It Hurts Until It Doesn’t
For the last 5 years, I’ve had the same New Years’ resolution every year: run a total of 1000km during the year.
And like clockwork, I have failed every single time. The closest I got was in 2014. 704.4km.
The unbiased reason for my failure is very simple: injuries. Every time that I really build up fitness and momentum, I get injured. Injury is followed by recovery and then limbo and procrastination to build up fitness from scratch again. I’ll let this visual confirm the peaks & valleys:
My challenge was complicated with the fact that it wasn’t a single, recurring injury that plagued me. Instead it was always something new; shin splints, tight hamstrings, lower back pain or the kind of hip pain that made even sleeping painful.
I’ve however always been determined and persistent in beating this invisible (injury) enemy. So last year after an orthopaedic surgeon diagnosed my lower back pain with “You’re fucked for the next 18–24 months, but it’ll work itself out”, I tried my hand at Pilates to strengthen my core. This had an immediate positive impact on my running and I was feeling better than ever.
Only to find myself experiencing this excruciating hip pain for days after a run.
My Pilates instructor eventually recommended that I see a chiropractor and with a little bit of skepticism, I had two 40-minute sessions in mid-January.
And lo-and-behold, my hip pain disappeared completely.
For the first time in years I was truly running pain-free and I was feeling really strong. I’ve subsequently run a total of 155km in both of the last two months, which is about 30% more than my best-ever month in the past.
This experience made me reflect quite a bit of any painful experience in the past; every time during the painful part it feels like there’s no way out. And everything just hurts.
And suddenly the pain disappears.
I’ve probably most felt like this during my entrepreneurial endeavours in the past. For much of my experience with WooThemes, everything just felt painful. I didn’t know what to do next, how to continue to grow or find any resemblance of personal happiness or work-life balance. It was naturally not all bad, but big parts of my experience was tough, challenging and painful.
Then I somehow managed to escape that experience by jumping into a death-spiral with my next venture. That definitely didn’t end well.
In fact, it took me months to just feel like myself again. Momentum built, normality permeated my daily life again and I started working on something new.
Fast-forward to today and I can tell you that last year was an amazing year for me. Even being an entrepreneur felt like the least painful thing I could be doing; not because everything suddenly became easy (it definitely wasn’t), but it just wasn’t as painful as before.
I didn’t solve my running and injury problems with a bulletproof plan that had seven specific steps.
I merely kept trying and eventually stumbled into something that took the pain away.
Entrepreneurship — and I’d say life — sometimes just works in mysterious ways. Where there is pain today, there might just not be pain tomorrow.
We just have no choice, but to keep pushing forward.
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