person doing the work by calling doctors, asking difficult questions, demanding clarity, presenting my own research, and executing my rehab tasks. At the same time, I have to explain the goal, select (and fire, as appropriate) the experts, follow-up on information requests, and manage expectations. I have to be the project manager of my care if I expect to achieve my rare and personal aim. No one of the professionals on my care team can be expected to know what I feel, what I want, or what I can do the way I do.

You Are NOT Average Or Typical

So if you continue to compete and you continue to pursue performance as a goal when it doesn’t pay your bills, you have to recognize you’re a project unto yourself.

If you are recovering from an injury, you can’t expect any one medical professional to bring you all the way back to performance. You should expect to need a medical doctor, a physical therapist, a massage therapist, and potentially a surgeon. You might need a dietician and a therapist and a strength coach and a sport coach. And then you have to manage all of those people like your employees.

Don’t ever think that you’re just average because you’re not elite.

Don’t ever think that you’re typical because you have a stress fracture or a ligament tear.

Because you’re an adult in sport, you’re already in rare air.

You are a singularity to the establishment.

You are an N of 1, as we say in the sciences.

First, embrace that.

Second, consider this question: how are you going to get enough support and enough expertise to keep you in the game?

I strive to be a part of your care team and one of the few professionals prepared to think through your role in your sport from now to the highest levels of performance. But when we work together, you’re still the project manager. Whatever I may know about sports performance is still second to what you know about yourself.

That’s what I had to fully embrace last week: if my goal is my responsibility, my recovery is my responsibility, too. That’s the burden of being an adult athlete. And that’s what makes me so special as to be inexplicable to a doctor.

You are not average or typical, because you’re just as special. So what are you going to do about it?