Inspiring stories
Even the most fortune-favoured among us face challenges in life, failures and losses that we must then come back from, but in 2020 nearly all of us endured similar challenges at the same time, writes Matt Fitzgerald
How to make 2021 the year of the comeback
Anew year is upon us, and not a moment too soon. Last year, I think we can all agree, was a pig. I’m referring, of course, to the global Covid-19 pandemic, but not only to that. In the United States, where I live, 2020 will be remembered also for a deep economic recession, mass protests sparked by incidents of racial injustice, a polarising presidential election, and apocalyptic wildfires (and I’m probably forgetting something).
When I sat down in the latter part of 2018 to begin writing a book about how great athletes rebound from adversity, I could not have imagined all that would happen before I completed it, nor how timely its message would be for athletes and non-athletes alike on its release in early 2021.
All fans of sport love a good comeback story. Muhammad Ali’s breath taking eighth-round knockout of a previously invincible George Foreman in 1974, restoring a heavyweight title stripped from him eight years earlier for Ali’s defiance of a Vietnam War draft order. Monica Seles’s gutsy victory at the 1996 Australian Open, three years after a horrific on-court knife attack left her nursing psychic wounds far deeper than the gash in her right shoulder.
Scotland’s own Callum Hawkins’s return from a terrifying collapse near the finish line of the 2018 Commonwealth Games Marathon (which he was leading at the time) to set a national record in the following year’s London Marathon.
Such feats appeal to a deeply human craving for proof that anything is possible – that it ain’t over till it’s over.
On the surface, these and other great sporting comebacks appear to have little in common.
But what I discovered in the process of researching the phenomenon is that, underneath their superficial diversity, great comebacks are always achieved through a singular process of facing reality head-on.
When an athlete is able to fully accept, embrace, and address the reality of a difficult situation, he or she inevitably succeeds in making the best of it. And on the flipside, when an athlete fails to make the best of a difficult situation, it is invariably because he or she failed to take one of these three key steps.
The notion that facing reality is the secret to overcoming adversity is not as far fetched as it may seem at first blush. Thinkers and spiritual leaders going as far back as the Buddha have observed that wishing things were different than they are is the root of all our problems.
The ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus put it this way: “Demand not that things happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do, and you will go well.”
Modern psychology has lent empirical support to this ancient wisdom. A form of psychotherapy known as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) teaches patients to accept negative emotions and divorce them from their root cause so that rational decisions can be made about how to respond.
In a 2015 study led by Elena Ivanova of the University of British Columbia, a group of non-exercisers who were given a single lesson in ACT improved their performance by 15 per cent in a high-intensity fitness test while also reporting increased levels of exercise enjoyment and lower ratings of perceived exertion.
As a microcosm of life, the sporting arena offers the clearest examples of how this process works.
Among the case studies I share in my book is that of Jamie Whitmore, an American professional off-road triathlete who experienced a strange weakness in her left leg during the 2007 XTERRA World Championship, a race she’d won three years before. Little did she know when she hobbled across the finish line a disappointing third that her troubles were only beginning.
By the time a cancerous tumour was removed from her lower back in March 2008, Whitmore was in unceasing agony, unable to put weight on the affected leg, which had atrophied from disuse. Months later the tumour grew back, necessitating a second surgery.
Then, less than 24 hours after her discharge from hospital, Whitmore was readmitted with a life-threatening case of sepsis. She survived it only to acquire a bone infection, surviving that only to face a third major surgery, in which her left kidney was auto-transplanted to her right side, and a surprise pregnancy that required yet another hospitalisation – seven and a half weeks of total bed rest – due to her fragile health.
A full recovery was now out of the question, for not only had the cancer been removed from Whitmore’s body but also her sciatic and sacral nerves, most of her left buttock, and a chunk of her tailbone, leaving her permanently disabled at 34. No problem.
Whitmore got herself fitted with a hi -tech leg brace and began to compete in cycling events for disabled athletes, eventually winning a gold medal at the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio.
This was a remarkable feat, but it was no miracle. Whitmore achieved it through the same process of facing reality that underlies every great comeback. First, instead of wasting time and energy wishing away her condition, she accepted it, telling me in an interview, “I would allow myself to feel sorry for my situation or be angry at it for 15 minutes a day. After that, it doesn’t get you anywhere.” Whitmore then embraced her new reality by focusing on what she could do versus what she couldn’t and committing to becoming an athlete
When an athlete is able to fully accept, embrace, and address the reality of a difficult situation, he or she inevitably succeeds
again. And, finally, she addressed the reality confronting her by giving everything she had to her comeback, going to such lengths as walking her neighbourhood with a nephrostomy bag hooked to her walker.
I neglected to mention at the beginning of this article that I myself have been touched by all of last year’s major crises. I contracted Covid-19 in March and am still suffering from so-called long-haul symptoms that appear to have been exacerbated by exposure to wildfire smoke. My wife is black, so for me the racial strife of 2020 hit not just close to home, but inside it.
Much of my personal revenue comes from selling training plans to endurance athletes, and with races cancelled worldwide, demand for these offerings has plummeted, and with it my income. And, to top it all off, I lost a number of individual clients who took issue with my public criticisms of Donald Trump.
This is not a play for sympathy. Chances are the past year wasn’t terribly kind to you, either. Even the most fortune-favoured among us face challenges in life, failures and losses that we must then come back from, but in 2020 nearly all of us endured similar challenges at the same time.
Ultra-realists – my name for the masters of facing reality discussed in my book – offer us the blueprint we need to make 2021 our Year of the Comeback.