The mental strength to start again

Getting back to athletic baseline after an injury can mean embracing big discomfort. It's almost always worth it, but not always for the obvious reasons.

---

Next week on AGING with STRENGTH:

> strength training workouts that build neuromuscular fitness (incl. unconventional routines)

> the single best piece of equipment to build enduring functional strength

> 3-minute #WorkoutWednesday video #27

---

Yesterday at 5pm, I stood over the Sunset Boulevard surf break in Los Angeles, the air filled with the smell of briny ocean and the glottal brrrr of motorcycle engines on Pacific Coast Highway behind me. A swell had come in, producing six-foot waves with a lot of mid-Pacific energy in them, and I was suddenly uncomfortable: I hadn’t surfed in more than a year, after shoulder and knee surgeries. I had, in the vernacular, lost my stoke. In this moment, all I wanted was to get back in my car. I wordlessly recited the excuses why this wasn’t the right day, the right hour, the right conditions to get back in the water with my not-right surfboard—a 10-foot fiberglass log better suited to knee-high rollers.

I could come back tomorrow….

I pictured myself driving home, peeling off my (dry) wetsuit and then….no. Just no. I couldn’t let myself off the hook like that. The reason I couldn’t is that this moment was familiar to me. I understood that meeting it was important and retreating from it would be a regression of a larger kind—one with consequences.

I had to start the lonely process of getting my stoke back, and just get in the water.

Hello ocean, my old friend, I’ve come to paddle into you again

Which I did, extremely inelegantly, and was immediately reminded that gym workouts are great for many things, including making you look good at the beach, but don’t always build functional strength the real world demands. Just paddling out past the big sets of waves exhausted me. Once I could sit up on my board, I said to myself, “Good job, dude. You got back on the bicycle.” Tomorrow, I’d be sore and creaky.

The hard lesson: As the years accumulate, getting back to baseline after an injury (or the surgical procedure that addressed the injury), is long and hard. Even when you’re physically able to resume your athletic routines, hopping back on the proverbial bicycle can feel a lot worse than remaining in one’s new, post-injury, slightly uncomfortable comfort zone.

---

In case you missed it….

---

Failure isn’t in the performance but in the excuse to avoid performing

Yesterday’s ordeal reminded me of another time, this past July, when I literally got back on a bike, two months after a shoulder surgery that, to that point, had made any exercise all but impossible. I thought I was ready to jump back into a simple cardio workout. My mind wanted nothing to do with it.

The bike I mounted was a stationary one, in a sad little excuse for a workout room at an otherwise very pleasant old hotel. Cranking the peddles of this bike felt like stepping onto a treadmill sideways—an alien maneuver that made no physical sense. My aerobic ability had vanished since my surgery, and this first step toward regaining it felt like starting from less than zero. I peddled for two minutes and was physiologically forced to stop, out of breath, sweating and very much wanting to throw that stationary bike into the wall of the sad little room. I vividly remember the bad mood that my failed workout spawned.

Except that it wasn’t the workout that failed, but rather my expectations of it.

“The moment I make an excuse, I confess to many things.”
~ Muriel Strode, My Little Book of Life, 1912

Embrace the journey back to baseline

One thing the surgeons never tell you beforehand is that regaining your athletic self is a mental battle, requiring a brand of fortitude and self-forgiveness that may not be part of our emotional IQ.

The hard lesson: Throwing myself back into the ocean or atop a stationary bike, there is no failure. Failure would have been accepting a (reasonable) excuse not to try. In these critical moments starting the journey back to baseline, one’s performance isn’t important. What matters is putting oneself into motion again and being willing to suffer the indignities that come with starting the journey back to baseline.

I got my stoke back by getting back into the water and paddling into those six-foot waves. Whether I caught any waves was, for the moment, irrelevant. Oftentimes, the universe rewards you just for putting yourself out there.¹

1. The first time I remember having this realization was during the first month of my solo bicycle journey from Hanoi to Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam, in 1993. Travel guides written about the country back then still had notable geographic gaps, because Vietnam, after years of remaining mostly closed to Westerners, had only recently allowed foreigners to travel independently, without a government minder. As I peddled south on Highway One out of Thanh Hoa, in a bleak section of northern Vietnam, my guidebook showed nothing on the road ahead—no major towns and, thus, no hotels for foreign travelers, anywhere on the 150 kilometers I was about to peddle into. I rode with a certain amount of anxiety into the countryside, having no idea where I would stop or be allowed to sleep that night. The story of what happened later that day is worth an article of its own.