Damaged vertebrae, broken fingers, torn knee ligaments, Achilles tendon damages, neck muscle pains, pulses passing through limbs, numbness, injured intercostal muscles, torn feet tendons, and a number of other joint injuries that will stay with us for the rest of our lives. As someone once said: „If they dig me out in a few hundred years and they make a television show on Discovery Channel about it, they will have quite a riddle what kind of vehicle run me over.”
The price of being an amateur athlete is high. We pay it with our own body, but often forget that our psyche is like a hard drive with limited capacity, subjected to a tone of stimulants every day. Our nervous system has its capacity, and through training load, and so-called life, may not keep up with our desire to improve our training results. The skill we gain through training depends on the regeneration of our nervous system. When it’s overloaded – subjected to tension at work and home, when taking care of children, driving a car, bombarded with internet incentives, constantly scrolling pages on the phone, writing business e-mails, replying to private messages – it won’t allow us to learn new things during training. As a result our fatigue reduces our immunity to diseases, despite the fact that we follow a healthy lifestyle. In the aftermath we catch flu, we lack progress, fail competition (when we have exhausted ourselves just before), our mood goes down leading to depression, injury and a break in training.
And moments that have gone away and will not come back.
This is another aspect of the negative side of being more than amateur athlete. We often hear that the biggest mistake we make is comparing ourselves with others; everyone has their own path and life, what relates to their progress in training, achievements in sports, number of attended competitions, etc. However, slowing down is associated with laziness, we subconsciously compare ourselves to our training buddies who have made progress, we analyse our skills dragging ourselves down into depression, what even more weight to already heavy one we carry. And what about our so-called life? Friends, social life – it all actually happens in the club. There is not enough time outside it to have life, especially when we have a family. It is them who suffer the most from our passion. Unfortunately it’s a compromise – time that we could devote to our family we devote to our passion. It is therefore worth to appreciate the support of our relatives, thanks to which we are able to train.
Summing up; we pay the price on three levels – physically, mentally and socially. We forget that we are not professionals – they usually workout twice a day, but often sacrifice life for sport. It means no family, catering company delivers food, his passion is his job. Sure, what he achieved is through hard work, and the level of challenges he takes is much higher.
We will always consider those as heroes who train, make sacrifices (including spending money on their passions without the help of sponsors), and combine their so-called normal life with their hobby, which in the end will leave them with broken body and a belief that they were good at something.
Train. Development is worth every price.
