There’s nothing like a career-ending injury to There’s nothing like a career-ending injury to remind an athlete that the human body is fragile. As I was wheeled toward the operating room in a hospital gurney, I contemplated my life choices.
The doors opened. Monitors beeped around me. People asked if I was comfortable as they transferred me over to the table. My doctor — a former rugby player turned orthopedic surgeon —approached me.
“How are you feeling?” he asked. aCalm and stoic, he was performing a routine procedure, even though it was borderline catastrophic for me.
I shrugged, and I told him I was okay. I didn’t tell him what I was really thinking, about how I remembered every moment and decision that led me here in the first place.
Years earlier, a thin, almost gangly girl walked into her first wrestling practice, and she had evolved into this: a decisive, muscular athlete with strong shoulders who couldn’t quite recognize herself in photos from before.
As much as I had given to this sport, as much as I loved it, it had thanked me for my loyalty with a mid-match shoulder dislocation and a torn labrum.“
Count backwards from 10,” the anesthesiologist said from behind me. As I dozed off somewhere around five, there was an uncomfortable truth swirling in my head:Forget putting on a singlet ever again — my shoulder might never regain full mobility.
The Mental Piece
There’s a particular kind of silence that follows an injury like that.
Not the grand, cinematic kind. Not the gasp of a crowd or the whistle that stops a match. That part is over quickly. It’s the aftermath: the days that follow, when the adrenaline wears off and the reality settles in. Your body, which was once so reliable and strong, becomes something unfamiliar.
Injury has a way of making athletes strangers to themselves. One moment, the body is an instrument sharpened by repetition. Next, it’s a question mark. For Miami alum Max Flory, an All-American diver and U.S. national team member, that question came at the worst possible time.
Three weeks before Flory was set to compete in the NCAA Swim & Dive Championships last year, he broke his hand hitting it on the springboard. In that moment, everything shifted for one of Miami’s top divers.
“I was in a cast for two weeks, and I couldn’t dive,” Flory said. “I couldn’t practice.” Then, three weeks later, he competed anyway.
For Flory, breaking his hand wasn’t just a setback. It was a familiar reality for athletes whose bodies are constantly pushed to their limits.
“Athletes are prone to injury because you’re just doing the same type of movement over and over again, putting stress on your body,” Flory explained. “A lot of injuries are overuse [injuries], but a lot of sports are dangerous, so you’re more prone to accidents as well.”
The body, once pushed to its limits in pursuit of greatness, suddenly demands patience instead of punishment, precision instead of power. That’s where the real work begins.
What makes the recovery possible is something scientists call neuroplasticity: the body’s ability to adapt, relearn and rebuild after trauma. It’s the reason muscles regain strength, movement returns and patterns once lost can be formed again. But while science explains how recovery happens, it doesn’t fully capture what it feels like to live through it.
The challenge of rehabilitation is that it asks athletes to redefine progress. Winning is no longer measured by times, scores or podium finishes, but by patience.
“Motivation isn’t just wanting something,” Flory said. “It usually leads to action.”
Moving Forward
Rehabilitation is often framed as are turn: a journey back to baseline, back to the version of yourself that existed before everything went wrong. For many athletes, that version is gone. What replaces it is something more complicated. It’s a negotiation between what the body was, what it is and what it can become again.
“An injury is an injury, but you can speed things up through your mindset,” Flory said. “There’s a psychological component to recovery.”
Physical therapy becomes both science and ritual. It’s a process rooted in repetition, retraining the body through small, deliberate movements until they become instinct again.
Because the hardest part isn’t always regaining strength. It’s believing your body won’t fail you again.
Flory is still navigating that balance.Even now, he’s competing through a knee injury, which forces him to constantly adjust how far he can push his body as he trains for an upcoming international competition.
“There are certain things I can’t do anymore, mostly with my knee,” Flory said.That adjustment has reshaped how he approaches training.
“I do very low reps compared to most people in practice,” he said. “But it’s not as frustrating when you leave practice still feeling good, versus when you try to do more than you can handle and you leave feeling horrible.”
And somewhere in that process of training and rehabilitating, the body begins to remember itself. Movements that once felt impossible become familiar again.Strength returns, slowly and unevenly, until one day it doesn’t feel like starting over anymore.
“The more physically fit you are, the easier it is for you to come back,” Flory said.“But there are times when you have to be conscious and hold yourself back.”
The body has to rest before it can bounce back, and sometimes, that patience makes the impossible become possible.
Three weeks after breaking his hand, Flory won the NCAA national championship in the men’s 3-meter springboard, setting a personal best.
Flory’s comeback is a reminder of what the body is capable of when given time to adapt and rebuild. Injuries stand as a reminder of how incredible the body actually is. It relearns movement. Rebuilds muscle. Scars fade, skin stretches and wounds heal.
“Pay attention and take care of your body,” Flory said. “Being able to shift that mindset away from the outcome and onto the pieces that you can actually control is one of the big things that allowed me to have such a good performance [at NCAA championships].”
Since retiring from wrestling, I find myself thinking back to that day of my surgery. Instead of fixating on how fragileI felt, I think about what came after: the slow, frustrating and often invisible work of putting myself back together. Then I focus on all the opportunities I don’t miss out on because my shoulder healed.
Injury doesn’t just teach you what your body can’t do. It forces you to learn, piece by piece, what it still can. And maybe that’s the real comeback. You don’t return to who you were before, but you learn how to trust who you are now.
words_bella armstrong. photo_wes fleischer. design_charlotte deangelis.
This article was published in Distraction’s Summer 2026 print issue.
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