Saturday, February 5, 2022

The Hardest Part About Putting Your Feet Up

              Sometimes the world decides it’s time for us to take a few rest days. Whether it’s divine intervention or a random visit from lady (bad)luck, there are times where forces beyond your control keep you from the regular day to day. When you’re like me and the regular day to day monotony is comforting and just so happens to include your passion… well, it gets really hard to adjust to the new normal, even if it is the correct (and often only) thing to do.

               Basically, I got some sort of Staph Infection and had to take a few days of required rest off the bike and away from regular training.  For someone as obsessed with numbers and consistency as I am, missing a few scheduled training days is akin to shooting myself in the foot, which honestly would’ve produced a similar result to the infection. Quick backstory for context… for a long while I’ve had two bone spurs hanging out on the top of my feet, a nice result of having incredibly flat feet and spending too much time in tight shoes. Last week my left foot randomly swelled up around the spur, turned bright red, and decided it was going to cause excruciating pain. Thinking that I was paying the price for not getting my sad feet looked at by a professional, my initial assessment of the pain was that I had a stress fracture or something… I guess my midday walk to the coffee shop was decently quick for someone who doesn’t like walking, but I didn’t jump off any stairs or anything. Turns out I’m still a dumbass and stress fractures don’t swell and turn red; that’s called an infection. Long story short I have a staph infection which decided to cause my foot to go full balloon mode and provide me with a couple horrible nights (I’ll spare you details from the midnight bathroom episodes).

               Thankfully I’ve got an ace in my pocket, and Dr. Steve Noble was once again able to come to my rescue. Providing some antibacterial medicine, energy work, and some needed words of comfort, Dr. Noble got me back on my feet (ha) in no time and saved the day… yet again. Being on the mends, however, does not mean it’s a good idea to jump directly back into training, and there was no way I was fitting my still-swollen elephant foot back inside a dainty little cycling shoe. So… it was couch time for Payson. If you’ve ever spent time with me, you probably know how good I am at resting. Here’s a hint: I’m terrible. Recently I’ve gotten better, but sometimes even taking a rest day sometimes feels like a step backwards. When I’m required to take a full four days off, well, that feels like I’m plunging into an un-recoverable hole.

               At this point, you may say that I’m being unreasonable, and that taking a few days completely off to let your body recover from a decently gnarly virus is the smart thing to do, and resting is most likely actually helping you get faster. And yes, you’d be right. But I’ve never been one for reason, and when you put my slightly obsessive character trait on top you’ve got a recipe for disaster. So yes, it’s absolutely the smart option to take a few days off, and I’m going to do it… but let me tell you… goddamn it's hard. For two main reasons:

               Reason one. When your life is dedicated to training and racing, two specific mantras come to define your life: FTFP and HTFU. FTFP stands for Follow The Fucking Plan, which is pretty straightforward in its general meaning. When you’re looking ahead at a full season of racing, it’s important to look at the big picture, and understand that the only way to get faster is to trust your coach, your plan, and yourself. It’s hard to improve in one day, but stick with it and soon enough that one day turns into two, then a week, then a month, then three months, and all of a sudden you’re flying. It’s not one workout that’ll make you quicker, but rather the collection and combination of months of dedicated workouts that all add up to real performance gains. So, when something happens and suddenly you have to stray from the regimented plan of training and recovering, everything gets thrown out of whack and any OCD athlete such as myself begins to panic. On a similar note, HTFU stands for Harden The Fuck Up, which is also decently self-explanatory. Sometimes training sucks… racing at a professional level is a job after all, and nobody has only perfect days at their job. There are days where the weather is doing everything in its power to dissuade you from going outside, or sometimes you have to wake up at an ungodly hour to get in the required training hours. Times like these it’s necessary to HTFU and just buckle down and get the work done. I’m fully aware that having a dangerous virus coursing through my body is definitely not a time when Hardening Up is a solid choice, but when putting your head down and pushing forward been a defining part of your life for basically every scenario… it becomes hard to turn that switch off. As dedicated athletes or simply motivated individuals, it’s easy to think that we can mentally will our way through anything, and that taking a step back to actually take care of ourself is a sign of weakness. Which when you think about it… is the absolute worst thing to do, but for some reason I seem to be hardwired for self-destruction in the name of progression.

               Reason two. There’s a sinister downside to defining yourself as an ‘athlete.’ When you make training and athletics defining qualities of your character, it’s shattering when you get sidelined from training and athletics. Again, I know this sounds crazy, and it is… but it’s worth talking about and bringing up, because I think it affects more people than just myself. Right or wrong, I classify myself as an athlete to the core. I love training, pushing my limits, and the continuous improvement which accompanies dedication. Obviously, this has benefits and it’s important to have a healthy self-image of who you are and what you want to be. But we’re multifaceted beings, with many different aspects to life and have many different roles. It becomes insidiously dangerous when a single self-image begins to dominate all others, as this sole identity begins to take hold of all your self-concept. If this one defining aspect of your life is suddenly removed, put on hold, or even just altered… it can have outsized and overwhelming effects. It was explained perfectly by Simon Marshall in “The Brave Athlete.” The concept of a self-schema includes the thoughts and beliefs that people have about themselves as a something-or-other (in this case, as an athlete). This self-schema then builds into your personal identity, which in turn creates your overall self-concept. There are many different identities we have throughout our lives (athlete, student, partner, employee, etc…) and each of these influence others. We also give individual identities more worth than others, which in turn gives them a more outsized role on our overall self-concept. For example, I believe that my athletic identity is more important than my identity as an employee (don’t tell my manager), so how I perform in the athletic sphere has more of an effect on my overall self-concept.

This is all fine and healthy, as we all have different ideas and thoughts about the hierarchy of things throughout our lives. Things become dicey when one specific identity begins to become the sole influencer of our general self-concept. Therefore, if I believe that I’m defined by my athletic identity, I assume that to be a successful person in all aspects of life I need to be performing well (or even just performing) as an athlete. It’s irrational, yes, but my brain has proved it’s anything but rational at times. So even if life is otherwise great, poor performance or lack thereof in the one thing that I put too much priority on can wreak havoc in ALL unrelated aspects of my life. Simply put; when I believe I’m defined as an athlete and then can’t perform as an athlete… it has an outsized and negative effect on the other (usually unrelated) aspects of my overall life. And there’s the problem I’ve been wrestling with the past few days: I understand that allowing my athletic self-identity to encompass too large an influence on my overall self-concept is unhealthy and potentially self-destructive, but I simultaneously have lofty goals for myself… and achieving these goals require a level of commitment that is borderline unhealthy. So, is it worth the risk?

For me, and at this stage of my life… I believe it is. Ten years down the road, maybe not. But hell, I don’t even know what I’m having for breakfast tomorrow, so trying to plan even a year in advance often seems to be an exercise in futility. Maybe I’m kicking the ball down the road for future Payson to deal with, but I know that right now I’m dedicated to exploring how far I can travel down this path. It seems like the proverbial warning of eggs all in one basket, but I’ve never been one to heed warning signs too well… which brings us full circle to how I found myself in this situation in the first place. So, you can probably take my words as someone having an illogical argument with themselves and shake your head at my unwillingness to actually learn from my mistakes. Some things never change.

No comments:

Post a Comment