Comment by mikestew
1 month ago
A high-level athlete doesn’t need to see a sports doctor. Why is that?
If one wishes to observe “begging the question” in the true definition of the phrase, there ya go. Many high-level runners struggle with constant injury. And those are the ones you’ve heard of. The ones you haven’t heard of? They couldn’t stay healthy at the level of training required. At high levels, athletes are pushing themselves right up to the brink of injury, and hopefully not past that point. It’s an otherwise okay article, but that sentence is a swing and a miss.
Yes this is like saying a Formula 1 car doesn't need a pit crew because it's faster than a Honda Civic. The opposite is true: high performance requires operating at the absolute limit of mechanical failure.
Novice athletes operate at 50% of their capacity and have high safety margins. Elite athletes redline at 99%. They need constant medical and PT leverage not because they are "sick," but to manage the structural debt accrued from that volume. The better the athlete, the tighter the feedback loop with their support staff needs to be to prevent system collapse.
Most athletes have (and need!) regular access to shared or personal sports therapists.
These days it's arguable that F1 needs pit crews because pit stops are the only source of entropy during a race but I (bitterly) digress.
I used to run 5 miles a day on trails in a nature preserve. There were sections that were skewed to one direction, and dangerously so after rains. There were uncleared fallen trees to hop over. Etc.
One day, a coworker joined me. He was a serious runner, and was recuperating from a knee injury, hoping to compete again in a month or two. His pace, learned on tracks and city sidewalks, was so much faster than mine that I noticed him jogging in place when I hit a slow patch. After we finished, he went back and ran it again at his preferred pace.
Next Monday he reported that he had exacerbated his injuries on the trail, and would probably never be able to run again.
Talk about pushing yourself to the brink... I mean, if that course had been flat, he would have been fine. But his "high-level" techniques were honed on a course without the threats and extra challenges for his support muscles, and that combination ruined him.