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Another thing you miss after you leave the game is the structure. Imagine driving through a long, narrow tunnel. The road is laid out for you and the walls keep you from straying off course. The path is clear. That’s what your football career is like. Your goals and objectives are clearly defined, and so is the path to reaching them, and every decision you make in your life is made within the parameters of that tunnel with the ultimate goal of being the best football player you can be. Now imagine retirement as a giant, open field at the end of that tunnel. No more walls or road to guide you. No parameters. No rules. There are unlimited decisions and directions and limitless possibilities, but you don’t know the way. You don’t even know the destination. You’re on your own. For 11 years, my life operated on the football clock. I had weekly meetings and weekly goals, and every decision I made in my life — what to eat, when to sleep — was based on football. Suddenly, I didn’t have any direction when I woke up. I didn’t have that purpose. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing.

“In theory, freedom sounds great. We all want more freedom. But when I retired and I had all the freedom in the world, the only thing I craved was that structure. It was all I knew. Adjusting to the lack of structure and schedule is one of the biggest challenges of retirement because the real world moves much slower than the football world. Football is week-to-week, and everyone in the real world is working on the fiscal year. You have to slow yourself down because it’s not a sprint. You can’t attack every day like you do in football. You have to pace yourself and find balance. That’s a new concept for me.”

—Former Chargers center Nick Hardwick, who retired at 33 in February after an 11-year career, all in San Diego, in an