“Getting old to regret”: the tunnel more than one night for an athlete | where the emotion plays

After a serious injury, someone who cannot muster enough motivation to recover the previous physical level – a long road, without shortcuts – “gets old to regret it.” These are the words of Mikel Sánchez, an eminent figure in traumatology, the doctor who, when they seemed hopeless cases, recovered athletes such as midfielder Santi Cazorla or the Uruguayan point guard, historic Endesa League player, Jayson Granger for high competition. A teaching that, advised Sánchez, serves identically for the common citizen. The one who gives up “enters a spiral of abandonment and progressive degeneration”, he comments. It takes tenacity to recover, a determined effort, hours of dedication. You need a reason to cling to, a “sparkle”, like the one that illuminated the path of Benjamín Jiménez (Puerto Real, 1976), referee and patient of Sánchez who, for the surgeon, embodies the perfect example, the inspiration for those who find themselves in that trance. What do they both have to teach us?

After the final of the last basketball Copa del Rey, in February, Jiménez, the match’s main referee, shed tears as he ran to hug his teammates. It was the culmination of a tortuous odyssey that took him away from the courts for many months. The happy ending he could only dream of. “That day I felt that a cycle was closed,” he confesses. “Because I had come to believe that I could not walk again without feeling excruciating pain, and yet, I had returned to my highest level on the biggest stage: whistling in the Endesa League and directing the decisive duel of the cup tournament!” .

Dedicated to refereeing basketball since he was 13 years old, injuries had been on the verge of tripping the career of someone who would be unable to understand his day to day without sports (he has competed in table tennis and is now hooked on golf). In 2010, when his whistle resounded on all the fields of the Endesa League, he began the torture. A bulge on his calcaneus, the heel bone, hurt his Achilles tendon. Physiotherapy and insoles were not enough and he underwent a first arthroscopy.

An intervention that depends on keeping him at the foot of the canon day after day until 2018. During a preseason game, in Granada, — “I can’t forget that day,” Jiménez sighs on the phone — the pangs returned. Neither anti-inflammatories nor corticosteroids are produced by the effect that, when you enter the first month of 2019, you are proposing to a new person. “But this time the pain did not go away at any time after the operation. Something smelled bad.” Nevertheless, he kept whistling, stubborn, until he was barely able to put his foot down. That was when he went looking for doctor Mikel Sanchez. “I arrived in Vitoria, at his clinic, and he asked me: ‘Could you stay tomorrow? Let’s start with intraosseous injections. At four months all seemed to be going well and as I was jogging gently I felt a pop.”

The moment of truth (and its endless potholes)

The tendon had ruptured in two points, it had to be operated but, in the middle, the pandemic had broken out. On May 22 — “I remember it because it is my wife’s birthday” — in 2020, the first confinement restrictions had just been lifted, Jiménez ostensibly limped back to the Mikel Sánchez Arthroscopic Surgery Unit, in Vitoria, from his native Puerto Real and entered the operating room. And, although the surgery went well, the complications did not stop. In July, already trying on, supporting the foot without the immobilization boot, he verified how it was bruising. He touched it and the play was on fire. “It had turned into a tendon rupture from another place.” “There”, he confesses, he felt the hardest blow. “I thought about the withdrawal. How many more times do you have to start from scratch for nothing?

Jimenez did not give up. The surgeon, with the trunk loaded and heading to his holiday destination, received the news of the umpteenth mishap from the referee and turned around and operated on him again – fourth intervention. He had to restore five centimeters of the tendon. And, on this occasion, he asked Jiménez to continue his recovery in Vitoria, with his team. “I rented an apartment. From Monday to Friday I dedicated myself entirely to physiotherapy and exercise to recover, and on weekends I returned to Cádiz to be with my family. So for months.” A sacrifice that finally had his reward. When the following season, in September, he underwent the physical tests to return to refereeing and passed them without hindrance —and without pain— he was emotional: “I said to myself: ‘that’s it, I’m finally going to return to basketball.”

What really matters

An isokinetic machine possible that Jiménez would not force with the recovery exercises: he would gain mobility without the risk of excess and recovery; The first jogs could be done on an antigravity machine that allowed him to run with just 10% of his weight and gradually increase that load, calculated to the millimeter. Some technological innovations that, without a doubt, are helpful, but that Mikel Sánchez affirms that they are hardly more than that: an assistant assistant, by no means the reason that decides the success or failure to overcome an injury of such magnitude. “Santi Cazorla wanted to play football again above all things, he believed in his possibilities even more than I did, and he put in hours and, little by little, he erased any limits and recovered excellent form. Benjamin Jimenez, older, did exactly the same. But it is that I can also count cases of housewives who with destroyed knees have gone back to skiing working on their recovery alone in the gym ”, argues Sánchez.

Factors that affect the recovery of a lesson, says doctor Mikel Sánchez

• The patient mindset. A tenacious and active person is more likely to succeed.
• The biological capacity. The physical condition of each body is different. An elite athlete will normally recover faster and recover to a higher physical level.
• medicine and physiotherapy. The better the medical and recovery work, the easier it will be to get a full recovery.

“A brilliant surgery without the rigorous effort on the part of the patient during rehabilitation will probably end up average; however, a more ordinary medical work that counts on the scrupulous commitment of the patient after the operating room, not only recovering but staying active and fit, I am sure will have a happy ending. Everyone who decides to undergo surgery must be convinced of what he supposes: he has to make a commitment. He must do everything in his power to recover the physical level he had before because, if not, why is he having surgery? He fights to the end ”. Word of Mikel Sanchez, word of a wise man like few there are in his field.

a wavering emotion

Without motivation the goal is not reached but, like any other emotion, motivation is not stable: it fluctuates, and one should not punish yourself when you feel helpless. Benjamín Jiménez was taught in common by a psychologist, Lara Jiménez (“There is no relationship, just the coincidence of a surname too much!” She says between laughs on the phone from Avila). He had weekly sessions with her, which consisted not in trying to stay perpetually motivated—that’s impossible, no matter how much the referee’s itch to return to the trading floor was around—but in arming himself with tools not to give up. “The main ingredients for walking a path this long and with so many ups and downs are commitment and flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances; and the most common enemies, that cognitive rigidity that forces you to think that if something has gone wrong it is that the process cannot be fixed or, worse, the longing for a magical and sudden solution, without assuming each step”.

Lara was able to get into Benjamin’s play. After all, she is also a basketball fan —and also plays for a senior team in Ávila and is a referee—, and, in this way, it was not difficult for her to convince him that body and mind are one and, therefore, , that psychology would also help in his complete physical recovery.

Benjamín Jiménez is going to turn 47, a whole life around basketball. His father was a player: “I would go on Saturdays to play the parties that he organized with his friends; and when I got older, I was the one who organized them and invited my father to play with my colleagues”. That emotion continues to accompany him when he referees, after more than three decades in the profession. He doesn’t abandon him. And, without that feeling, his battered foot would have won him the game at the basket.