E3: What It Takes to Become World-Class — Ruth Astle

Before we come on to the diagnosis, in that period where you can't put your finger on it, but your body's just not feeling it and your profession at this stage all rides on you being able to perform and feel strong and healthy.

Maybe this is upon reflection rather than at the time, but would you draw out any learnings of how you deal with that uncertainty? Was there anything that was...

helpful or perhaps when again perhaps when you look back at it was there maybe something you you would talk to your former self and say you should have done x y and z in order to deal with that uncertainty and that doubt

yeah i think it's really hard because i think it is quite individual in terms of kind of what works for people or what doesn't I don't I don't think I dealt with it particularly well I

think you can

probably talk to uh yeah my partner and some of my friends and they'll probably be like yeah she wasn't a particularly great person to be around for a lot of that period because yeah I think like all the things that kind of made me happy in terms of being able to train properly and feeling fit being able to go and race like I basically just had none of that so I felt like I was just kind of going through the motions but also I feel like I tried different things like I'd actually I'd changed coach by that point and my new coach was like you just need to take a break and I sort of tried that but then I was like well if I'm not doing anything then I feel even worse about myself so was then trying to do sort of fun stuff But yeah, I felt like we kind of got into this cycle of like, I wasn't really doing anything properly.

So I wasn't feeling particularly good about the training anyway.

But then when I was trying to actually train, I wasn't training properly because the body wasn't really letting me.

So then this whole like vicious cycle of just like, yeah, basically going through the motions and not feeling particularly great about any of it.

Yeah, I think for me, I don't think I really got to a good place with it really until the diagnosis, because up to that point I was like, yeah, like there is something going on, but no one seems to be able to tell me what it is.

And I think having already gone through that whole period of uncertainty with trying to work out what the calf was, and that took so long.

And I was just like, well, I can't, you know, I was like, why can't I just have like an easy something to diagnose that I can just do something about? Cause I think it's the, it's the not being able to do something about it.

That's like the hard thing, especially when you're the kind of person that you're like, I just want to put in, you know, I've got my plan of how I'm going to get to this bit.

And you want to feel like you're doing something.

And I was like, I literally can't do anything.

And like everything I seem to try, I was like, I've tried rest.

I tried not resting.

I've tried just doing fun stuff.

You know, I've tried all these things and nothing seems to be helping.

Um, Yeah, I think like I then, I definitely got to a point of at least had pretty good perspective that even though that whole big part of my life was not doing what I wanted it to do, like life was generally pretty good.

So like that sort of helped.

And then I think taking on the role with TBF events and being event director at the end of last year was like helpful to kind of just have something that I could be like, okay, Even while my body is not working that well, like I've got something that I can do and do properly.

Mm-hmm.

So yeah, I think for me, it was having something that I could do.

Yeah.