Restraint

The hardest part of training for me is restraint. I push ahead, manically at times, without a healthy sense of my own safety or limitations. In all honesty this problem appears not just in my training, but in all aspects of my life, where I am prone to pushing too hard on the challenges I face and I run the risk of breaking something. Most often myself. How many times have I pushed myself too far, just to teeter on the brink of destruction? Why do I do it?

That question is particularly relevant now as I return to hard contortion training after nearly a year out, and still missing the ligament in my right hip. That hip is prone to tendinitis because it doesn't sit cleanly in the socket and the tendon rubs over my hip bone when I move. I know that I need to be careful with it, but in the moment when I am in the gym I lose track of my better judgement and I just want a higher stack of mats for my oversplits, a deeper backbend. More more more.

Why? I have finally figured it out. The true devil, the root of almost all destruction. Of course, it is fear.

If I don't push myself to my limits and beyond then I fear that I will never feel the bright light of the dream. I fear that if I don't do it now, right this second, that I will never be able to do it. The fleeting nature of my life in this body haunts me as I work with it, and I constantly suspect that if I don't squeeze every last drop of capability out of these muscles, bones, and tendons that I will lose them to age and death before I can satisfy the ravenous hunger that drives me forward.

Do all athletes feel this? I think it must be common, but I also think that the truly superlative movers in the world have found a way to overcome this fear and find a sense of faith in their bodies, and their destinies. For faith is the opposite of fear. If fear is the belief that your desires will never be realized, then faith is the belief that they will. Neither one can be proven for both are dependent in part on our own actions, and in part on so many things that are beyond our control. But choosing faith over fear, a daily choice, is what makes us able to flow forward, without pushing, into a place that is both inspired and healthy. I will try to choose faith today.