The Come Back Kings

Do what you love often enough, hard enough, and you’re bound to break down. Pro athletes Ryan Sandes, Wade Young and Matt Trautman all suffered serious injuries – and never lost their love of competing. Here’s what it takes to come back stronger than ever.

- Jazz Kuschke

NO ONE HAS MORE MENTAL GRIT THAN RYAN SANDES . Ultra-trail running requires the kind of stubborness most of us would call obsession – like a dog with a bone, he just keeps coming back for more. On the back of a massive 2014, where he ran the La Transgrancanaria 125km, set a new Drakensberg Grand Traverse record of 41 hours, then took on the Mount Fuji 100-miler and even tackled Western States, the world’s oldest and, most prestigious 100-mile race, the 34-year-old was laid low by glandular fever. All that running left him too run down to fight it off, and it lingered in his system that he wasn’t able to finish some pretty big races.

“I didn’t finish Transvulcania, in the Canary Islands, but I wasn’t too fazed because Western States was always my focus,” he says. “Then I got sick just before the race, in June. Obviously I was super bummed, but maybe a day or two after that I decided to put all those months training and effort into Ultra Trail Mont Blanc instead.”

Ultra-Trail Mont Blanc is the most prestigious trail race in the world. Starting and finishing in the tiny town of Chamonix, it swarms with runners, supporters and crew. If you rock up with an immune system that’s not as its strongest, picking up a bug is easy: “I tried to be super-vigilant and washed my hands all the time and didn’t shake too many peoples’ hands,” Sandes says, “but I still went down with a severe stomach bug.”

Forced to also pull out, this was the final straw that signalled the end of his 2015 season. “My system was just very fatigued. All the tests showed I still had glandular fever in my system, and though, it was super low after UTMB, my white blood cell count was still really low,” Sandes says. “Technically the bug was out of my system, but its effects can linger,” he says.