CONOR Meyler has opened up on the pain and misery of a season wiped out by injury, which prevented him from making a single appearance for Tyrone.
The former Allstar has had two operations on a knee injury, and continues to work towards a return to fitness following a number of setbacks.
He told the RTE GAA Podcast that his efforts to find the road to recovery have been all-consuming.
“There’s more miles on the clock, and it hurts more as the years go on.
“When you’re young, you think it’s going to last forever, but I’m 29 now, and I’m thinking, will I not play at all this year, with the knee injury,” he said.
“You miss it, you maybe take it for granted.
“I have had two surgeries now, I have torn most of the cartilage in the knee, so it’s pretty bad.
Tyrone’s early exit from the All-Ireland series in a shock preliminary quarter-final defeat to Roscommon brought an end to Meyler’s hopes of returning for the latter stages of the Championship, but he’s hoping to salvage part of the season on the club scene.
“I was actually back into full training and going well, so in one sense it was like, okay, you got there, but it wasn’t quite the fairytale ending of running out on to Croke Park that I had envisaged.
“That said, you would still do it all again, all of the sleepless nights and the hours of training, just to try and get that chance again.
“I was told in February just to hang up the boots for the year, forget about it, but that wouldn’t sit comfortably with me, so I threw everything at it and nearly got back, but then I hurt my achilles.
“I’m in with the consultant again next week, I don’t know how that will go, but I’m going to keep throwing everything at it anyway.”
The lonely existence of an injured sportsman became a reality for the Omagh, St Enda’s man as he pursued every possible route out of just injury hell.
“Because of the injury, it did become a bit all-consuming. And I think when you’re injured, you even train more.
“When you’re fit, you go to training, you can compartmentalise it switch off when you go home. That’s grand, you’re fit, you’re healthy.
“When you’re rehabbing, you’re injured, it’s kinda 24/7. For me, walking down the stairs, in pain, it’s the first thing you think of in the morning, or if you’re going to bed in pain.
“I have been icing every day, getting different kings of treatments, shock-wave, hyperbaric chambers and cryotherapy, and still doing the meditation and breath work as well.
“And that’s really to try and bring me back round from just how obsessive we can get with the training.”
Countless journeys from Belfast to Garvaghey merely added to the frustration as he remained on the periphery while the rest of the Red Hand squad gave it everything on the training field.
“When you’re rehabbing, and driving up the road, you lose the joy and fun that you get from just playing the game, and yet you’re still there every night.
“We could have trained 150 times this year, and you’re up and down the road to do a gym session, really, and I’m up in Belfast, which is an hour and 15 minutes.”
Meyler is currently studying for a PhD with the Technological University of the Shannon, researching the areas of Sport, Leadership, and Gender with a focus on the integration of Gaelic Games.
Integration is an issue which he feels the Association has been too slow in addressing.
“If we were to get an integration in gaelic games, I think it would be one of the biggest things to happen in Irish sport.
“But it won’t be quite straight-forward, I would imagine, because it’s so nuanced.
“I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago in Portsmouth, and you’re trying to explain the context and how it works, but I would struggle to stand over gaelic games and say we have got the best game in the world, when I know we’re segregating based on genders, and the opportunities that would have been presented to me as a young boy compared to the young girl going down to start her under-age career are very different.”
The 2021 All-Ireland winner was surprised when he began work on his chosen subject of integration that virtually no research has been done on the topic.
“I went down that route of looking at gender equality in sport and leadership, and at the time, there was talk of integration, so I thought it was too good of an opportunity not to do a bit of research on this, because when we started to look, there was no research at all.
“Like a lot of things in gaelic games, we’re quite traditional and parochial.
“It’s our greatest strength, but it can also hold us back from looking ahead too.”
