2018 PWA Slalom Women’s Vice World Champion Lena Erdil suffered a serious foot injury last year in Pozo, taking her off the water for over 8 months. Lena talks us through her rehab, valuable life lessons learned and reflects on the art of risk-taking in her chosen profession.
The biggest fear of every athlete is to injure themselves, especially when it’s an injury that could impact you permanently. However, having been injury free my entire career, one of my biggest fears was to compete in the waves in Pozo. Competition always pushes you to your limits and with the hardcore conditions there I always saw it as a risk maybe not worth taking during an unfinished slalom season. German philosopher Volker Caysa says, “Sport is the school of dealing with risks. Sport as the art of risk-taking is the ability to choose dangers and uncertainties and turn them into calculated, manageable and justifiable ventures”. So with my slalom season having finished early and the 2018 PWA Vice-World Champion title in my pocket, I believed it was time to overcome my fears and travel to Pozo for the PWA wave event. In the spirit of sports philosophy, self-improvement and avid to take in all of life’s lessons I was ready to push my jumping skills to the next level in some wild conditions. Little did I know that this trip was going to have much bigger lessons to teach me.
OUCH
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