No Pain?

In defense of Rest

Shin splints. That’s how it all started. Just a nagging, frustratingly dull, pain that seems to flare up every time I run. I’ve done plenty of research on the best way to treat and manage my shin splints so I can get back to running again. After all, I have goals to track and I’m falling behind!

My research yielded something I found to be equally frustrating and dull.

Rest.

Ice.

Compression.

Elevation.

No magic massage or cold therapy? No targeted stretch to release muscle tension? No topical creams or medication that would give me my running edge back? Just good ol’ rest, ice, compression, and elevation. And while it might be the simplest prescription to follow, I can’t seem to accept that rest is what my body needs. So I go back to the well, looking for more advanced, active solutions, or I tell myself “fuck it”, run through my pain, because no pain, no gain, right?

Every bone in my body has been tuned to the idea that I need to push through my pain. Rest means if I’m not doing it, someone else is. I start to question if I can’t do it today, will I ever? Am I, as my old PE teacher might say, soft?

My frustration with the simplicity of the solution should tell you a lot about my adherence to my recovery plan early on. I just didn’t do it. I’ll just dial it back on a run. I’ll lift a little less heavy. I’ll still walk six-eight miles a day. And after a week, I asked myself how I wasn’t miraculously cured. I knew what my body needed. I just had to stop, sit on the couch with an ice pack on my shin, and do nothing. How hard can that be? Isn’t there a version of me that was just dying to binge watch The Pitt for an entire weekend to relax? Where the heck did that guy go? I thought for sure I would be ecstatic about having permission to do nothing for two weeks.

Rest does not come naturally to me. It feels like I’m stagnating. I allow negative self talk back into the equation. If I’m resting, I’m lazy. I’m not growing. The discomfort of resting (read “doing nothing”) steered me back to more comfortable, judgment free territory, pushing through pain, which, spoiler alert, does not make it better. It’s not a shocking conclusion. I know rest is good for me, and yet, I cannot seem to apply the simplest of remedies to my life. I can’t productivity hack my way to a better outcome. I could not brute force my way to recovery. There isn’t a magic pill to make it all better.

Stopping and resting feels like the worst possible remedy to my pain.

I convince myself that the pain of losing my fitness, or my momentum toward my goals is actually worse than the physical pain I feel. And so in an effort to prove something to myself, to prove that I can persevere, that I can endure, and that I am not indeed soft, I push through the pain.

Until I can’t.

It turns out that I struggle with this in every facet of my life, not just my fitness program. I want to build a meaningful and successful business. I think about the work I do non-stop. I take more meetings per week than I should sometimes. My brain does not know weekends, or holidays. In the moment, it feels low stakes and low effort. It doesn’t feel like the same physical grind of pushing through pain, until I wake up for a week straight with no meetings and an energy reserve that I’ve tapped on margin with no repayment plan, and my brain decides it’s done enough thinking for a while. My brain needs rest. It needs sleep. It needs to get lost in a fiction book where I can immerse myself in a world that is not my own. It needs to be in nature. And yet, those remedies, much like the remedies for my shin splints feel wrong, and weak.

I’ve been led to believe that suffering is part of the success equation. If I work harder, I deserve the outcomes I seek. If I ever rest, I’m just lucky. And it seems we will all gladly line up for more suffering before subjecting ourselves to the simplest and easiest solutions: rest for the mind and body to recover. It’s no wonder I’ve come face to face with the professional equivalent of shin splints more than once in my life. Burnout.

Doing nothing has never been a viable KPI in my professional career. When I am able to rest, I can feel that it makes a difference. So why does it feel like pulling teeth every time I need to rest?

Because I’m too uncomfortable to adhere to that prescription.

I don’t trust the data, and more importantly, I don’t trust myself. I must be the outlier. Despite knowing what’s best for me, I simply have a hard time sitting in the discomfort of rest. I am uncomfortable with resting because I am afraid of being labeled weak. I’m scared to sit with the thought that maybe I don’t have what it takes. I fear judgment, who looks a lot like my high school P.E. teacher.

Working harder can feed us an illusion that we can, one day, outfox stress. I’ve been there. If I can just clear out my inbox, I won’t feel as scattered. Once I become a lead advisor, then I’ll have better balance. I’ve been conditioned to believe that rest is the reward I deserve when I finally arrive at my destination. I tell myself that I succeeded because of the suffering and the pain I endured. And I neglect the simplest of solutions to my pain because I am afraid of getting left behind.

What if the key to unlocking a healthier life isn’t pushing through the pain, or discomfort, or stress? What if it’s Inaction.

What if the solution is instead to stop dead in our tracks to make friends with the discomfort of doing nothing? Not to conquer it, but to befriend it. What if it’s Compassion.

What if I’ve spent my life confusing the idea of slowing down and resting? What if I could tell myself I have Enough.

My mileage is down this week. I’m icing my shins several times a day. And I’m still not 100% comfortable with my treatment plan.

R.I.C.E