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4.1.2007
Words in my vocabulary

Moaning, feeling sorry for myself or making excuses don’t belong into my vocabulary. Especially in German because the language still suits me like sideburns to a gold fish. I accept and take responsibility that in football you are exactly as good as you are in your last game. My old man used to say that with 90 percent you get 50 percent results (although i think he read it somewhere). The last months I was never over 80 percent fit, so on pitch i felt like a salmon in Sahara. So I guess it was not a surprise that after I had played 11 pre season games, 4 national team games and 7 first ones into the season once again I found myself not just on the wrong side of the lines but in the wrong building also.

After spending most of my time in clinics, hospitals and physio rooms, I have to admit that a tiny part of my body (and with this I mean my calf you perverts) has decided not just about my career but also the direction of my life for the last two years. It is not a huge problem worldwide if a blond footballer has rarely made it out from the training ground at day light but I don’t really have a solution for tribal indifferences in Kongo so in my every day life calf tightness has been the most concrete worry and frustrating fight against the unknown. Running around the world after specialists in a hope for solution is hard but worse waits at home: it is easier to turn a cross trainer facing towards the grey wall instead of watching from window how others are training. And cross trainers are big buggers to move, just try yourself.. they move like colin montgomery or freezer refrigerator combination. Injuries hurt always the most in the head.

So when respectable Swiss orthopedic Bernhard Segesser told me that the reasons (not actually calf but ankle and fascia pressure!!) for my calf problems were easily fixable by operation, I wanted to start jodling.. probably because didn’t come up with anything else they might do out of uttermost joy in this promised land of clocks and chocolate. The club was supportive and we proceeded with it. Now I am only last little scar and two weeks away from being through it all. And hopefully for being able to leave it all behind. At last I have been given a logical explanation instead of Korean guru meditating energies to my leg while drumming my ear cap. This feels like it could be answer to my prayers. A new chance, maybe even start for a whole new career. I believe so. I can still feel scars from Swiss Army knives in my leg but I haven’t felt this good for a long time. Feeling good are old words now reprinted to my vocabulary – even in German. Ich bin god drauft!

This time I recommend
1. Dr Segesser & Rennbahn Clinic in Basel
- Short in vocabulary but tall in weight of words

I do not recommend
1. Salmon&Sahara or freezer&ColinMontgomerry combinations

" Nothing is either good or bad but your mind makes it so"
- Brian Tracy

Aki


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