Ciara Mageean and Ciara O’Sullivan: injuries to a sense of self

CASE STUDY: CIARA MAGEEAN, RUNNER

Identity matters. People have neither time nor appetite for complexity so they use shorthand and the world keeps spinning.

When Ciara Mageean goes for a run at home in Portaferry, she knows most people she passes won't know her name. But she knows they know she's the runner. As long as they're talking in the present tense, she's happy.

“I remember going to a race one time and going through the turnstiles and overhearing someone behind me going, ‘Oh, she used to be a good runner, didn’t she?’ I had only been injured for about six months at this stage, I had been off the scene for even less than a year. And already I was a has-been. So you’re contending with that identity in your own head but you’re also contending with the fact that everyone else just looks at you as a youngster who is burnt out.”

An injury to her left ankle dogged her for a long time. After breaking lots of underage records belonging to Sonia O’Sullivan, Mageean went six years without wearing an Irish vest.

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The trauma of it is still there. She’s adamant she will give up the sport rather than go through it again. “I run because I want to represent my country. I don’t have another six-year absence in me.”

She had just switched coaches and started to work with Jerry Kiernan when she got injured. Her way of coping was to throw herself into being of his group without being in it. She wasn't allowed to run – she was barely allowed to put weight on her left side for the guts of a year – but she could stand to the side and cheer and be. Anything to keep the mind turning.

“I kept trying to switch the stimulus. I would go to training and become a little assistant coach on the sideline. I wasn’t allowed to run but I was allowed to go to the gym. I wasn’t allowed to stand on my sore foot but I would stand on the other one and do exercises.

Lost chances

“I would do a load of upper body stuff. It wasn’t going to do me a whole lot of good or hugely improve my athletic performance but it was feeding into that little person in my head that was saying, ‘You need to be in the gym, you need to be getting fitter, you need to be doing something.’

“When I think back on it, I was a bit lost. I just wanted something. If I wasn’t able to run, I wanted to go to the gym and I would have spent an hour there stretching. I maybe wasn’t even allowed to exercise at that point but I wanted to have something, I wanted to still be in touch with the Ciara that was the runner.”

Pain is one thing. But fear is anticipation of consequences, which is something else altogether. No sportsperson really cares about being hurt – plenty even wear it casually. What they care about is what it means. Time out, chances lost, the very thing of who they are eroded. You only have to get burned once for everything to look like a flame.

“Nowadays, I’m extremely careful. We might be out for a walk somewhere and whoever I’m with will say, ‘Sure you’re young and fit – hop over that fence there.’ But I’ll be evaluating it in my head and most of the time I’ll just go, ‘No, that risk is unnecessary. I’ll take the long way round. An extra five minutes won’t kill me.’ It’s not that I’m fragile, I just don’t want to risk slipping and falling over a fence. I can jump over those fences when I’m retired.

“It leaves you extremely wary and somewhat scarred mentally. Getting your body back is only the beginning. My body was back and it was ready and I was able to take all of the force I needed to in the gym. But my mind was anticipating pain. I had to break that link between my mind thinking that my left foot was still injured.

“Small things, like I would never step off a kerb leading with my left foot. It got to the point where I had to consciously tell myself not to change feet approaching the edge of the footpath. Or I’d say to myself, whenever I was stepping out of bed in the morning, ‘Don’t think this is going to hurt.’ I even had to ask my daddy to stop asking me about the ankle because every time I was with him, and he asked, it reminded me that I had an injury.

“I came back from a run one day and my physio asked how I would rank my pain and I said, ‘Actually, I didn’t notice anything, Emma. I didn’t even feel it.’ That’s the day I recovered from my injury. And that was maybe two years after I started racing again.”

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CASE STUDY: CIARA O’SULLIVAN, FOOTBALL PLAYER

One cruciate injury a career is enough for anyone to carry. Two in two years ought to be too much. It first happened to Ciara O’Sullivan the day Cork lost their five-year unbeaten run to Tyrone in 2010 and, although it was awful, there was at least a novelty to it. Recovery was long and dull but she went big on the whole positive mental attitude thing and got through it. Second time around in 2012 was different.

“The second time, I was just so sick of it. My attitude to it became like, What’s the point? This has happened to me before. Who’s to say it won’t keep happening? I got disillusioned with it I suppose.

“It’s very boring work. For a cruciate injury, 90 per cent of it is in the gym. When I did my cruciate first in 2010, we had barely set foot in a gym in our lives. Things have come on a lot since but back then, doing gym-work was pretty much alien to us. Football to me was going out and playing and training on the pitch and that was what I loved about it. I didn’t like the gym, I didn’t want to go to the gym and I surely didn’t want to do it while everybody else was out playing football.”

Long-term injury bites off chunks of who you are. O’Sullivan is an auditor and when she’s out meeting clients, being known or introduced as a Cork footballer is often a handy ice-breaker. One time, during the second injury, however, one of the partners in her firm casually mentioned it and it clanged.

“I had to get him stop saying it. I wasn’t playing football. I was out of it and I didn’t want to talk about it. There was nothing to talk about. When you’re not playing, you’re not part of it. You are known for it but you’re not involved in it. Other people want to bring it up but you’re just like, ‘That’s not what I’m doing at the moment.’ Just stop, like!”

World doesn’t stop

The thing with injury is that the world doesn’t stop for you. Everything else – and everyone else – keeps moving. You don’t even stop for yourself. Your body is the only thing that comes to rest. The mind keeps going, piling more work on top of itself. Worry. Despair. Regret.

“A lot of it is in your head. You’re so used to training four of five nights a week and now suddenly you’re not training at all. Obviously you’re not after putting on a stone in a week but that’s how it feels in your head. You’re feeling crap and you’re just in your head going, I’m getting bigger and there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t move, I can’t do anything. This is only after a week – what’ll I be like in six months? That’s when you start thinking, what’s the point?

“You worry all the time. You miss so much that you can’t imagine how you’re going to get back to where you were. I remember coming back after the cruciate the second time and I had to bend down and tie my lace during what was effectively the warm-up. Everyone else was flying. I could not catch my breath and I was just thinking, I will never catch up to these girls.

“And all that is just getting more worried than you need to. People can only reach a certain level of fitness so it stands to reason that you will catch up with them eventually. But you’re not thinking that. You’re doubting yourself. Even when you start playing, you think you’re probably not as good as you were.

“But a lot of that’s in your head as well. Like, I presume because of two cruciate injuries that I’m slower than I was before I had them. I would always say I’m a lot slower now. But I don’t know if I am or not. It’s in my head that I am so I go with that. That’s just what injury does to your mind. It’s scary.”