Real-world transition for Justin Foster

CLEMSON -- The video that booms throughout Death Valley before every fourth quarter features the strength coach screaming about rings not being placed on smooth hands.

The head coach has always said championships are won when no one is in the stands, during the unforgiving grind of workouts during the winter, spring and summer.

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So much of that process is about pushing through the most difficult circumstances imaginable, fighting through pain and exhaustion so that when hard times come during the season it's not as hard and maybe even seems easy by comparison.

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And that sums up what was so difficult for Justin Foster last summer as he battled through extended complications from COVID. High-level athletes are wired to ignore what their bodies are telling them, and Foster was having to learn how to listen to his.

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"At first I just thought I was out of shape," Foster said in a podcast interview with Tigerillustrated.com. "But then it became: 'OK, obviously something is going on with Justin. He can't finish the workout.'

"If you'd see me in the facility walking around, I'd appear to be fine. Most of the time I'd feel short of breath but it wasn't obvious to everyone else that I wasn't feeling good. It was very hard for people to see me and know that I can come to meetings, I can do all this other stuff, but why can't I work out? If you see someone with an ACL and they're wearing a brace or they're on crutches, you can actually see it. But looking at me, it looked like I was perfectly fine."

Foster was far from that. Having dealt with asthma and allergies his whole life, his contracting of COVID in June brought complications including vocal cord dysfunction, shortness of breath, rapid heart rate, a struggle to swallow regular foods, and an inability to carry on a lengthy conversation without being out of breath. He's now classified as a COVID "long-hauler."

After an emotional rollercoaster last fall -- feeling like he was close to returning one week, then feeling hopeless the next -- Foster decided to give up football late last month and is now devoting his passion to pursuing a career in small business.

It probably would not be accurate to say Foster is totally at peace with his decision. Though he's convinced it was the right thing to avoid putting his health at risk, to gamble on the unknown as the medical community still tries to figure out the virus, there's still a clear tone of loss in his voice as he tries to process never playing football again.

"The transition is difficult," he said. "Because if I go out and see people, I'm known as a football player and that's what most people want to talk about. Until this, my goal was getting to the NFL. I loved football from the day I started playing."

In the raging world of polarized social-media discourse, there isn't a great appetite for respectful discourse and finding common ground, nor of nuanced views based on nuanced realities of daily life.

A football building is quite a laboratory in that way, a possibly refreshing counter to the way matters are settled and issues defined in the outside world.

The hundreds of people in Clemson's football building know what it's like to work through the extremely difficult conversations last summer, to hear the points of view and experiences from others, and to emerge stronger and more loving of each other as a result.

They also know what it's like to return to that building in late May not taking the pandemic all that seriously, and soon learning that their ways would have to change.

Foster said there were a few breakouts on the team in the month of June, and he learned late that month that he'd contracted it. He wasn't sure where he picked it up, as he'd tried to be careful given his pre-existing conditions.

After he returned from his quarantine, he was cleared by the team's medical staff and was walking around his neighborhood.

"I hit a hill, and I immediately had an asthma attack," he said. "From there, I tried to do workouts the next week and only did like half the workout. And that's when I began to ask myself: 'Maybe I'm just out of shape? Is it just asthma? Allergies? I'll just take these medicines I've always taken and then I should be good because that's what I've always done.' And that's kind of where it all began."

From that point forward, on his best days Foster would work out at about 30 percent of what he could do before contracting COVID. On the worst days he couldn't do anything at all.

He remembers sitting in the locker room by himself as the team practiced outside, knowing that when he emerged every person he encountered would ask the same question:

"How are you doing?"

It was a hard question to answer because even he wasn't sure how he was doing depending on the day.

"You try to push through, but when it's shortness of breath it's like, I can't really control too much of that," he said. "I'm trying to do something and I physically can't do it. I can't do another half-gasser or a sprint, or another lift. Because I can't really breathe. I mean I can breathe enough to stay alive, but pushing myself to do stuff? I can't do it. A lot of times when I'd be in there lifting with the team, I'd have to just walk away and spend some time by myself.

"If I'm out of breath just walking up the stairs to a team meeting, what can I do? What do I do? That was a battle I always fought, not pushing myself so hard that I would need oxygen or couldn't physically move or do anything."

Last summer, when the battle raged over whether to play the 2020 season, two extremes emerged: 1) Shut it all down because it's too dangerous and there are too many unknowns; 2) College athletes have almost zero risk of being debilitated by the disease, and things should proceed as normal.

Foster's experiences and wisdom place him pretty close to the middle.

On one hand, he knows COVID is serious:

"It feels like your heart is beating out of your chest, and a lot of people I know who have gone through it have experienced the same thing. A lot of other players would be short of breath, even if they didn't have asthma. It was just hard for them to breathe. A lot of them improved much more quickly than me, but that's been a common thing."

On the other, he's 100-percent on board with the notion that college sports should've gone on and should continue to go on, and that existence inside a protective team bubble is much safer for athletes than them being largely left to their own devices in a shut-down scenario.

"If we look at my situation, had I not been around Clemson football and medical professionals that were around, I'd have probably been in the hospital. Who knows where that would've led? I was in the training room every day with doctors. Had I been without that, who knows how fast I'd have gotten medical attention? Throughout this whole process, I truly believe us being around campus and just being around was the best decision by far. I personally believe it was the best for most players in college football, to stay and stick through it and go through all the protocols that were put in. I personally believe it was the best for me and other players."

The experience of Xavier Thomas also reinforced the realities of the virus to Clemson's football building. Thomas came down with COVID during the spring and suffered some complications from it that were similar to those Foster dealt with.

"A lot of his was the shortness of breath and his chest hurting," Foster said. "His time dealing with it was shorter than mine, and obviously he did get better as the season went on. But when he first came out of quarantine he was dealing with a lot of those things."

The football team has recently been battling an outbreak, showing that even though 2020 is over the COVID-related challenges still persist. Foster believes that the litany of protocols and mitigation measures have been a success overall.

"I think last summer that it really hit home when people saw how many people were getting it and how serious it was," he said. "When we'd work out everybody would have masks on and gloves, things like that. I think everyone was on board with it. We'd have regular meetings with coaches, players and everybody to make sure they were doing the best they could and we were doing the best we could just to keep everybody safe as best we could."

Foster says he still hears random people saying: "If I get COVID I'm going to be fine."

"And you probably will be," he said. "Most of the time, that's right. But I felt the same way. I told myself: 'If I do get it, I'll be fine. It'll be like any other sickness: You get it, it works its course and you'll be good to go.' You never really know. I got it, and things didn't go how I wanted them to.

"I'll say you have to take it like anything: You can't be fearful of living your life. Obviously you wear a mask, wash your hands as much as possible. But at the end of the day, when you get it you just have to deal with the consequences of it and the process of it."

With football now in his past, you could say Foster now moves on to the real world.

But his world has been pretty real already.

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