Ankle Sprain Recovery for Triathletes: Rehab, Mindset & Returning to Training

A week before a planned trip, I suffered an ankle sprain that stopped training completely. As a triathlon coach, it forced me to step back, not just physically, but mentally and rethink how I approach injury and recovery.

In this episode, I share what ankle sprain rehab actually looks like for triathletes, including the mindset challenges that come with time off, loss of fitness, and uncertainty around returning to training.

We cover:

•  How to approach injury recovery as an endurance athlete 
•  Common mistakes triathletes make during rehab 
•  Staying consistent when you can’t train normally 
•  Rebuilding confidence and returning to training safely 

I also share a powerful moment with my son Milo, what helped me mentally during rehab, and what it’s been like getting back to pain-free cycling as I look ahead to training again.

If you're dealing with an injury, coming back from time off, or trying to balance recovery with performance, this episode will give you a clearer, more sustainable approach.

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Transcript

Hi and welcome to todays episode, it’s just me on my own today, and I’m going to talk about What an Ankle Sprain Taught Me About Identity, Recovery, and Letting Go

About 4 weeks ago and A week before a bouldering trip to Fontainebleau, I sprained my ankle.

At first, I told myself it was probably fine. I could still walk to the car, I drove home, and I think part of me just didn’t want to believe it might be serious. 

But by that evening, the reality started to land. This wasn’t just a small tweak. It was the kind of injury that suddenly changes your plans, your routines, and the things you’ve been building toward for months.

And if you’re an athlete, or honestly just someone who loves having something to look forward to, you’ll know that an injury is never only physical. It’s logistical, emotional, and psychological. It doesn’t just affect your body. It affects your sense of momentum, your identity, and the future you thought you were walking into.

That’s what I want to talk about in this episode: not just the injury itself, but what it brought up, what it forced me to confront, and how I’m learning to move through recovery in a healthier way, than I would have before

The next day, I went to A&E to rule out a fracture. By that point, deep down, I already knew this was worse than I’d hoped.

What hit hardest wasn’t even the pain. It was the implications.

I knew I wouldn’t be climbing in Fontainebleau. I knew I’d miss an upcoming bouldering final. And almost immediately, my mind jumped ahead and started rewriting the next few months in the worst possible way. It was like, in one moment, the whole timeline I had carefully imagined for myself just disappeared.

I think that’s one of the hardest things about injury. We don’t just grieve the physical setback. We grieve the version of life we thought we were about to live.

The trip. The competition. The progress. The plans. The little milestones you’d attached so much meaning to.

And when that gets taken away, even temporarily, it can feel surprisingly destabilising.

Pretty quickly, I realised I had a choice.

Not a choice about whether I was injured — that part was already decided. But a choice about how I was going to respond.

I could resist it. I could stay in denial and keep hoping I’d somehow push through. Or I could spiral into that place of “everything is ruined now,” where all I could see was what I’d lost.

I’ve done both of those things before.

With previous injuries, I’ve either tried to override the reality of what my body was telling me, or I’ve gone fully into doom mode and obsessed over everything I couldn’t do. Neither of those responses helped me heal. They just made the whole process harder.

So this time, I wanted to try something different.

Not pretending it was all fine. Just acceptance.

Acceptance that this was real. Acceptance that my plans needed to change. Acceptance that I was going to have to create a different path than the one I’d originally imagined.

And honestly, that sounds simple, but it’s not. Acceptance can feel like giving up when you’re used to pushing hard. But actually, for me, it was the first step toward moving forward.

In the middle of all of this, my son Milo said something that really stayed with me.

He said: “The universe I created never really existed.”

And that landed.

Because he was right. The future I was grieving was, in many ways, a story I had built in my head. It felt real because I had invested in it emotionally. I had pictured it, planned it, attached meaning to it. But it was never guaranteed.

That doesn’t mean it didn’t matter. It did matter. I was excited. I cared deeply.

But hearing that helped me loosen my grip a bit. It reminded me that maybe the pain wasn’t only from the injury itself, maybe part of it was from clinging to a version of reality that was never promised.

And weirdly, I found that comforting.

Because if that imagined future could dissolve, then maybe I wasn’t trapped. Maybe I could create a new timeline. Maybe this was a detour, not an ending.

That shift didn’t magically make everything easy, but it gave me a place to stand.

What helped most was deciding not to repeat my old patterns.

Instead of pushing through in denial, and instead of collapsing into helplessness, I chose what I think of now as the third way.

I got help from a physio. I made a recovery plan. I focused on what I could do rather than obsessing over what I couldn’t.

That mindset sounds obvious, but in practice it meant a lot of small decisions every day.

It meant respecting the healing process instead of trying to rush it.
 It meant asking, “What supports recovery today?” instead of “How quickly can I get back to normal?”

It meant letting rehab become its own kind of training.

And I think that was important for me, because when sport is a big part of your identity, being told to rest can feel very frustrating. So I needed to find a way to stay engaged, to stay intentional, to still feel like myself — just in a different mode.

Rehab gave me that.

One thing I realised quite quickly was how much social media would affect me.

My feed was full of climbing content, and instead of feeling inspired, I just felt confronted by everything I couldn’t do. Every video was a reminder of what I was missing. Every post had the potential to pull me back into frustration, comparison, or impatience.

So I stepped back.

Not in a dramatic, delete-everything way. Just enough to protect my attention and my mindset.

I started logging off when I noticed the content was making me feel bad.

And I think that’s worth saying out loud because sometimes we treat mental input like it doesn’t matter. But it does. What we consume shapes how we cope.

If you’re injured, or going through any kind of setback, curating your environment matters. Not just your physical environment, but your emotional one too.

Sometimes healing also means reducing noise.

I still went to Fontainebleau, but obviously not in the way I’d imagined.

I couldn’t boulder at my limit. I couldn’t have the trip I’d planned around performance. But I was still there with my family, and that meant a lot

I had to connect with the experience differently.

Instead of relating to the trip through achievement, I had to relate to it through presence. Through time together. Through noticing what was still available to me instead of only mourning what wasn’t

And honestly, that ended up being one of the most meaningful parts of the whole experience.

It reminded me that life is bigger than sport, even when sport feels like the centre of everything. It reminded me that I’m more than my climbing, more than my performance, more than the goals I happen to be chasing at any given time.

That doesn’t make those goals unimportant. It just puts them in perspective.

The good news is that rehab is going well.

I’ve now managed to cycle pain-free for two hours, and I’ve done that across multiple days, which feels like a huge milestone. 

More than that, it feels reassuring. It tells me that the work is paying off, that my body is responding, and that progress is happening even if it’s not in the exact form I would have chosen.

And for anyone who’s recovering from injury, I think those moments matter so much — not because they mean you’re instantly back, but because they rebuild trust.

Trust in your body.
Trust in the process.
Trust that healing is actually happening.

I’m also looking ahead to a training camp in Mallorca in a week’s time, and it feels really good to be excited about something again. Not in that frantic, everything-must-go-perfect way, but with a more grounded sense of optimism.

I think injury has a way of stripping things back. It forces you to ask what really matters, what you can control, and who you are when your usual outlets are taken away.

For me, one of the answers has been this: I still want to train, improve, and challenge myself. But I want to hold those things a little more lightly. I don’t want my wellbeing to rise and fall entirely with whether a plan works out exactly as I imagined.

If you’re injured right now, I know how easy it is to feel like everything has been put on hold.

But your life hasn’t stopped. Your identity hasn’t disappeared. And your recovery doesn’t have to be defined only by loss.

Maybe this is a pause. Maybe it’s a reroute. Maybe it’s an invitation to build a different kind of strength — patience, perspective, adaptability, trust.

You are still here. You are still you. And you are more than your sport.

Thanks for listening.