1. The Second Attempt
Return to baseline
I’ve come full circle in my attempt to return to football. The main influence for this was the 2026 World Cup and the desire to play again was stronger than I expected. I’ll turn 32 next month, and I’ve realised I don’t have unlimited time left to enjoy football. If I’m going to test how far I can push my body and test myself, this decade is the last window even if it’s just for leisure, I still want to know how far I can go in terms of football fitness, even though I never made it pro. In the end the idea is to enjoy football as much as possible.
As of 30 August 2026, this is where I’m at: I’ve finished phase 5 of ACL rehab. My latest 5k time, on 25 July 2026, was 24 minutes and 54 seconds. This was after completing phase 3 of rehab. My personal best last year was 26:37, set in September 2025.
The goal
Short term: get my right knee back to the best condition I can, pass the physiotherapy tests for ACL, and get an MRI scan to check the condition of my ligaments. Then start pre-season workouts and get back on the field.
Long term: take pro-level football conditioning tests which are the yo-yo test, sprints (10, 20, 30, and 40 meters), the Cooper test, and the VO2 max test.
Two attemps : ten years apart
My first surgery was almost a decade ago, in July 2015, and the injury itself happened in December 2014 while playing pre-season friendly games for GKS Pogon Grodzisk Mazowiecki’s B-team. My first attempt to return to football was exactly a decade ago, in June 2016, for a month-long football camp in Nuremberg with IFX. I thought a chance like this I wouldn’t get twice, so I rushed the comeback when the hamstring graft hadn’t fully recovered. I played through constant pain for the whole month, relying on painkillers, and I couldn’t even run at full pace because of the hamstring. I should have taken more time for the comeback, with more comprehensive rehab but that’s easier to say in hindsight, since I didn’t know better then.
My second surgery was three years ago, on 18 May 2023. This time, in one way, I did the recovery differently I took my time returning to sports. I regained full range of motion within the designated time and completed two months of rehab before returning to daily activities. But I made a different mistake: I didn’t pay for professional rehabilitation at a rehab center, so the knee didn’t recover well enough for a return to sports within eight months. So I started playing tennis instead, as a way to ease back toward football. The gap left by skipping sport-specific rehab caught up with me in June 2026, while playing tennis on the carpet turf surface on a Sunday. I realised the knee needed some more work for sports activity. I decided to take a full three-month break, from July to October, to focus only on rehab and no sports.
What got in the way
What really got in the way was cost. Professional rehab was an additional 2355 PLN for 15 sessions plus the cost of two way taxi rides, on top of the debt I was already carrying from the surgery I’d had it done privately, since the wait time for government-covered insurance was almost a year. Hence I decided to skip paid rehabilitation and asked the physio for a guideline on what can I do by myself.
I also only took one month of medical leave for the surgery and rehab combined 18 days of it was mostly bed rest until the stitches came off, then two weeks of rehab for full range of motion, and then I went back to work. That was also a mistake. Since I was only getting paid 80% of my salary on leave, I thought going back to work was the better choice, and that I’d manage my rehab through discipline instead. But work wasn’t easy to handle, I got consumed by it, and my commitment to rehab suffered.
The Baseline , for real this time
Measured August 2 2026
- Weight : 62.65 kg
- Height : 170 cm
- Biceps : 26 cm
- Chest : 82.5 cm
- Waist : 74 cm
- Hips : 92 cm
- Calves : 38 cm
- Thigh Left : 57 cm
- Thigh Right : 55 cm
The last number, for the thighs, is the one that actually matters: there’s a 2 cm gap, in favor of the leg that wasn’t operated on. That’s normal to expect after two surgeries on the right leg. It’s not a big number, but for now it’s what matters it’ll show whether the sport-specific work is actually working. I’ll be tracking it alongside my 5k timings; the next run is on 5 September.