Richmond's Dylan Grimes travels a long way to feel like the Tiger of old Matt Windley
From: Herald Sun
August 24, 2012 DYLAN Grimes had no one to blame, which made it all the more frustrating.
It was June 30, he had just suffered a third major hamstring injury in 14months and the Richmond defender was beginning to question if he would ever put his injury woes behind him.
"I can't point the finger at any one and say we cut any corners or anything like that, we were actually pretty conservative," Grimes said.
"So when it went I wasn't angry at any one, there wasn't a stone we left unturned. The question I had was just `why?'
"I thought, `geez, I'm a third-year player, I've played 17 games and I've done three hamstrings'. I was sort of thinking `is my hamstring ever going to get right?', which is just an irrational thought.
"But I was just frustrated that, I'm coming up to my fourth pre-season, and I've only played 17 games and I feel like every time I start to get confident and start to play good footy in the AFL I was just getting injured again."
Grimes suffered a season-ending tear to the tendon in his right hamstring during last year's Dreamtime at the 'G game against Essendon.
The Dreamtime curse struck again this year when his left hamstring tendon failed, but that injury only kept him out for six weeks.
His relief was shortlived, because with only minutes remaining in his return against Adelaide the left hamstring went again.
It was then that elite performance manager Matt Hornsby and club doctor Greg Hickey floated the idea of sending Grimes to Germany for treatment with world-renowned doctor Hans-Wilhelm Muller-Wohlfahrt, whom former teammate Mark Coughlan and former Cat Max Rooke had visited previously.
The wonder doc has also treated the world's fastest man, Usain Bolt, soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo and U2frontman Bono.
"I arrived in Germany with Terry Condon, our rehab manager, and the treatment pretty much started straight away for a good five days," Grimes said. "They thought it was an issue with my lower back. Basically it's nerve related and it was interrupting the signal going down to my hamstring through the nerve and causing a bit of a reaction.
"It's not a traditional diagnosis, it's a pretty left-of-centre way of looking at things, but the benefit of having that knowledge is that my rehab program is now a lot about building lower back and deep core strength. It's more holistic, I guess.
"The belief the club showed to send me over to Germany and spend so much of its resources on a third-year player was pretty humbling. I'm just determined now to pay back that faith.
"We got a pretty good indication of what we need to do to stop it from happening again. I'm feeling good, really good."
He may have been some 16,000km away, but Grimes could not escape the clutches of drug testers, who woke him at 6am - wearing just his undies - to take a range of blood and urine samples.
The trip also cost him a birthday - his 21st.
"We left on the Sunday and got home on the Tuesday and my birthday was the in-between day. I had two hours in Singapore, where it was the 16th of July.
"I thought about staying in Germany for an extra couple of days. It wouldn't have been too bad if I missed the flight."
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/afl/grimes-travels-a-long-way-to-feel-like-the-tiger-of-old/story-e6frf9io-1226457003996
