Born to Perform (18 page)

Almost every day of my life I meet people who are stuck in a rut, searching for options. I encourage people to follow their star and their instinct. Life is not a dress rehearsal. We pass through this world once and I encourage people to embrace the opportunity to do what they want to do with their life. I explain that I am an example of someone who did not find his calling the conventional way. I did not go through the standard four-year university education to become a standard physiotherapist. I found an alternative, and qualified as a sports physical therapist – proof, perhaps, that where there is a will there is a way.

22

Making the Transition from Sport to Life

Some people who are successful in sport can later be like a lost ship at sea when it comes to life. What made them succeed in sport somehow seems to elude them in the field they chose after sport. Most have not registered that the ingredients that made them successful in an individual or team sport can easily be transferred to make them equally successful in another endeavour.

If the drive, passion and the belief is transferred to their study, to their career and to their family life, they can make them equally successful. The individual sportsperson, whether it's the long-distance runner or the triathlete or the athlete involved in some other single-minded pursuit, has learned the ability to do it alone; those in team sports have learned that no one person makes a team but that teamwork is the secret.

This principle of transference from sport to life is one that I truly believe in. Many successful athletes go on to become successful in life after sport. They have understood the principle of transference. Others, without sport and competition, can lose their drive and their willpower and this is obvious when you meet them. Their vitality is gone, as if they have accepted that their youth and good days have passed them by. Some of them have bought into a life without excitement and limited opportunity. The challenge for someone like this, an athlete successful in their sport, is to make a list of the qualities that made them successful in the first place. Once the ingredients are identified, it then becomes a question of attitude. With a positive attitude, the successful ingredients can be transferred and used to bring joy, success and happiness into work and family life. The alternative is a wasted life, full of drudge, insecurity and failed opportunity.

My good friend Bobby Behan, from Killenard in Co. Laois, is an example of a man who had a successful career as head of Oakley Eyewear in Ireland. Yet he packed in his secure job, with company car, to pursue his dream of competing for Ireland in triathlon at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. He relocated to South Africa to avail of excellent coaching and facilities. He funded his mission with some personal savings and limited sponsorship. He is one of the most up-beat, positive and enthusiastic people I know. But he had difficulty with injuries, and these soon scuppered his plans. One day he flew home to meet me, to see if there was anything further we could do to address his injuries. We discussed the pros and cons of pushing on and chasing his dream, but also weighed up the consequence of perhaps lifelong injury. We drew a line in the sand. Bobby retired from triathlon one day and the following day put his name back in the hat, job hunting, but knowing he wanted to somehow stay involved in sport.

He soon landed a job with Specialized, the giant US bicycle manufacturer. He brought his passion, enthusiasm and positivity to his job. Within a couple of years, his ability to transfer those ingredients from sport to life was noticed by the top management in Specialized. He now heads Specialized global sports marketing for mountain bike and triathlon. He still rides the bike most days, and is very happy and content in his new skin.

I, too, have entered the fascinating world of developiong sport technology. Sometime during my early teenage years I developed a fascination for and natural inquisitiveness about running shoes and competition spikes, and later that developed into an interest in performance bicycles and equipment. Whenever travelling abroad, I always headed to the local sports and bike shops, and spent hours examining and comparing the latest products on the market. I never lost the fascination and, indeed, it has given me the opportunity to work with leaders in the industry.

In my earliest running years, I ran a lot on grass, barefoot, because my coach at the time PJ O'Sullivan explained to me that barefoot running strengthens the sinews around the ankles. Later, when treating Kelly Holmes and seeing how injury prone she was, I could tell that one of the causative factors was wearing spiked shoes on the synthetic track. With that in mind, I designed a racing flat that was moulded onto a spike plate, which gave her more support but retained the traction on the wet synthetic track that can become slippery in wet conditions. Likewise, I determined that Paula Radcliffe did not need all the cushioning of a modern-day running shoe, as she was a fore-foot striker. What she needed was a more rigid midsole; with the soft midsole she was dissipating shock, and losing force.

In the quest to explore my many ideas in terms of running footwear, I re-visited the concept of barefoot technology, and Nike, the giant US athletic footwear company, contracted me for six years to work with their research and design team in Beaverton, Oregon. My approach to a running shoe was “less is more”, a shoe that is more minimalistic than a standard athletic shoe, designed to cushion and stabilise the foot. However, this was controversial as, for over twenty years, the athletic footwear companies promoted the big, thick-soled shoes on the basis that cushioning and shock absorption was everything. Yet kinematic studies showed that athletic shoes that packaged, cushioned and protected the foot in fact resulted in a greater incidence of injuries in athletes. In effect, the shoe made the human foot redundant, akin to the person who wears a collar around their neck. The collar holds up the neck and the underlying neck muscles weaken as a result, similar to when a person breaks a leg and it is put into a plaster cast. Six weeks later, the cast is taken off, and the atrophy of the leg is sizeable.

Along with Nike, I developed the Nike Free shoe in 2004, which gained wide attention – and suddenly barefoot running and minimalistic shoes became very popular. These days I am aligned with the German footwear and sportswear giant Adidas. Never being far away from the latest research and technology, always being alert to the trends ahead, helps to keep my brain active.

In my triathlon days I was the first person in Europe to experiment with the time trial handlebars, while these days the so-called aero bar is now a necessity in time trials, triathlon and Ironman events. I also experimented with the five-spoke composite front wheel. While this made sense from an aerodynamic perspective, the wheel was too heavy and never made an impact. Some things work, other things fail, but it's always important to push the barriers in terms of technology.

Even though my competitive days are behind me, I remain every bit as excited by technology and equipment. Specialized supply me with their inventions to receive my feedback, and their latest time trial bike – the Specialized Shiv – is the fastest and most technologically aerodynamic bike ever designed. I ride it to give informed feedback, and to keep abreast of the latest developments in the pursuit of legal higher, faster and stronger athletic performance.

When Paul Kimmage was competing in the 1989 Tour de France, extracting every ounce of energy out of his body and digging deep into his willpower to survive the tough days in the French Pyrenees and Alps, he was already using the ingredients that made him an Irish road race champion and Olympic cyclist. After each stage, he would sit down and pen the day's activity, recounting the drama, the excitement and the pain – and created a unique insight into the peloton. These were his honest and true feelings, as experienced by himself, a mere
domestique
– or team journeyman – trying to eke a living out of cycling and to survive in the toughest three-week grand tour of them all.

These daily accounts from the Tour de France were first published in the late and lamented
Sunday Tribune
newspaper. They were carried across a full two-page spread and made for gripping reading. The professional cyclist turning the pedals in the Tour de France was unaware that his account was top-class material. After the Tour, he was offered a full-time job as a feature writer for the
Sunday Tribune
. He made the transfer from professional athlete to professional writer almost automatically. As it happened, he was a born writer, the best sports feature writer that I have read. He is now the chief sports writer for the
Sunday Times
and has won numerous Writer of the Year awards for his work. I purchase the
Sunday Times
each week just to read his features.

It is amazing how one life ends and another life starts. I now respect why Paul Kimmage asked me in 1991 if I took performance-enhancing drugs to fuel my triathlon performances: he was the ultimate professional, doing his job to the best of his ability and ensuring he had looked under every stone.

Four years later, in 1995, Paul Kimmage contacted me again. This time he came to visit me. He travelled to Teddington, London, where I was based for the summer months as a physical therapist. We did not mention my previous triathlon life or his cycling exploits. He sat in a small room for hours, just observing me applying my trade. He was a fly on the wall, watching me treating many of the great Kenyan athletes of the time. At 7.00 p.m. we mounted two old bicycles and tried to follow a group of gazelle-like Kenyan athletes as they ran the seven-mile lap of Bushy Park. The gazelles were too fleet of foot. We soon got bogged down in the rough grass, and stopped and laughed in awe as the Kenyan athletes legged it off into the distance. Here we were, two former athletes that once competed at the highest level in our respective sports, and we were not able to keep up.

Paul Kimmage penned the following feature article, which appeared in the
Sunday Independent
on August 13, 1995:

The Man They Call Daktari

“Agghhhhhh.”

We join them in a small room of 59 Park Road, Teddington, London. William Sigei, the fastest 10,000 metres runner in the world, is in pain. A lot of pain. He felt the twinge in his hamstring during training and went to see “Daktari” straight away. Why? Because that's what you do when you've got an injury.

You go to his room and knock on the door. He runs his palms over the damage, takes out his pot of Tiger Balm and…“agggghhhhh”…goes to work straight away.

This is how it looks to the fly on the wall. The black man with the sore leg is lying on the treatment couch. The white man standing over him appears to be giving a massage, but William is not enjoying it.

Daktari's great white thumbs are pressing too forcefully into the area giving him pain and it's hurting. It is hurting bad. He turns and grabs Daktari's arm and pleads for leniency: “Aghhh, very pain, very pain.” But, Daktari is having none of it.

“Tough, my friend, isn't it? But just let me stay on it for a little bit longer.”

Gerard Hartmann from Limerick remembers a time when he used to rise at 5.00 a.m. Triathlon was his drug and, in order to be competitive, he had to squeeze his daily training around his 9.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m. job. He would get out of bed and pull on his togs. Then pull off his togs and put on his suit. Then pull off his suit and pull on his runners. Then pull off his runners and go to bed. A monastic lifestyle? No, he never looked at it like that. Seven times the National Champion, 14th in the World Championships; no sacrifice was too great when the target was the summit. He never reached it…but believes he just might now.

Gerard Hartmann remembers the day when his life changed. It was 1987 and, crossing a railway line on his bike, he came down and hit the ground hard. He woke the following morning with a searing pain in his back and hip. The swimming was put on “hold”, and the running and the bike.

For the next fourteen months he limped up and down the country in search of a medicinal cure. Fourteen months of specialists taught a man a lot about his oil and nuts and bolts. The more he found out, the more he wanted to know. He was neck high in theory books and manuals and it still wasn't enough. He wanted to wield a “spanner”. He wanted to be a “mechanic”.

Abandoning his post at the head of a family jewellery business that had spanned four generations (he is an only son), he travelled to Gainesville, Florida in 1989 and took a degree in physical therapy. Once qualified, he set himself up in a clinic in Gainesville – Florida Sports Medicine and Orthopaedic Centre. Today, he is rated among the best and “guru” to the rich and famous.

We join him in a small room at 59 Park Road. He has come to London and the quaint suburb of Teddington, at the invitation of the world famous agent Kim McDonald, who has hired him on a twelve-week contract to look after his stable of runners.

Moses Kiptanui, the world record holder in the steeplechase and 5,000m, has just slipped through his fingers. William Sigei is on the table as we speak. Eighty per cent of McDonald's athletes are Kenyan. They have a name for the Irish “musungo” (white man). He is the man they call Daktari.

“Aghhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” “Most physiotherapists,” explains Hartmann, digging his thumbs deep into Sigei, “use a more passive style – gentle with the hands on, ultrasound, laser and electro-stimulation machines, hydro-therapy, ice and heat. I tend to be aggressive with my hands and do a lot of manipulative work. William, for example, has a hamstring strain. In two weeks he hopes to break the world record, so, I have got to get him right and on time. What I am trying to do is increase the pliability of the tissue using manual therapy. It sounds contradictory, but I am going in very deep on tissue that is already tender to….”

His explanation is interrupted by a knock on the door. Another Kenyan with an injury sticks his head through the gap and requests treatment. “Wait downstairs. I'll be looking at you soon,” he is told. (Although Daktari has some words of Swahili he prefers to speak to his Kenyan patients in Johnny Weissmuller – “Me Tarzan” – English.) “Now where were we?” he asks. “Surely by going in deeply you are only making his hamstring more sore?” He shakes his head. “Think of it like this. Anytime there is a trauma of the tissue, the body tries to heal it with scar tissue (a substance known as collagen). Now scar tissue I would liken to a blob of chewing gum that has been walked into the carpet – we need to get it out to make the carpet clean again. But how do we do it? Do we take the quickest way and use a hammer and chisel? Or, do we use hot water and try to melt it away? Well effectively, I suppose, I am going about it with a hammer and chisel, but in a very specific scientific meticulous way.” “Aghhhhhhhhh.”