Born to Perform (12 page)

16

Beginning a New Career as a Physical Therapist

A couple of weeks before my bike accident in 1991, I was in Sligo on the day before the All-Ireland Triathlon. It was there I first heard the news that Seán Kelly's brother, Joe Kelly, had been killed. He had taken part in a 100-mile charity cycle and was cycling back towards his car when an oncoming vehicle hit him. Three days after Joe's funeral, Seán Kelly, always the professional, was back on his bicycle and taking part in a criterium event in Belgium. Seán had cycled every twist and turn on the roads of Europe at daredevil speeds, and in fact broke a collarbone on a number of occasions. But it was his brother Joe who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe it's providence or destiny; perhaps life is simply all mapped out for each and every one of us.

After my accident, there was no way I ever saw myself getting up on the bike again. I had lost my nerve. The accident had rocked me to the core. It wasn't just because of the breaking of my hip, and the pain and slow process to get mobile again. I'd heard, too, that on St Stephen's Day 1992, outside Gainesville in Florida, a so-called redneck ploughed his pick-up truck through nine cyclists. Seven cyclists died, one was paralysed and one came out of it physically intact. They say when a redneck sees a possum on the road he “gets” five points if he kills it; if he runs a cyclist off the road he gets ten points.

Two days later, at The Oaks Mall in Gainesville, two young boys were out riding their new bicycles that they'd just received as Christmas presents when a city bus backed into them – they were killed instantly. Stories like that helped convince me I had my fill of riding bikes.

On March 18, 1992, I got a phone call from my mother. “Very bad news,” she said. Joey Hannan, the life and soul of Limerick Triathlon Club, was dead. He had been out cycling when he was struck from behind by a drunk driver. Joey was only in his early thirties and was full of life and passion for sport. The Limerick Triathlon Club forever remembers Joey, and every May it stages the Joey Hannan Memorial Triathlon – which remains a great tribute to a great friend.

The stark reality of life without triathlon, the only life I had ever known, dawned on me the day I left the hospital in Florida. A friend came to collect me to drive me the four miles to her home. Jackie Ferber was a local physical therapist. She and her husband Corrie Landis had taken me into their care and I would be bed- and house-bound for many weeks in their home.

Getting down from the third floor of the hospital was a serious task in itself. Using crutches, I took it step by step, with my right leg trailing and all bandaged up. I slowly made my way through the long corridors to the hospital's entrance, where her car waited. It was a marathon of sorts just to make it to the car. I remember my shirt being fully drenched with perspiration from the effort and my arms were trembling. I was feeling and looking gaunt, frail even, and was almost afraid I would faint.

I must have looked completely helpless as I tried to mobilise myself into the back seat of the car, keeping the leg outstretched and trying to figure out what to do with the five-foot crutches under my arms. Reality set in straight away: I was an invalid.

I recall one long day, when Jackie and Corrie were both out at work, feeling particularly alone. I dug deep into my heart and faith. Fortunately, I had parents who were great role models and gave me the gift of faith, which I call on in my hours of need. As a young boy, I had often looked up to heaven in despair, especially when the rosary beads were taken out in the evening and study time or an all-important TV programme was disturbed for family prayer. We would all sink to our knees and pray the rosary. My mother's motto has always been, “The family that prays together stays together.”

It was in this crisis, when darkness, fear and negativity tried to consume me, that I realised how grateful I was for having being reared in a secure Christian environment of love, faith and understanding. I had choices. This reality was not going to change. There was no turning back the clock. I looked into the mirror and saw a gaunt face, a body fading away. I had little stomach for life and certainly no appetite for eating. My friends were concerned. I weighed myself on the scales three weeks after the surgery and found I had dropped under eleven stone. My parents wanted to travel from Ireland to see me, but I was not ready to share the news. I was low and embarrassed.

Only three years earlier, I had turned my back on the business that my parents, my grandfather and his father before him had built up over 120 years. Managing Hartmann Jewellers and Opticians at 2 Patrick Street and 2 O'Connell Street in Limerick would have been a fine career for any sensible young man. Instead, I pursued a sport involving swimming, cycling and running, which at the time looked like being nothing more than a fad or craze. I had spent my savings and every last penny putting myself through college to become a physical therapist, and in one split second I ended up with nothing.

I do believe in miracles, but, more so, I believe in destiny, providence and in God's plan. What was to happen to me in the next year and continue to this day was certainly something I did not plan; indeed, it was probably outside of my own thinking or capability to do so. I am sure it was all mapped out for me.

After several weeks of feeling down and out, of not wanting or being able to fight the fight, I woke up one morning with a sense of finding a new light. I had prayed, I had cried and I had tormented myself – but I woke up that morning to brightness, to a life full of possibilities, and to a more positive, energised and driven self. What was to happen in the next year, and the following twenty or so years, was in many ways inexplicable, something that a PhD from Harvard wouldn't be able to explain or all the contacts in the world could not make happen.

The life energy that I had as a triathlete – the desire, passion, spirit, perseverance, focus and enthusiasm – was suddenly transferred over to my new life. If these were the inherent qualities that had helped me become one of the fittest athletes in the world, then they could also help me become one of the finest physical therapists in the world. The Tyrone football manager Mickey Harte stated, “My philosophies stay the same but I regularly change the window dressing.” I can vouch for that.

The transition happened in the blink of an eyelid. It was seamless, almost like downing tools in one profession one day and picking up new tools the next day. Within one year, I was working at the Florida Sports Medicine and Orthopaedic Centre, one of the top Orthopaedic Centres in the US, now renamed ReQuest Physical Therapy. I soon became known there as the “Irish physical therapist” who was once a great athlete but who had a life-changing injury. People with other orthopaedic injuries, patients undergoing physical therapy and rehabilitation following spinal surgery, hip or knee replacements, naturally gravitated towards me.

I had my qualifications, but I also had had my own accident and many sports injuries along the way – so, even with very limited practical experience, I was in demand from the outset. To this day, I know that my accident happened for a reason. It was all part of a bigger plan. My life experiences – as the running scholarship athlete, the world-class triathlete and then the victim of an accident – gave me the insight, both physically and psychologically, to effectively treat my patients. I had been a competitive sportsperson. I had also been a post-operative patient who underwent physiotherapy and rehabilitation, and I had to learn how to walk again and cope with new challenges.

My work day in Florida Sports Medicine and Orthopaedic Centre always started at 7.00 a.m. and seldom finished before 8.00 p.m. I immersed myself in my new career with unbridled enthusiasm and a drive that was perhaps greater than what I had as an athlete. I had found my calling in life, and I knew it.

Sportspeople living and training in Florida booked in to see me; others travelled from far away. And some of these were not just any sportspeople – the world and Olympic medal winners Calvin Smith, Leroy Burrell, Carl Lewis, Linford Christie, Mark McCoy, Merlene Ottey, Liz McColgan, Grete Waitz, Moses Kiptanui and dozens more were among my early clients.

By June 1992, I was travelling as a physical therapist to the Barcelona Olympic Games. It was the first of five Olympic Games at which I have served to date. In 1996 I was the physical therapist to the Irish Olympic Team in Atlanta; in Sydney (2000), Athens (2004) and Beijing (2008), I was the physical therapist to the Great Britain and Northern Ireland Olympic team. I have had the opportunity and unique experience of working with over 1,000 Olympic athletes and over 60 Olympic medal winners, plus numerous world champions and record holders. It is a badge that I wear with pride and honour, but I respect that it is all part of God's plan and, like my triathlon career, I am aware that it is only on loan. To take something for granted is a sure way of throwing it away.

Every human being has been given gifts or God-given talents. It is a sin not to use them, and worse still to disrespect them. My name has become synonymous with the work I do with world-class sports stars, and helping to prolong the careers of top athletes like Keith Wood, Ronan O'Gara, Seán Óg Ó hAilpín, Kelly Holmes, Colin Jackson, Paula Radcliffe and Sonia O'Sullivan – and that always attracts attention and publicity. On a day-to-day basis, I am faced with the task of helping to resolve the injuries of sportspeople who are talented, who have dreams, who have big games to play and big races to run. It is a demanding career, because everyone who attends my clinic puts their trust and their hopes in my hands for me to resolve or find a solution. At times I do feel burdened; I feel the weight of their expectations on my shoulders. So I call on my faith. I am thankful every day to have been given a second chance, so I must help them.

I work with so many sportspeople whose profession is their sport. Take the Munster rugby players that I meet almost every day. Most of them are 28 or 29 years of age and know that their sporting shelf life will come to an end some day soon. When I talk with many such sportspeople, I see that they are already searching for the next step in their lives – a job with a bank or insurance company, perhaps, or opening their own business, and so on. I give advice whenever I can. I pray that, like me, they too will be blessed with something special, meaningful and purposeful to fill their years after sport.

Many sportspeople, when their careers are cut short suddenly through illness or injury, or being dropped from a team, have difficulty in the aftermath. Each individual deals with this in their own way. At its most basic level, it is the death of something that they loved and lived for, day after day, and often from the young age of eleven or twelve. They trained, pushed themselves, dreamed, all in the name of winning that club championship or intercounty championship, or that national, European, world or Olympic medal. When it ends, there is a void, a hollowness and a silence. Even if it is a planned retirement, there is still a void. When it is sudden, it is a big shock, and the stress that results can be detrimental to starting again at something else.

It was through my own accident and misfortune that I learned the nuts and bolts of what it really means and takes to put people back to full functional capacity following injury, especially orthopaedic surgery. My own experience and drive to fully rehabilitate after my operation formed my philosophies and protocols that I use to this day in my practice. What I learned post-surgery was that I was very much on my own to fend for myself. The surgeon who saved my leg did a fantastic job, but that was his job done.

After my accident, I was on crutches for sixteen weeks and hobbling with an obvious limp from muscle wastage and over-compensation. My left leg, the good leg, got stronger as it did all the work to protect and save the injured right leg. But I have witnessed over the years how little even the specialists know about what is necessary to recoup optimal functional capacity. People are told to do some swimming, some walking and to keep their weight intact. Too often, the direction is sparse in terms of post-operative rehabilitation advice. The reality is that, to succeed at post-op rehabilitation, the patient must work harder and more regularly than any guidelines advocate. I have seen so many people who have had a successful procedure at the hands of top surgeons, but whose functional outcome is limited, who are debilitated and in pain, and who are not able to enjoy a functional lifestyle because they were never guided or informed that it takes a lot of work to fully rehabilitate – a staggering amount of self-discipline and application.

Some people do not have the drive; it's easier for them to be the casualty, and live with dysfunction and impairment. In 1991, and for over a year after, I treated my rehabilitation like I was preparing for another Hawaii Ironman. I got up every morning at 5.00 a.m. and spent two hours doing a stretching and strengthening programme, plus other exercises that I designed myself towards gaining mobility around my hip and pelvis and the strengthening of the muscles of my torso and hip. Every night, I spent another hour stretching, always doing extra exercises to build up the weak leg.

As a physical therapist, my own career-ending injury gave me an education that all the theory in the world could not provide. I lived through it, doing my own intensive rehabilitation, and experienced the gains and results of becoming healthy enough again to complete the Hawaii Ironman and, indeed, run a full marathon. The experience shaped my philosophies and methods that I employ daily in my practice with sportspeople and other orthopaedic post-operative clients. In later years, I also developed what is known as “prehabilitation”, or a programme designed to prevent injury and promote performance.

The philosophy that a flexible and stronger body is more functional than a stiff and weak body stands to reason, but the challenge is always to search for improved methods to gain optimal function.