Every experience in life holds a lesson for us. Understanding and accepting the lessons allows us to trip and fall less in the future and have a fuller experience of the present. The same principle is true with our athletic pursuits and our interactions with nature. As we become better at tuning in to our lessons our athletic lives will be more inspiring, varied, and effective to help us us break through our personal challenges.
In the last post we discussed how exploring life as an athlete can serve as a path of personal growth. The counterpoint is that our athletic pursuits can also be used to escape reality, medicate the symptoms of our distress with endorphins, and run from the ways that we can benefit from growing. After spending eight years as a dedicated ultra endurance athlete, I’ve become a lot more familiar with this dynamic than I like to admit. We can also find ourselves moving in circles as we struggle to grasp the messages that nature is giving us in our athletic lives. In my case, I literally raced my mountain bike in circles through various deserts and mountains for many years before I could understand the main lessons that it held for me and feel ready to move on. Furthermore, it’s all too easy to fall into a rut of doing what we like and what feels good, even as the challenge diminishes. If we don’t appropriately push the boundaries of our comfort zone, we often stop getting new lessons. Some of us also tend to get trapped by fixations on certain performance outcomes or find ourselves becoming slaves to our own training schedules. I’ve been down that road a couple times and it sucks.
The key to making our athletic lives a useful part of our personal transformation is being able to interpret the lessons we are given. It can be really difficult to discern whether we are still truly moving forward personally, are getting stuck, or if we are actually just running from our problems. The messages we get in our athletic lives can be quite murky. It’s tough to distinguish when to move on from when to go deeper or try harder. When we do know in our hearts that it’s time to move on to new challenges, it can be painful to let go of our former obsessions, especially when we’re not sure where we’re going next. Our next step usually isn’t very clear because it takes a substantial investment of energy to transform a mere inspiration into a powerful and compelling vision.
It’s very difficult and inefficient to effectively navigate a fulfilling and transformational athletic life alone. The feedback of loved ones, friends, and coaches is pretty critical to staying in motion and continuing to progress. As a generally self-coached athlete, I often learned this the hard way and spent a lot of extra time spinning my wheels. I still find it a struggle to seek or accept the feedback of others that can help me stay in the strongest flow, but I do now recognize it as critical. A bit of assistance might have helped me learn a lot faster that 24 hour mountain bike racing for me was about the truth of human unstoppability and about the lessons offered by the sunrise instead of being about proving myself competitively. It took me sixteen grueling all day and night races to learn this. Maybe with more openness I could have realized this in just a few races. Some good advice from the right people could have helped me start interpreting and applying the empowering lessons of kitesurfing to the rest of my life a lot sooner and more effectively than I’ve been able to do on my own. Sometimes we need the difficult feedback from the people we trust to point out when we are holding ourselves back by trying to fight reality or escape from reality.
We can gain so much from the lessons in our athletic lives. As we continue to develop as athletes we become better learners. At Indigenous Strength we’re committed to teaching and coaching effective approaches to staying in the flow. It helps to know stuckness intimately in order to manage it, so I’m really happy that stuckness is like a brother to me now.
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