The pulse of your heart is hammering in your ears. You can feel it pound against the walls of you chest; a cadence that bursts with adrenaline as it surges through your veins. Your lungs are grasping for air but unable to keep up with the rampage of determination that has swept through your soul. The wheezes that have replaced your breath burn your throat begging you to reprieve them. Your legs are relentlessly thrusting you forward as your muscles scream for it all to end. Your eyes are focused on that white line they know so well; the line that has been taunting your every thought and dream. Your hand is clutched around the ball so tight your fingers might bleed. The Jaws of Life wouldn’t be able to set it free. A blur to your left closes in and threatens your immanent progression. You dance around their advance with graceful precision and adrenaline quakes from deep in your chest. It’s just you and the try line.
You spring from your feet not wanting to run any longer. Stretching out your arms you offer the ball to the safety of the try zone as your body crumples and tumbles on top of it. The dry grass burns straight through your flesh. The impact of the hard dirt reverberates through your bones. Whatever breath was left in you is knocked into another dimension. The crowd is erupting all around you as if you just saved the world. But you don’t care. You can’t feel anything but pride spreading through your heart mending any failure or disappointment that ever graced you with its presence. You can’t hear anything but the smile that has taken over your face. You just lie there. Not because you are hurt. Not because you are tired. Not because you cant get up. But because you are taking it all in. Those five seconds of euphoric bliss where you know that you just did everything in your power to safely deliver that ball home are priceless…and can be taken from you in the blink of an eye.
Hi. My name Danielle Landry, and I am a recovering rugby addict. It may sound dramatic, but I assure you, it is not a joke. It all started five years ago at the ripe age of eighteen. Fresh off a softball injury that left me with pinched nerves in both my shoulders and took away my ability to throw a softball ever again, I was looking for my next adventure. The physical therapist told me to choose a new sport…so I did: rugby. From the first second a rugby ball was entrusted in my hands, it never left my soul.
Every day at practice, I pushed myself beyond any threshold I even knew existed. I had no idea who I was proving myself to, but rugby had created a dangerous hunger for perfection deep inside me. I didn’t know it at the time, but that newfound desire would be the death of me…almost literally. Two days before our first game of the season I was informed that I would be starting in the match against Middlebury as weak side wing. All five feet, three inches, and one hundred and twenty pounds of me quivered with excitement and simultaneous fear. Twenty minutes into that game I got my first taste of unequivocal bliss when I dragged my tiny body to the try line with three opposing players attached to my legs. And thirty minutes after that I experienced my first in what was to be a long line of injuries. A severe concussion left me lying on my back completely unaware of whom or where I was for a good thirty seconds. Everything was black. I blinked. Everything was white. I blinked. Everything was spinning. I blinked. The roar of the game around me was muted by the ultrasonic waves of my brain crashing against the back of my skull. Like an idiot, I got up and finished the game not even aware that I was concussed. And because I was a rookie, I got to play all forty minutes of the second game. It wasn’t until we were all on our way to celebrate our victory as a team that someone finally realized my eyes were out of sorts and I wasn’t making sense. I spent the “third half,” as we called it, on the couch being woken up every 5 minutes by one of my teammates and later found myself at the hospital so that they could confirm what I already knew.
There is a rule in rugby that if you take a sub you can’t re-enter the game. To most people, that meant they would only come out of the game if they got hurt. To me, that meant I was never leaving that field unless someone was dragging my limp body off. With that determination and try after try I quickly worked my way up the line starting, and finishing, in every game. But as my determination grew, my body’s ability to keep up diminished.
Three semesters in, my sophomore year, the nerve damage that I had previously experience in my shoulders had found its way down to my legs. Practice was no longer just a test of how much rugby I could learn in two hours, but also how much pain I could withstand before collapsing. With every step an invisible knife sliced through my calf between my bone and my muscle and fire spread up the sides of my legs. As long as I kept moving and continued to keep my mind focused on the task at hand, I could push the pain to the back of my mind long enough to finish the drill. When I finally gave in and went to the doctors for treatment, they were baffled. Nothing could be done and I refused to even hear their notion of a solution. If I had a dollar for every time a doctor told me to stop playing rugby I could probably pay off my student loans.
Four semesters in, I was voted line captain. I was still one of the youngest on the team and it was beyond an honor, but a battle all the same. Because there were elder members on the team, I had to earn that title every second of every day. I could never show weakness and I certainly could never sit out at practice, no matter how much pain I was in. Twenty minutes into our second game of the semester I fractured my ankle and chipped off a piece of bone all in one shot. I immediately tried to stand up and found the ground coming at my face as I shouted to the empty skies. I lay there face down in the sweat-covered dirt digging my fingers into the soul of the pitch until I had enough strength in me to bite back the lashing pain and finish the game. I did just that and I’m still paying for it. I was too proud to go to the doctors and I only took a couple days off from practice to let it “heal,” but it didn’t heal. Not correctly anyway and now it never will.
Five semesters in, I had somehow managed to bulk up thirty pounds of muscle and grow another inch since freshman year and I thought I was invincible. I was never more wrong. When the chill of winter still covered our field with flakes of snow, we had to practice in the unforgiving chamber of the gymnasium. A fun game of no tackle rugby turned into an anguishing shatter of an elbow bone tip and I was once again biting back tears that threatened my façade of authority. I didn’t let anyone know that I couldn’t move my right arm and no one even knew that I had suffered an injury until the end of practice when my right elbow was visibly three times the size as my left one. I shrugged it off and waited until I was hidden in the security of my suite to put ice on it and grunt out waves of pain. I had to keep my arm in a sling via doctors orders to let what was left of my elbow bone heal but of course, I only appeased those orders during the school day. 4 o’clock came around and I was practicing rugby with one arm.
Last game of the fifth semester, the one and only time I ever came off a rugby pitch before eighty minutes was up. When you sign up for rugby, you have to pay for a rugby specific insurance and there are certain rules that can hinder your eligibility for said insurance. One of those rules is that you can have no more than three concussions. By this time I had already racked up at least three if not more, but none were as severe as that first one. Thirty minutes into the first half and I got rocked. To this day I have no idea what happened. I had the ball in my hands and then I was lying facedown on the ground with a pounding headache. I rolled over and the sun pierced through my eyelids as my body recoiled from the pain that was relentlessly surging through it. After what had to be five minutes I tried to stand up and the ref finally saw me. My ridiculous efforts to act like nothing had happened were not fooling him and he had to ask me three times if I was ok before I even could hear him. I nodded in assurance as my hands clasped the sides of my head. He completely didn’t believe me, but he had been our ref several times and knew that he wasn’t going to get me to leave the pitch. I was flyhalf now, and had been for a couple semesters, which meant I was the first person in the offensive line to receive the ball from the scrum. As the ball came spiraling in my direction my right eye went completely fuzzy and I barely caught it. Five minutes of these antics passed before I decided I wasn’t benefiting the team by staying in and ate my pride as I stepped off the pitch. Four concussions. Luckily I only went to the doctor for the first one so there was no record to prove that I was no longer illegible for insurance. And so I continued this masochistic addiction further into the dangerous depths than I thought was even possible.
Eight semesters in; my first senior year, and my last rugby overdose. I didn’t know it was even possible to be in more pain than I had already experienced. I thought there was a limit. I was under the silly impression that your body could only revolt so much. I was naïve. I was stupid. And of course, I had to learn the hard way. It started with just a ping in my lower back. An uncomfortable pinch that wouldn’t go away, not even off the field. But it grew faster than I could control it. The pinch became a knife. The knife became paralyzing. And my previous nerve damage was now joining forces and truly testing my will power. In a mud pit of a game against UVM I got sacked with ten minutes left after scoring for the last time in my rugby career. My lower back was driven into the ground and I found that new level of pain that I didn’t think existed. Like a fool I finished the game. I walked off that pitch. And it was the last time I walked for two weeks. I still refused to believe that it was over. I refused to wake up. I didn’t want to smell any damn roses; I wanted to smell the blood, sweat, and dirt of my rugby pitch. My home. I never even entertained the idea that this was the end until I wound up in three months of physical therapy and three different doctors demanded that I stopped playing rugby if I wanted to be able to walk in the next five year.
I spent the rest of the summer lost in my thoughts. I hated my body. I hated what it was taking from me. I hated everyone who didn’t understand. I couldn’t picture my life without a rugby ball in my hands. Or without a battle wound from my latest injury to show off to the world. I couldn’t imagine never going home again. Never being able to let the comfort of the rugby pitch embrace me and erase any wrong the world had done me. I had buried my life so deep in rugby that I didn’t know who I was without it.
They claim that rugby is just a sport but it’s not true. It’s a drug. It seeps in your veins and pulses through your heart. It blinds you from the rest of the world. It invaded my subconscious and flashed images of glorious victory in my mind every second of every night and day. Those dreams used to keep me alive and give me hope but now they just haunt me. I’m no longer running towards a try line in them, I’m lying on the ground helplessly clutching a ball trying to stand up. I wake up with trails of tears that escaped my unconscious mind and an unsurrendering hole in my heart. Rugby is dead. It’s nothing but a ghost to me. A glimmer of a past life that I somehow emerged from alive. One more overdose and I might have been in a wheelchair…or worse. But the first step to recovery is to address the addiction. And the amazing part about recovering, physically and mentally, is that you learn more about yourself than you ever would have if you had played it safe and followed the rules. You see, sometimes it's not until you think you have lost everything, that you realize the everything you thought you had was actually holding you back from so much more than you ever imagined.
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