Eimear Ryan: Daring greatly to get back in the camogie arena

You love the sport despite the bruises, the rainy training sessions and the lack of fanfare. You’ve put in a fair amount of years. Will you do another?

Wed, 08 Dec, 2021 - 17:10

Eimear Ryan

Are you still at the camogie?

It’s a question that comes up a lot, over the Christmas break. You might meet cousins or schoolfriends or college friends who haven’t seen you in a while. You’re trying to place each other, colour in the sketched outline: Jobs and partners and kids and cities of residence. And sport.

“Ah yeah, still going,” you say.

You see them do the mental arithmetic. Chances are they know the year you finished school, or graduated college, or played minor. It’s a while back now.

Apropos of nothing, you bring up Pauline McCarthy, the unstoppable 62-year-old who scored a goal in the Limerick junior B ladies football final last month.

“Lots of people put pressure on you but why should you give up something if you like doing it?” she told the Limerick Leader after helping St Ailbes to victory. But Pauline is an outlier.

To be fair, it’s a question worth asking. You love the sport despite the bruises, the rainy training sessions, the sometimes crushing disappointments and the general lack of fanfare. You’ve put in a fair amount of years. Will you do another?

There is a sense of unfinished business. An eminently avoidable injury-interrupted your 2021 season. You have to tell a succession of nurses, doctors, physios, friends, and team-mates how you came by this injury, and the embarrassment does not diminish with each telling. Suffice to say, your skateboarding days are over.

It’s a young woman’s game in a lot of ways — skateboarding, certainly, but also camogie. You’re astonished by the young talent coming through in your club — how fearless they are, how calm under pressure. That enviable injection of pace. And then there’s the visible strength of today’s inter-county stars, years of quality S&C under their belts.

The routines posted to Instagram: Dumbbells, Gym+Coffee, dog-walking, sea-swimming. Entire lives geared towards excellence. You were never that disciplined, not even when you were their age. Could you be that disciplined now?

The first set of physio exercises were very modest in scope. You think of that scene in Kill Bill, where Uma Thurman is in the back of a car after waking up from a coma, trying to wiggle her big toe.

It’s not as bad as all that, of course, but when you’ve been in a cast for six weeks, you begin to depersonalise your injured limb. You can’t see it, and you can’t manoeuvre it without using your hands or crutches; it no longer feels yours. That first set of exercises is all about becoming reacquainted. Rotating the joint as much as you can.

Moving it from left to right, as far as it will go, imitating the movement of windscreen wipers. And yes, lots of toe-wiggling.

You are told your dorsiflexion will never been the same. You love this word, dorsiflexion, even as it describes your limitations. It means you can’t really squat anymore, or properly bend your leg forward. Put your toe to the wall, then move your knee forward to meet the wall also. Easy, right? Now try on your bad leg.

“It’s great that you’re still fairly young and fit,” your physio tells you, “it’ll help your recovery.”

And you are lucky in that respect, but in hurling years, you’re old.

Perspective is everything.

Even when you get your cast off, you use your crutches to get up the stairs that night.

After only six weeks, you trust the crutches more than your own two feet.

It comes back slowly, the trust. The sole of your repaired foot gets pins and needles when you put it flush to the floor, no longer used to that sort of contact.

You can stand, but walking feels much harder. It means putting most of your weight on the dodgy foot. You laugh out loud in the kitchen when you take your new first steps, startling the cat.

Walking, swimming, cycling. One by one, they all come back.

Your physio tells you it’s time to try running but you’re afraid, afraid, afraid. You tried it once on the treadmill in the gym and you were convinced your foot was going to shatter.

You know it’s all in your head, this feeling, but it still causes your heart to judder in your chest. It’s wild, the effect that the brain can have on the body.

At your parents’ house, on the big lawn out the back with the dog running circles around you, you make yourself jog slow circles. It’s not pretty, but it’s a start.

You used to be very cynical in your youth — unemotional, hard even — but as you’ve gotten older that thick skin has become more permeable. You find yourself welling up at books, movies, poignant Christmas ads. You do a bit of yoga and meditation. You read the odd self-help book.

One of these is Daring Greatly by Brene Brown, which takes its title from the following speech by Theodore Roosevelt, the first and lesser of the Roosevelt presidents: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood … who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

This has become known as the ‘man in the arena’ speech, and not, strangely, the ‘hurler on the ditch’ speech. But it cheers you up, for some reason. Maybe it’s not self-defeating to pursue something where you’re constantly coming up short. Maybe it’s daring greatly.

Are you still at the camogie?

Yes, I am still at it — or at the very least, camogie is still at me.