The 5:2 diet has become extremely popular. It has perhaps more substance than many modern fad diets. It prescribes people to eat normally for five days of the week while restricting their calorie intake to 500-600 calories on the other two.
One of the alleged benefits of this intermittent fasting is that it causes autophagy, which in layman’s terms refers to the death of parts of the cell which have become old and junky, allowing them to be replaced by brand new parts. Cells and their parts are constantly dying and being replaced, but the act of fasting apparently does it more efficiently.
It’s not just people's cells that pass away and are replaced. So are other parts of them as they evolve and age. For retiring players like Brendan Goddard, Jarrad Waite, Michael Johnson and many more who will join them over the next six weeks, the football player part of themselves will die, leaving an enormous space for something else to grow into.
Hanging up the boots: Fremantle’s Michael Johnson is chaired from the ground between a guard of honour after playing his final game, against Collinwood in round 23.
The challenge most players have is that there’s nothing on the same scale ready to fill the void, such is the energy players put into their AFL careers. When the primary school self finishes up at the end of year six, for instance, it’s immediately replaced by the high school self. The excitement usually outweighs any loss felt for no longer being in primary school. But there is rarely as neat an answer for players moving onto the next phase of their lives.
From my observations, it generally takes retiring players about three years before they start to get a clearer picture of what interests them and where their skills lie. They should then allow probably 7-10 years before they become high performers in their chosen fields.
There are always outliers, and the timeline is quicker for those who want to stay involved with the game, where they already have a significant level of competence, albeit as a player. Needless to say, the timelines extends significantly if the space that opens up in the retiree’s life is replaced by pathological behaviours in the early years post football.
Richmond champion Alex Rance.
It’s not just retirees who have the opportunity to shed part of themselves and replace it at this time of year. Like cells, for which limited access to food gives them the chance to re-generate, players going into their time off will now have breathing space from club contact. Some will decide that they don’t want to be the same player next year.
Of all the lessons that sport can teach people, the most important is that transformation is possible if the desire is great enough.
I’ve never seen an AFL team illustrate this as clearly as Richmond. Bar Alex Rance and Trent Cotchin, who were both star players even when Richmond were a mid-range team, the other players who’ve been there for extended periods bear very little resemblance to their former selves during the Damian Hardwick years before 2017. This is true even of Trent Cotchin. He was at that time already hyper-competent Brownlow Medallist, but Trent Cotchin the effective leader was yet to be born.
People’s affection for heuristics when analysing problems lead some to attribute Richmond’s rise up the ladder to one or two changes of responsible people, because it’s more expedient than acknowledging the hundreds of small events and modifications that have led to them once again to become an AFL powerhouse.
Experiencing the sort of complete behavioural change that many of the Richmond players have undergone should give their playing group an enormous amount of confidence. But it should be balanced by a cautionary understanding that the players they’ve become today can be just as impermanent as the players they were yesterday now seem.
To stay where they are, they will have to maintain the on- and off-field actions that they’ve perfected since 2016. Unfortunately for the other seven teams in the finals series, they show no sign of weakening.
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