The One Athlete Nobody Is Monitoring

You collect a wellness score from forty players every morning. Sleep, soreness, mood, energy, out of five, in the app before they have their boots on. You know who is trending down before he does. Now tell me the last time anybody collected one from you.

I wrote a list years ago. It has not aged.

You snap unnecessarily at family. You cannot wait to get the kids to bed. Reasonable questions from your partner become incessant nagging. Your efficiency drops. Your clarity of thought becomes clouded. Creativity becomes an effort. Motivation for everything wanes. You stop moving. The path forward becomes unclear. Your guts churn. You wake up in the middle of the night. You cannot turn off the noise in your head. You look tired. You feel tired. People start to comment on how tired you look. Little things seem massive, and little things no longer seem to matter. You fatigue quickly. You look forward to coffee. You crave comfort food. You crave alcohol.

Now read it back as a report.

If one of your players handed you that on a Monday, would you clear him to train?

You would not. You would flag him in the meeting. You would pull his loading, you would walk it to the doctor, and you would not let it run another fortnight to see whether it settled itself. You would act, because acting on it is the entire reason you collect it.

You have never once done that for yourself. Nobody has asked you to. There is no form with your name on it.

That is not your failing and it is not your club being cruel. It is a norm, and it is almost invisible because everybody in the building is inside it. Athletes are the asset. Staff are the infrastructure. Infrastructure does not get screened, it gets replaced when it stops working.

You agreed to that, quietly, some years ago. Agreeing to it is part of how you got the job.

I am not going to tell you the work should be easier. It is meant to be demanding. Elite sport is not a wellness retreat and I would not want it to be.

You already know the difference, because you spend your whole week making exactly that distinction for somebody else.

Underneath that list I put four things, and they are deliberately small.

Move. Anything that gets your blood flowing.
Quieten your mind. Meditate, breathe, whatever it takes to reduce the noise in your head.
Finish one thing. The to-do list is massive. Pick one, nail it immediately, leave the rest to tomorrow.
Tell your family you love them.

None of that is treatment and I am not pretending it is. It is what you do in the next hour, the same way you do not diagnose a hamstring on the sideline. You get him off the park and you sort it out properly on Monday.

I used to finish this by telling you to realise things are not that bad and get on with it.

I am not finishing it that way anymore.

Read that sentence against the list above and you can see the problem. If a player handed you that report and you told him it was not that bad and to get on with it, you would deserve to lose your accreditation. You would not accept it from a colleague. You would not accept it from yourself about an athlete. The only person you let say it is you, about you.

What you would actually do for him is take it seriously and put him in front of somebody qualified. So do that. Talking to your GP is not a failure of toughness. It is the same call you make for your players every week and get paid to make well.

You are the one athlete in that building nobody is monitoring. There is no staff wellness app, there is no Monday flag with your name on it, and there is not going to be. So run it yourself.

Score yourself on your own form, this morning, honestly.
Read it as though it belonged to somebody you are responsible for.
Then do what you would do for him.
And if the score is bad enough that you would have picked up the phone for him, pick it up.

It is your responsibility to manage it. It was never your responsibility to manage it alone.