Having suffered a major setback prior to the 2004 Olympics, Jamie Costin makes a comeback. He talks to Ronan McGreevy
IRISH RACE walker Jamie Costin had almost completed his preparations for the Athens Olympic Games in 2004 when he was involved in a horrific head-on collision.
On his way back from a training session in Greece near the town of Porto Heli, his car was in collision with a lorry which was on the wrong side of the road. It was just 10 days before he was due to compete in the 50km walk.
He has since made a full recovery and broke the Irish record in March. He also competed at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin last week, but was unable to compete the course just four kilometres from the finish because of severe dehydration. A third of the field pulled up because of the severe heat.
"After my accident in Greece, I was in a lot of pain though I was conscious. The first thing I wanted to ascertain was whether I was going to be able to compete in the Olympic Games. Doctors told me straight away that I wasn't, but I was hanging on.
"I knew deep down that I would not be competing and within a couple of hours the results had come back. I had two breaks in my vertebrae - L5 had pretty much gone, L1 was crushed. I knew then I was not going to be doing much walking let alone 50km for a long time afterwards.
"It was a terrible realisation. It was like being a lawyer having done four years of study only to be told that you had to go back and do it all again.
"Dr Sean Gaine [the medical doctor for the Irish Olympic team in Athens], consulted doctors and specialists in Greece and he said that I should be sent home for assessment in Ireland.
"I went back to Ireland and my family looked after me. It was a tough station to watch the Olympics from a bed in the Mater Hospital.
"After the Olympics, while I was obviously disappointed, I was very much consumed with trying to get better. That was the most important thing for me at that stage.
"I was put into a body cast from my neck to my hip for three months, essentially a plaster of Paris. My arms were the only things that were free.
"It was something I had to get used to. I wasn't able to move very much, but it was necessary to protect my back. There are a lot of things in life that are necessary even if you don't like them.
"In Greece they could have fixed me straight away by putting rods into my back.
"I trusted that I had good doctors and physiotherapists looking after me. I was very fortunate that I did not have any rods inserted because I would never be able to compete again.
"Not having rods in was certainty not the normal practice. It may have been a riskier practice, but it worked.
"I spent three months in a body cast from my neck down to my hips. I wasn't able to move very much, but it was doing what was necessary to protect my back.
"I wasn't able to walk at first and only my arms were free. I stuck at it day by day and once I started moving, I could go a little bit more every day.
"It was a strange world. Anybody who is recovering from major surgery is not going to have a normal life for a while afterwards.
"Once you go through it and get over it, you try your best to forget about it.
"After three months I had a scan and everything was under control at that stage.
"I went back training as quickly as I could, but I wasn't able to go back training properly for a long time after that.
"I eventually went back training in February or March after the Olympics. I went away to a camp in Mexico and when I came back my specialist told me to stop for another six months as I was only going to more damage to my body.
"It takes a year for bones to mend properly even though my back felt better.
"I had to write most of the rest of 2005 off and I only started back training properly in December of that year.
"The biggest issue for me was being able to race and being able to race strong. I was getting a bit fitter and stronger with every race, but then there came a plateau in my performance.
"There was no improvement in the second half of 2006.
"In May 2007 I qualified for the World Championship and the Olympic Games which was the big breakthrough for me. As an athlete you can race alright, but if you are not able to handle training, your body is not up to it. My body was clearly ready.
"For a long time, though, I was obsessed with getting back to a level I thought I was at before the accident. I compared my training in 2006 and 2007 with my training in 2003 and 2004. All it did was frustrate me.
"As your body get older, it changes anyway. I just kept pushing and pushing myself, where maybe, if I let things go, I might have got stronger.
"I could have got better results out of things if I had been a little bit more relaxed. I'm a lot more comfortable in my body now.
"I'm 32 now and I broke the Irish record earlier this year.
"The Irish record was a great confidence boost. A lot of race walkers can go on into their mid-30s.
"My advice to people in a similar situation to myself is to control your own recovery.
"There are fantastic health practitioners out there, people like physiotherapists, doctors and surgeons and they are all doing great jobs.
"They will give you good advice, but, if you don't follow their advice and you go away and do your own thing, and think that your body is going to go away and heal itself, you are mistaken. It won't.
"Listen to the specialists and, if you don't understand what they are saying, ask them questions. Make sure you go and do the best possible thing for your body to recover, whether it is from a nutritional aspect or from an exercise aspect. That's really the way you have got to do things.
"If you want to get back to full activity, whether it is an illness or an injury, you need to follow what the doctors are saying. Be diligent about it and take it day by day," he says.
If you have had a health experience, good or bad, that you would like to share, e-mail health supplement@irishtimes.com