One mental knee-jerk I know lots of athletes hear in their heads from time to time is: "Whats the point?!" When a race goes poorly after tons of preparation, or nothing is clicking in training for months on end, or if it just has not seemed "fun" for longer than you can remember. I certainly heard that familiar exasperation two weeks ago when I wrenched my ankle. I had been putting in good work and thought in the moment it was all down the drain.
Setting aside the obvious catastrophizing of setbacks and non-perfects that this lash out often represents—its a valid question. What is the point? For great elite athletes, a class I never achieved, the point is partly that it is your profession. Like any other job or career the work either earns or invests in payoffs that are your livelihood. Most athletes though really enjoy their sport. Some people don't enjoy physical exertion but most at least enjoy being outdoors, a good workout, or the satisfaction of accomplishing something. Many of us, elite or amateur, also have some kind of goal that we are working towards and that provides motivation and excitement about the process.
For me, "what's the point" usually visits when something happens that feels like it has snatched away the goal I have in my head or made it feel unattainable. So when I wrenched my ankle, "whats the point" was both asking about the work I had put in but also the goals I had set for myself. For example, "whats the point" of shooting for a good result at events this year if it can just be snatched away in an instant? When I was younger, I think this reaction jerked more often when I had bigger athletic goals and even smaller disappointments like a bad workout might have me frustrated and questioning my choices. But I have also always had another thread raising the issue of purpose separate from achievement.
I have been consuming a lot of war poetry lately (which likely holds a tie for my favorite genre with natural observation of spirits like Mary Oliver). Classics spinning hyperbolic frenzy around the thirst for battle and glory, contemporaries zooming in to inject the visceral reality into your veins or hold the space to recognize the valor but acknowledge the folly. I have a line of warriors in my family, but it was never my calling. I do, however, feel some constant tug towards contributions to a greater good. So my mind also questions often whether I am serving a higher purpose . . . making the world a better place than I found it. I rarely felt I was with athletics. However, later on in my racing career I did feel like I was helping other achieve goals from time to time which was gratifying. But it was hard to justify the pursuit internally because I knew it was not going to change much in the world for the better.
So training still has this stigma, as it were, in my head. It is self-indulgent to some extent. When I was younger I had a lot more trouble giving myself permission to do things I enjoyed. But that has changed a lot over the years. I feel less now that I have to justify the things I like doing and allow myself to enjoy them more. With how busy life has been over the past eight or so years, this has been key. It is good to have a hobby with daily, weekly, and monthly goals and processes. It gives me things to look forward to and something to focus on if I need respite from other things. Additionally, in the long term, I really want to remain as healthy as possible for as long as possible because I so look forward to the future my family is building.
My foot is healing up much better than I expected. But in the past two weeks I found that the habits I have developed over the past couple of years of exercising regularly really helped get me over the dejection. Usually something like the sprain would have had me out moping and not doing anything for weeks. But this time I stuck to the icing and elevation, and set up my stationary bike so I could at least keep up my normal schedule of activity. I told myself that I would let the February and April events go if I was not healed up, and I still will. But I kept up the work with what I could do on the stationary and at the end of this week got a couple of runs in that showed promise that my aerobic numbers have not dropped off too much.
So maybe I can shoot for my original December goals in the next couple of months or maybe not. But I enjoyed the challenge of finding different ways to maintain what I had built up, and I really enjoyed being able to get some hard aerobic work in on the bike. The affirmation though is that I have established a life and a routine that I enjoy. The process being something that means as much to me as any accomplishment at this stage in my life. I may not be doing something monumental or legendary but it is good to me so maybe that is enough.
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