Jumpers knee athletics
Jelle's experience on his patellar tendon recovery.
I am Jelle de Jong. Multiplayer in athletics and student-athlete in America. A dream come true: playing sports in America and competing for a university at the highest level. After 9 years of training in the Netherlands, training in America was quite a change. My way of training was suddenly changed. Many more hours, listening less to the body and pushing yourself further than you thought possible. Reading it, you can actually feel it going wrong. And with a long body that has always been injury prone, it was to be expected. Several injuries came up during my first year. The American thought was that with some stretching and massaging it would go away. And even though I was never really injury-free, I kept improving. And then the doubts began: could I perhaps continue to train harder and longer with my injuries? Will they be right?
"A month of rest and on again"
I have always had mild symptoms of jumpers knee. But never longer than 3-4 weeks or very mild during the season. And this season in my second year in America seemed no different. But the mindset was different. Maybe with some ibuprofen I could indeed still make my full training hours at the full 100%. That's where it went wrong. Properly wrong. After a few weeks of training through the symptoms, I could no longer walk without pain when I was off the ibuprofen.
At the doctor of our school's sports teams, the reaction was pretty nonchalant. "Ah yes, I went a little too far" was the reaction. With a month of rest I was back on my feet again, they said. After a month of doing nothing, most of the pain was indeed gone and I was allowed back on the athletics track. But it soon returned and I had a whole year of ups and downs. There was no structure, no real plan to work towards the top again without complaints. Very frustrating.
"A year later, things seem to be better..."
The next year seemed to be better after a summer of rest. Workouts went well, the pain was gone, but how? That's still not entirely clear to me. And so the first games of the season approached again. The first race I sustained a hamstring injury in the long jump. And when that healed, of course the knee symptoms came back. What do you do then? Continue as advised? That didn't seem like a great plan after last time. But conference, the most important race of the year, was fast approaching. After that, there would be time to rest and recover. "Let's see what we can make of it" was the message from the doctors and coaches. That went so wrong that in America, based on an MRI scan, surgery was the advice before entering summer vacation, the season stop.
I decided to go for a second opinion in the Netherlands and so through doctors, who advised me definitely not to do surgery but to follow a well-structured sweaters knee program, I ended up with Michael de Levie of FysioHolland. After getting acquainted and an explanation of the plan I felt confident again. Maybe after 2 years with this approach I can then train again at full load next season, my last season in America.
After barely 2 years of barely being able to complete a training week, I was desperate to get going with a good plan. Or so I thought. It soon became clear that I would need a lot of patience and that this was not a matter of weeks but of months. And that was very disappointing. But I kept going, day after day. There were good days that gave me hope, but they were followed by bad days after which we had to reduce the intensity. And then it was sometimes difficult to see the progress. I was running out of patience because the time to go back to America was getting closer and closer. It became a daily frustration because I didn't feel that I would be ready in time to enter my final season well. I struggled with that idea for a long time. The outcome was that I began to care less about the sport and the results. This led to it becoming even harder to stay motivated and train with patience daily to hopefully eventually get back on the athletic track.
"Eyes on the goal."
I am now 6 months into structured rehab training and I am running again. There is progression and once I can do my workouts again, the fire to continue in the sport will definitely return, but I have become more careful about taking hope from the better days, because the disappointment is too great if I then have to take a few steps back each time anyway.
So the rehab process is very double for me. I finally have a plan, structure and do have results. But on the other hand, no certainty yet whether I will be able to do a multi-camp again in a reasonable period of time. That idea lingers. That's what makes the rehab process so difficult. Not knowing how far I will eventually get. Where does the progression stop? How hard it would be to find the motivation to perform every little exercise with full focus and then very quietly take 2 steps forward and immediately 1 step back. I had really underestimated that about this rehab process. The patience I would need and the uncertainty about the result.
The way I am dealing with this may not be the right way, but it is working. I've been able to accept that it's a long, slow process, and the motivation right now comes mostly from all the things I want to be able to do again outside of my sport. Therefore, I am still doing what I need to do daily, despite not knowing if it will help me get back on the track the way I would like. Now that there is less pressure, the progression seems to come faster. You have to have less patience when there are also less expectations. This has allowed me to find the fun more in the small steps of progression within each exercise. Something I didn't see before. All I could think about was getting back on the track as soon as possible.
I learned a lot in this process. That there is more than just sports was again made clear. But also how beautiful it is that we can play sports. That you have to find fun in the small steps forward and the workouts themselves. That you are only working against yourself by wanting to go faster. And that you have to know what you're doing it for. Whether that is top sport, or winter sports vacation, or forest walks, or to get out of the house by yourself again doesn't matter. Accept that it may take a long time, perhaps much longer than you would like but as long as there is an upward trend, you will get there.
