As he goes around the last turn to finish the mile, junior Peyton Ricci falls after his leg popped. Suddenly, he woke up from the recurring dream from his freshman year track meet from when the injury occurred.

Injuries come in all shapes and sizes and can occur out of thin air. The athlete might have stretched wrong, or missed a step.

“Sometimes it is, [the injury], just bad luck,” athletic trainer Richard Nelson said. “It can sometimes be what we call deconditioning, or if we had issues as far as the way where training can lead to either there strangling one part or understanding can lead to some injuries.”

Some injuries are more common in certain sports. Different sports have more common injuries than others because different parts of the body are working more than others.

“It is weird, every year seems to have a theme. Last year we had like 7 ACL injuries. This year we had one, so it was really weird,” Nelson said. “More common injuries that we see in certain sports so, for example, the ACL we tend to see more in girls soccer, football, and basketball. Those are because they are hard-cutting sports.”

One athlete who is a part of the group that tore his ACL last school year was senior Aidan Crismon. In his case, it first was torn during his junior year, then again his senior year.

“It happened when I was playing against Norfolk about a half quarter in and made a wrong move and I just moved the wrong way and it popped,” Crismon said. “The second one, I’m still recovering from the second one.”

A lot changes after athletes get injured. Daily tasks get harder to do and they have to be more careful to reduce the chances of the injury happening again.

“You cannot do as much as you would like to do; you can’t run as well,” Crimson said. “Just got to be more careful than usual.” “[Just] take care of your tendons and your necks and your feet. They are the main two.”

For some injuries, steps for recovery are easier said than done. For Ricci’s case, his recovery has been on the longer side.

“Right now it’s still going on two years. Now I have had some time where I was completely okay for a bit, but then I just got unlucky, and as soon as I started running again something else happened,” Ricci said. “[There is] a lot of physical therapy, and just kind of like trying to find anything to take my mind off of things, mostly trying to forget about it a little bit and live my life as normal as I possibly can.”

Each athlete is unique and can react differently to injury. The same injury can occur in identical people and still have different recovery.

“Every sport is different, every person is different, every injury is different,” Nelson said. “That’s more what we try to do, treat the individual, not the curtain injury it is. So if it is an ACl of its ankle we are still treating the individual. It is not a cookie-cutter. I don’t treat every ankle sprain the same; I do not treat every ACL the same, because if you tear something and a 320-pound lineman tears something it’s very different.”