Writer Lara Ceroni helps pull a tractor in a training session organized by GritLabs in Burlington. The event, called the Dirty Games of Grit, was an outdoor obstacle course gym community event.Supplied
The light ahead of me was green, but I deliberately slowed my pace on a recent September morning run. Every time my left foot hit the pavement, a hot jolt of pain hit my ankle, as if someone was sticking me with a sharp pencil. Hobbling, I pulled my shoe off. My Achilles tendon was like a fat marshmallow: supersized and swollen. It looked bad – it certainly felt bad – but I’m stubborn, and I had only three kilometres left. I can handle it, I thought. Plus, I had a race coming up.
In a few weeks, I was meant to compete in my first-ever HYROX. The hybrid fitness competition, hugely popular in Europe and the United States, was finally coming to Canada. I’ve spent decades in the race circuit, pushing my body and my limits at everything from marathons to duathlons, half-Ironmans and adventure racing. I figured the HYROX relay – a four-person team competition combining running and functional-training stations – would be nothing. I’d just push through the pain – now and on race day. So, I kept running.
It wasn’t the first time I’ve willfully ignored my body. This summer, I tore the tendon in my finger and suffered an acute back strain. The latest diagnosis: Achilles tendinopathy, a type of overuse trauma. I joke with my gym friends that my body is broken thanks to a lifetime of fitness. But the fact is, that never-ending cycle of seeking more had started catching up to me.
“As I watched you train over the years, you always craved this high volume, high-intensity work,” said Dr. Waj Hoda, a chiropractor at Totum Life Science in Toronto (and my therapy practitioner for the past 20 years). “And while I understand that deep love affair with high-intensity fitness – it feels really good when we work really hard – what ends up happening is that if you continue operating at that gear only, you will burn out and, eventually, get injured.”
Most of Hoda’s patients are coming to him with “overuse injuries,” sports-related microtraumas resulting from too much stress on the body. With a race target or a fitness goal in mind, some athletes can become consumed with doing too much, too often.
“I think there’s pride in this idea that unless you suffer, the training isn’t worth it,” he said. “But you can’t keep pushing your body repeatedly at a high intensity without a crisis happening. A price will have to be paid.”
Writer Lara Ceroni lifts weights during a training session.Supplied
The mature me knew that I should modify my training because of my multiple injuries, but the ego in me can sometimes take over, so I just kept showing up for more. Always more.
This mindset isn’t that rare among some athletes. Remember “no pain, no gain”? The slogan became prominent in the eighties, when Jane Fonda repeated it in a series of workout videos, promising a greater reward for harder, even excruciating work. For years, I conditioned myself to believe that agony is the road to victory.
“Great athletes who are aiming for a higher goal are often people who can endure great amounts of discomfort: emotional, physical and mental,” Hoda said. “But their training plans also include strategies to help them recover, whether that’s happening through the right amount of sleep, nutrition, rest or physical therapy.”
If the factors that help a person recover aren’t there, the body moves into overtraining and can’t keep up with the demand. “It can get dangerous when people think pain is normal,” he said. “It’s not.”
Dr. Cassidy Preston founded CEP Mindset, one of the world’s largest mental-performance coaching firms, and authored Mindset First, a book that gives athletes and high performers a road map to elevate their game by prioritizing their perspective over outcomes. His work is inspired by his experiences as a top amateur hockey player. Preston fell short of his goal – making it into the NHL draft – and the stress and frustration consumed him.
“I was chasing the result and pushing through pain and not wanting to pull out because I had to make the goal,” he said. “Throughout that process, I lost my love of the game. I realized there had to be a better way for athletes to detach themselves from the noise of these expectations.”
Preston has since coached more than 10,000 athletes – including NHL, NFL and PGA players – on how to let go of the pursuit to win, instead finding value in the athlete they’re becoming throughout the process.
“Athletes can be obsessed with a results-oriented mindset, but it’s a limiting perspective,” he said. “They achieve the goal, they feel great. They don’t, and they beat themselves up. It’s a terrible way to live.”
Preston doesn’t believe athletes should lose sight of their finish lines entirely, but he does encourage them to be more mindful at every step of their journey. “You can enjoy the results that happen in the present moment, whether it’s the love of playing your sport, feeling connected to your body or the enjoyment of being outside in nature.”
Maria Fecik, the owner and head coach Holistic Athlete in Burlington, Ont., considers herself a “performance-driven person.” But, she quickly adds, there is a big difference between training hard and training smart. At her fitness facility, she often sees people doing intense workouts back-to-back, then getting tired, injured or burnt out. She tries to help these clients understand when they need to pull back and when to recover.
Her personal approach to training is rooted in proactively listening to her body, established over years of participating in extreme athletic challenges. She transitioned from a competitive life in ultrarunning, Ironman and bodybuilding into the prestigious ranks of elite HYROX athletes and as captain of the Canadian mixed relay team.
“I’m not the kind of athlete that likes to push through injury,” she said. “So when I feel like anything is off, I immediately get it checked out with a physiotherapist to treat it and I adapt my training around it. I don’t wait.”
Through my conversation with Fecik, I realized I needed to pull myself out of HYROX in Toronto. It felt disappointing, but her advice was sensible. “There will always be more races,” she said. “The value is in seeing yourself grow as a person throughout the training process – the self-confidence it builds and the strength of character it creates. There’s so much benefit in the journey itself.”
After a lifetime of chasing, I think I’m finally ready to take that rest.