The Comeback Quotient: A Get-real Guide to building mental fitness in Sport and Life is a book by Matt Fitzgerald that focuses on positive psychology as one of the driving factors in athlete development. In 9 chapters, Fitzgerald reveals how famous runners, swimmers, rowers, and even he dealt with the challenges that stood in the way of their professional careers. The author also emphasizes how psychological preparedness plays a role in developing a healthy attitude toward the problems and setbacks that often cause athletes to lose heart. Fitzgerald tells stories of how athletes have had to return to the profession, facing the difficult stages of accepting their injuries and finding ways to cope. From his perspective, many athletes are characterized by a characteristic of ultra-realism – elevating each event to the extreme of their responsibility for their decisions and their acceptance. Fitzgerald believes this trait is grounded in a tendency to desire the ideal outcome shaped by the sporting society.
Fitzgerald’s primary focus is on how to overcome the sports injury that has plagued athletes. Primarily, he discusses how the ultra-realism of athletes may be the key to accepting the inevitability of the consequences. He believes it is necessary to recognize trauma as a regular part of the sport, regardless of whether one engages in it professionally or amateurishly. In the chapter Discovering What We’ve Always Known, he specifies that finding peace in the back of one’s mind can be a strategy for surviving and overcoming the fear of returning to sport. Fitzgerald focuses on the need for accepting reality, processing it, and analyzing it to allow the athlete to discern something new and unique about the experience.
In the chapter Accepting Reality, Fitzgerald suggests that experience can make a career path thorny. Using the example of David Goggins, he demonstrates that derealization and withdrawal from reality result in a person no longer being able to cope with even the daily handwashing. Fitzgerald believes that not all people manage to come through the three steps of accepting reality, which leads to the oppression of their capabilities, even if they used to be limitless. Just as David Goggins suffers from an inability to overcome fear, other athletes are too focused on responsibility instead of seeking to overcome challenges.
Fitzgerald’s book is primarily about staying on the shore and waiting for anxiety and fear to pass impossible and wrong. According to Fitzgerald, building success builds from a moment of awareness of the reality faced by athletes with failure. Although the author focuses primarily on running, his notions of endurance extend far beyond the sport. He believes returning to the sport’s appeal is the primary way to overcome injury. Athletes must ask themselves what, why, and how leads them to derealization and an overwhelming fear of returning to the sport. Fitzgerald believes that such thinking will allow athletes to avoid a failed comeback and develop psychological resilience.
In the last chapters, Fitzgerald focuses on athletes’ failed attempts to recover from injury. Although he suggests this is due to a lack of will, this is far from universally agreed upon. Perhaps for all the book’s merits, its main problem rests on the inherent weakness of the athletes’ psychological state, taking it for granted. Fitzgerald is concerned about how to raise it but does not suggest that there are stressful conditions stronger than the “don’t give up” slogan on the covers. This is probably why Fitzgerald’s sports story is interesting and can easily be applied to personal experiences. However, delving into the scientific perspective on stress and overcoming fear, it is hard to say that he is entirely correct in his inferences.