Two drill bits broke on the bone.

They had to send for a third.

That is what the surgeon told me when I came round from ankle surgery. One plate, ten screws.

I was twenty-two. It was the best thing anybody said to me that year.

I am not going to over-explain what happened in that room. I will say I stopped arguing with it.

Then emerged the idea of GRITFUL — the relentless mindset to suffer, and then achieve your desires, through fitness and nutrition.

What it was competing with

I had waited years for the role I had just been given. One play took it. I did not get the season I had been promised since I was a kid — I got a surgery, and a lot of time lying still, and a new sentence to describe myself with: somebody who used to play football.

Then a man in scrubs told me my bones had destroyed his equipment. Whatever I thought I had just lost, the thing that made me was still in the room.

What I did with the time

Got strong on the parts of me that still worked. 185 to 215 in two months, most of it arms, because arms were what was available.

Nobody was watching, nobody was counting it, and it did not help my ankle. It is the training I am proudest of.

What happens after the last game

Athletes get told they are exceptional at one thing for fifteen years. Family, coaches, everybody, all the way down. What nobody tells you is what the life after that thing looks like.

Being an athlete was the easy part. You had been one since you were small, and somebody else built the structure around you. The hard part is afterwards, when nobody is counting your reps and nobody is waiting on you at five in the morning.

You already know how to suffer. Running ten hundred-yard sprints before practice has even started — that does not expire when the sport does. It transfers. It just needs something to attach itself to.

What I actually believe

Go back to the 185 to 215. I did not feel like doing that. Not once, not on any of those mornings. It was on the calendar, so it happened — and by the end of it I wanted to.

I did not invent that habit. My father was military, so discipline turned up early in my house and it was not presented as a choice. What I had to learn on my own was how to keep it once nobody was enforcing it.

Who I coach

People in their twenties and thirties who used to have a structure and do not have one now. Ex-athletes mostly, because I speak the language and I have been exactly where they are standing. But it is the same problem for anyone who finished school, or changed jobs, or spent so long running everybody else’s week that they stopped having one of their own.

I can build the plan. The showing up stays yours — that part does not transfer, and you would not want it to.