This phase of athletic life is reached at a horrifying speed, on average by your early-thirties when you're just getting used to things. There are minor signs of weakness and distress before this state of desperation, but there comes a day, or a series of days, when you finally must sit with the fact that you are irrevocably and for all time moving downhill towards oblivion.

Nobody has successfully summarised the lessons of sport, but certainly they reside in the failing body as much as they do in the determined mind. The whole bright show of league football today is a clash between physical realities and the modern habits of introspection, psychology and mindfulness. For everything now there must be assigned a reason.

In desperate athletes, which is every athlete still being paid to play beyond the age of 30, the reason for the body's seizure has to be subverted with some type of faith, either in the world of pharmaceuticals and surgery, or its natural alternatives, yoga and Pilates. The distance between these remedial worlds cannot be understated.

Orthopedic surgery functions like a service garage. It's a business first, cold-hearted, disinterested and sterile. The eastern practices, alternatively, appeal to the light inside you that "cannot be dimmed with age". Some of its gurus will try to convince you to convince you that everything will be okay if only you'd pay attention to the right voices in your head.

For athletes, this is one of those scenarios where beggars can be choosers, and ultimately they'll choose both, and all of these remedies, anything to try to alleviate pain and be able to move around a field without drawing pity or embarrassment.

Pharmaceuticals are the best and most reliable way to make positive psychological changes. There's really nothing like a good dose of cortisone to lift a man's spirits, especially if he's limping in a straight jog, a situation that will rain depression on a him before he can find where he parked his car. But the drugs will take you only so far and ultimately disguise whatever ineptitudes have solidified in the body, making you sore and upset.

And it's at this point that the eastern practices come into view and make a sales pitch. This it the time you begin to search further inside the body, away from its surface afflictions and towards the foundation, the source, where it is assumed there is some kind of neglected Zion at your core in need of nourishment. You turn to stillness, to meditation, to "body flow", and to anything that won't remind you of your joint pain.

Most of the sources of discomfort are joints, and when you return from the inner world unhealed you're going to be met with the spiked ears of a surgeon, who'll lean over the shadows of an MRI scan and tell you assertively that his tools will solve your problems. See that little piece of labrum, that dangling meniscus? Oh yes, we can fix that for you. No stress. Just deposit your entire savings into this account by Friday, fill out these forms and you'll see the difference.

Orthopedic surgery can be either a contemptible waste of time and money or a godsend, depending on the state of one's joints and how much pain they impart. Recently I spent an entire day in a queue for knee surgery, most of it next to a farmer having his second knee replacement.

"It's made the world of difference," he told me. "I couldn't wait to get back here and have the other one done."

While the farmer didn't strike me as a man who'd searched hard for his Zion, it's true that only a good surgeon can fix major mechanical problems like a ruined knee. That makes sense. But the frequency of surgeries for minor ailments is a suspect enterprise. It tends to feed on desperate types, people looking for quick fixes and hypochondriacs.

The seasoned surgeon will not even try to hide his disinterest in your daily symptoms, or the state of your inner peace. He knows his place. He'll just squeeze you in for a 20-minute clean-out before flying to Oslo for a conference. Often you'll never see him again. He'll just arrange in his stead a young physiotherapist with a tranquillised face to demonstrate how to use crutches on a staircase.

It can be a rather grim and hollow experience, this one, and even create a psychology of pain and affliction that is disproportionate to reality. It might have been a problem better solved by a trip to a Pilates studio, if you believe enough and have a good teacher.

Surgery is preferred in professional sport because time is money, and if surgery promises anything it is speed. A lot of professional athletes are also of the mind that the body is no temple. They've seen it splinter and break, pop and snap. There's no place inside your mind that can avert your eyes from blood and bone.

But as my yoga friend told me, it's worth trying everything. There are always surprises. I'm in the market for surprises, and this town is making a lot of promises.