Waking up from the dream
Kirsten van Heerden is helping elite athletes find life outside sports.
Former elite swimmer - former Olympic and Commonwealth swimmer for Team SA - Dr. Kirsten van Heerden doesn’t just want to help elite athletes perform at their best, she wants to help them live their best lives in the process.
It took Kirsten a little while to get used to the fact that she was no longer Kirsten van Heerden the swimmer. That had been her identity for 14 years of her life. For 14 years her life revolved around swimming. Rain or shine, freezing cold or sweltering hot, Kirsten van Heerden swam from 5:30 to 7am from Monday to Friday, and every afternoon from 3:30 to 6pm.
Swimming came first, and swimming related activities - like gym - came second, everything else came afterwards. Her studies took a little longer than most because she was studying part-time. It took her 5 years to complete a 3-year undergrad degree. If she was going to pursue her dreams of being an elite swimmer, there was no way she was going to do it as a full-time student.
“When I was studying, my studies took longer because they were part-time so that I could train and compete,” she says.
This is not odd. Professional sports people do it more often than not. Others suspend their learning altogether. Tabraiz Shamsi abandoned his university studies to be able to move from Johannesburg to Durban. He had been studying accounting with University of Johannesburg when Dolphins offered him his first professional contract. Here is what he was faced with: continue with education - while trying to earn a spot at Lions - or accept the contract that Dolphins was offering.
It was his first professional contract, a goal he had been working towards for years. It was a lifechanging opportunity. This was the fulfilment of a lifelong dream, an opportunity that he would probably never get again. He chose his career.
That is the price of the dream, it doesn’t allow you to have other dreams, and that is one of the things that Kirsten van Heerden is tackling in her work with athletes: reminding them that they can and must have other dreams outside of their sports careers.
"A lot of times athletes tend to focus on this very short term and forget that there is going to be this long life afterwards," says Kirsten. "I try to make them realize that they can have another dream. After putting the sporting dream first, what will they do next after it is all done?''
Let’s face it, you are not going to find a 50 or 55 year-old elite athlete, at least not a cricketer. More than half of all professional athletes will need to find some sort of employment after retirement, and for the few that make it as coaches, consultants, commentators, it is an easy transition. But, there are only a few such posts available, so many need to look outside the sports that dominated their lives for so long. They have to enter the civilian world and be civilians, to use a military term.
Speaking of the military, there are quite a few studies that have looked at military veterans after retirement, and they all have the same conclusion: a large number of them struggle with adjusting to civilian life. The loss of income, purpose, structure and community, those are some of the things that contribute to the struggle. I came across a study that put a number on the veterans that struggle: 1 in 4. That is a lot. The number rises to 1 in 2 if they serve during periods of conflict.
Elite sports are designed like the military, they are all-consuming. So, it's no surprise that retired cricketers face just about the same struggles as military veterans. And Kirsten has some quite alarming figures gathered from her research: about 1 in 4 of athletes suffer from depression, anxiety and stress once they retire and try to adjust to ordinary life.
It is probably harder on athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds who see their entry into professional sports as a way out for them and their families. Many of them often do not have structures to support them post retirement.
“The sporting world sets it up that athletes are commodities,” says Kirsten. “You give your life to this sport, 20 years or more, but once you retire the sport forgets about you. This is very difficult for athletes to grapple with. Suddenly they have lost value, so to speak. It's a painful reality.”
It’s like losing family. For most of your career, you are part of this team, part of this incredible group of people sharing a journey. You have belonging. And the day after you retire, you are suddenly no longer a part of that group, of that family. Invitations to social outings dwindle in number. You lose that part of belonging to this side and suddenly you are isolated, alone, and you have to face the world without the backing of your team or organization.
According to Dr. van Heerden, the number of athletes who felt let down by their organizations and teams is huge. When she was writing her book, Waking From The Dream, she came across a lot of former athletes who felt used and discarded.
Another startling revelation is that 1 in 2 retired professional athletes feel that they lose their identity once they stop competing. That’s probably the biggest struggle that athletes have to contend with after retirement: a loss of identity. The one question that many grapple with after retirement is: if I am not a cricketer, then who am I? If I am not out there making runs or taking wickets, then who am I?
And, these are not just numbers from various studies and patients (sorry, sportspeople) that she works with, this is also personal for Dr. Kirsten van Heerden. Like many professional athletes, she too started very young and dedicated her life to swimming. A journey that started because her doctor had advised her mother that swimming was good for an asthmatic child.
“It is very interesting to note the number of asthmatic professional swimmers,” she laughs. “They are many.”
Anyway, the result was that her mother took her to the pool a lot when she was a child, and when she was around 4 she was always tagging along when her older brother went for his swimming lessons, probably because she had already developed a love of the water by then.
“I would go along just to play in the water. I was a little bit young for the swimming lessons. Eventually the teacher just told my mother to let me join the lessons as well. And I just loved it.”
By the time she was 12 she already knew that she wanted to be a swimmer, she had lived her life in the water for so long that she had no doubt in her mind about her path in life. Of course, she did have an interest in other activities like netball and gymnastics, but there was no way she was going to be a gymnast with her height - she was a little too tall, with no signs of slowing down - and she was just not brilliant enough at netball to consider it.
So, she really understands the difficulty in trying to carve a new identity after living under a specific identity, as Kirsten the swimmer, for so long.
"It took me a long time to think of myself as a psychologist and not as a swimmer,” Kirsten admits. “When someone asked me what I do, I would immediately go, I am a swimmer. It took me about a couple of years before I got used to the idea that I was no longer a swimmer."
Athletes spend so much time working towards the goal of professionalism that the moment they make it, they seem to forget that they will only live the dream for so long. Or maybe they are so acutely aware of how short it is that they focus too much on it that they forget about everything else. Either way…
“So, while you are living the dream, you need constant reminders to not forget about the alarm clock. The alarm is going to go off and you will have to wake up from this dream,” she adds.
And part of her work is to try and provide that constant reminder and tools to athletes for them to not just pay attention to the alarm, but to know how to move forward once it goes off. Not many athletes are able to do what Tabraiz Shamsi did. After abandoning his University of Johannesburg degree he then did a marketing degree while playing in Durban - and he also did a few courses with University of Cape Town.
He was able to do this and focus, probably because of the difficulty he faced in breaking into the first team, despite his talents. So he could have felt that he needed a safety net more than most. It is also possible that he is just level-headed. It is a bit difficult to pinpoint why younger Tabraiz Shamsi created the safety net. But, older Shamsi will point out to you that it doesn’t matter how good you are, it will come to an end at some point. It has to, because the dream doesn’t last forever.
"But it's not just life after cricket, when you retire, that I try to empower athletes with. It is also life apart from cricket, whilst they are still playing," says Kirsten.
She feels it is important for athletes to actively cultivate lives separate from their sporting personas, besides family life. Creating that balance is critical for good mental health.
She speaks from experience, “At some point I realized that swimming had become a central point of my identity. My self-worth too. When I was doing well I felt really good about myself and when I did badly I would feel miserable.”
It this attachment of self-worth and identity to sports careers that probably makes it very difficult for athletes to walk away from the middle for mental health reasons while they are still active. With top stars like Glenn Maxwell and most recently Ben Stokes doing so, the door is opening wider for more cricketers to do so. However, the problem remains that many wait for themselves to reach breaking point before they take a step back.
That is what athletes are conditioned to do, they push until there is nothing left in the tank. No pain, no gain. Anything less is frowned upon and looked at as a lack of commitment. Hell, people are more ready to celebrate sportspeople who “power through” physical and mental injury than those that try to avoid them. Michael Jordan’s “Flu game”, where he dominated despite suffering from food poison, cricketers who bat with broken fingers to save or win matches, Brett Favre playing a blinder while grieving the death of his father.
That is what we define as courage. Anything less is not worth acknowledging. The reason, probably, being that many confuse mental toughness and mental well-being. Mental toughness is the ability to perform under pressure and good mental health is about mental well-being. One can have both or one of the other. Dr. van Heerden would like to see a better understanding of that fact. It might be difficult to do so in the minds of the fans and spectators, they want to live vicariously through their heroes, but she hopes it will not be too difficult with the athletes themselves.
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“They don't have to wait until they reach burnout before they take a step back, take a mental break,” she says. "After all, if we use performance as a general benchmark for mental health, then there is a problem, because mental toughness is not mental wellbeing.”
It is concerning to her that mental health only becomes an issue when an athlete falters or fails to perform. She would be happier if more athletes paid as much attention to it as they do to their physical health, and she has a smashing analogy: “You brush your teeth everyday, morning and night. You take care of your teeth on a daily basis. How many athletes are as intentional about their mental health in the same manner? We all take better care of our teeth than we do of our mental health.”
Kirsten hopes that by helping athletes realize all these things, then maybe she can help them live fuller lives while still active and have less difficulty with adjusting to life after retirement.
And, as they say, old habits die hard. 15 years after retirement, she still has an early morning swim. It’s a part of her that she has not completely let go of. The difference, though, is that now she doesn’t do it rain or shine, hot or freezing. No. And the time is shorter too. Just twice a week, from around 5:30 to 6:30, and mostly in the summer.
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