Earlier this month, a longtime friend of mine set out to walk from Mexico to Canada. An ambitious goal, for sure, but he has achieved similar accomplishments before, so completing this international walk seemed like a realistic challenge for him. He performed the necessary physical training, prepared for the logistics, headed to Mexico, and began. Unfortunately, what was to be a months-long endeavor ended just a few days later in southern California due to a persistent leg injury. Man, what a bummer. Like I told him though, I was more impressed that he stopped than I would have been if he had continued on while hurt.
Dealing with injuries early on in a big adventure is something that he and I have in common, but I made a different choice. In 2006, he and I set out from Seattle with some other friends to ride our bicycles to Boston for charity. On the eleventh day, I fell off my bike in Montana and fractured my spine. That diagnosis came much later, way after the window of opportunity for the breaks to heal on their own had closed. All I knew at the time was that I was in a lot of pain and that the muscles around the injury had seized up to the extent that pedaling a bike was temporarily impossible.
But I also knew that ending my trek early would have been unbearable. Virtually everybody in my life – family, friends, classmates, professors, and co-workers – knew that I was going on this trip, and the shame of having to tell them that I stopped early was more than I could handle. At that point in my life, which was a challenging time for me personally, I felt like my self-worth was contingent upon completing the trip. I feared how I would have looked to others and felt about myself if I had quit.
Beyond that, I was immersed in a no-pain-no-gain exercise culture that glorifies pushing limits and disregarding physical indicators of distress. I still am. And so are you. Our work-till-you-drop capitalistic society praises people who show up sick, substitute caffeine for adequate sleep, and forgo lunch breaks. New England Patriots fans wear shirts emblazoned with a former coach’s famous “no days off” mantra. A singer on the radio tells us, “My body tells me no / But I won’t quit ’cause I want more.” The same spirit bleeds into how we approach physical activity.
And sure, sometimes we get away with it. We play through an injury that eventually heals. We show up to the office all week hopped up on DayQuil and then recover over the weekend. Twenty years ago in Montana, I got a massage, remounted my bike, and finished our ride to Boston. We get away with such choices until, well, eventually maybe we don’t. Our society is pretty good at quickly moving past cautionary tales, but I still remember a tennis teammate who had to get his ankle fused after continuing a match on the sprained joint, a local woman who kept working with the flu until it proved fatal, and my two spinal fusions.
Listening to and honoring our body’s signals is a counterculture act of rebellion, which makes exercising intuitively more complicated than it otherwise needs to be. By stopping his trek early, my friend demonstrated courage, strength, discipline, patience, responsibility, and self-confidence. If I had those same qualities back in 2006, I probably would have taken a taxi to Glacier Park International Airport and found a sedentary way to enjoy the summer while recovering from my fall.