How I make old beliefs lead through new doors
“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
A day in the life of anyone is filled with difficulties, challenges, and inconveniences. Responsibilities take place of fun, health takes place of laziness and priorities take place of how things should ideally fit. In the life of this triathlete in recovery these things play a huge role and they often lead to extreme crankiness. I frequently read about this happening to endurance athletes and anyone familiar with recovery knows it happens in this community all too often. In recovery there is even a term for it for Christ sake, dry drunk. We all know one or ten and some of us have been one. I am lucky to have a wife who calls me out on it before I can wallow in it. But it sure is easy to get wound up and sometimes I have no idea it is happening until it’s too late. I find the scheduling in triathlon training is particularly challenging. In early recovery I never thought I had time to go to meetings or meet with people who could help me learn new ways of doing things. Through a little bit of work I have found out a few things and I have done a lot of reflection. I’m still relatively new to this stuff so after some reflection I will try to tie it in with some grace.
Most days I like to get my training wrapped up in the morning. It helps me to clear my mind and get my blood flowing. Somehow it seems to help me face the day with a feeling confidence. Because I like doing it this way it can actually end up causing a lot of anxiety, ESPECIALLY on those days where training sounds the least bit enticing. If I don’t want to do something I like to get it over with. Like a kid getting a shot from the doctor. If I want to train and something gets in the way, like a priority then I get upset too. To me this is a conundrum that I could not live with. Both of these cases were causing me to get upset and began to ruin my day. First I’ll reflect a little on how I have always liked to do things when I want to do them. As I built a little responsibility through sobriety in my life I began to be able to juggle stuff a little better, but it still caused great anxiety until I applied a few principles. So after reflecting a little bit I will explain what helps this beginner triathlete in early recovery.
I remember when I was a kid one of the most dreaded sentences my father used quite frequently was, “Mark wants to do what he wants when he wants it.” He would follow this up with, “But you can’t always get things when and how you want it.” Once I got to be a teenager he stopped following it up because he was probably so tired of it happening he would simple state an observation because he was done trying to teach the lesson part of it. I imagine its like that rude driver that is always at the same intersection at the same time because they are on the same schedule as me. The first couple of times they busted pass, or cut me off, or zoomed into my parking spot, I flick the bird while yelling a big fuck you in my car for only myself to hear in order to teach them a lesson (odd human behavior huh?). As time went on I would just say, oh there’s the shit head again, in stoic observation. That’s kind of how I imagine my father took some of my behaviors as a teenager.
Anyway, I hated to hear this because it made me feel insignificant. Aren’t I important enough to get what I want when I want it?!?! Aren’t I the king of the road, red lights and the parking lots?! In an effort to instantiate my importance as a human being I would get angry and throw a fit (as I have caught myself doing in my truck). As I got older this continued to occur because I learned how to manipulate situations to get what I wanted, when I wanted. Somehow, when I got things that I wanted it was never enough and still isn’t. If I get to train when I want and I neglect something else I have learned the training feels rather shitty.
This type of behavior actually led to many consequences that were the exact opposite of what I wanted when I wanted it. For instance, I would drink to oblivion with my handy-dandy Xanax to help me reach walking unconsciousness even though I had to drive. I wanted to get drunk there and then. The Xanax would help me not have to consume as much alcohol… that never worked, not once. But, I tried it as harder than I’ve tried a few pretty logical religions. Anyway, this behavior led to 4 DUI’s. I wanted to get high right when I got my stash leading to 3 arrests and being caught by my mother in my bathroom smoking a blunt. My using friends would even question me, “are you sure you don’t want to wait till we get home, what if a cop sees us?” I always trusted my tented windows, but in reality I just wanted what I wanted when I wanted it despite the world around me. If I had a job interview and it wasn’t exactly when I wanted it, it didn’t matter how big of an opportunity it was, I would get high and miss it if it wasn’t conveniently fit into my small window of semi soberness. This led me to not getting into graduate school and being removed from my post-graduate research team, I was completely unreliable. Come to think of it this feeling even prevented me from ever learning to master any one instrument because I wanted to be the best right then and right there. This feeling drives me crazy when reading a book and ironically even when writing. I must get over it!
Triathlon has helped me smash this way of thinking because it simply doesn’t work, and trust me I tried. I started out training and cranked out 7 miles in 7 ½ minutes for each mile. The following day I could not walk but I still ran. I did this throughout the first month until I ended up with Achilles Tendonitis. This was why a man took pity on me and took me in and began coaching me. If he didn’t come along I probably would not be able to walk, much less run.
This thinking led me to arrests, jails, fines and missed opportunities in life. It also led me to missing a few weeks of training causing some great setbacks during my first triathlon. Triathlon has showed me I can’t do this in training- so why should I be able to do it in life. Well sometimes it’s the case that not only do I not want to do it when it works for the world but I just don’t wanna do it at all! This is my last example to sum up what I have learned. Let me go ahead and say that some days seem tough, that that’s just it. They only seem tough. Early in recovery and training happen entirely too frequently, and worse the advice I learned to take was the last thing that I wanted to hear.
A few mornings ago, I woke mid morning, 4:35. (For those who don’t know I enjoy to drive Uber on the side. It weirds people out when I pull up in a big lifted truck, but I love it. It’s a gift of sobriety.) Anyway, at 4:35 I took an Uber customer across town and came back home. I put on some coffee and while I waited for it to finish I decided to meditate. While I was sliding deep into my head, sleep gripped me and took me places I wasn’t planning on going at all.
Inside my dream I was training with an overwhelming nauseous, sluggish, sleepy brick on my back. This made training very laborious. I was planning on doing two training sessions during the day and going to meet with my sponsor in between. During my meeting my sponsor laughed at me and said he was no longer going to help. So I did all I knew to do and went home to write about it in my blog, but my blog wouldn’t work! I entered panic mode. I could not train, could not keep sponsors and could not write! I woke up feeling empty with a big agenda filled with to-dos on both my training and work lists. GRRR “I JUST DON’T WANNA!” It rang loudly in my head as I lay exhausted from my dream. Somehow my dream had injected me with horrible feelings. I felt like no one liked me, my energy was gone and I knew my writing would go nowhere. Even though these things aren’t true I still believed them. God the mind is fucking powerful because all evidence shows that I have a ton of support and the most energy I have had in my life. But, trying to tell myself these facts was not enough to get me going. What was I going to do?!
The thing I noticed during that day and have come to hold dear over the past couple of days is that I am not able to tell myself what I don’t believe. Sometimes my feelings are what I believe and often times my feelings are not the best indicator for a follow up behavior (think back to the driving example). Instead, if I want to keep sobriety and the benefits that come from training I know that I must daily find the things I believe in. I must work to bring those things to fruition, at times with arduous painstaking effort. If I do this then I can tell myself the things I came to believe during that day. So, I have to ask myself, how do I change what I believe in the moment to what is true? I need to know this so I can use it tomorrow when I don’t want to do anything.
When I just cant go any further on my bike how do I break through?
When I think I am going to drawn or have a panic attack while swimming how do I continue?
When I need to get my Xanax prescription filled or a beer to forget about life how I muster up the strength to abstain?
What I have learned to do is listen to the advice that I never wanted to hear. But now I use that advice as mantras. In doing that I am thinking of someone else and saying to myself, “you are not right, they are.” Somehow this takes me out of those beliefs. I have heard people say that once I am able to get out of my head I will enter into a new realm of spirit, I gain another source of motivation. If I am able to hang onto the thought and that person for long enough then soon I see that I’m doing what I thought I couldn’t before, and often I’m enjoying it. In this moment, I have officially broken belief and proved myself otherwise to myself created new beliefs. This energy continues and I become stronger than I was the day prior and new belief take the place of the old. This works so well in the heat of the moment such as a grueling hill climb on the bike or a long swim alone in the water. This is pretty simple. I don’t have to get out and do a mother Theresa act. All I need to do is try to think of someone else. Something else that works for me is doing something out of the ordinary. For instance, most mornings I wake up and drink my pre work out protein and hurry to the gym. The morning of this bad dream I decided not to do that. I made an omelet for my wife and sat down for coffee until she got up. Sure enough before too long I was writing on my blog, which I didn’t think was possible and I was instantly back in my grove, ready to kick the day in the ass.
So what helps? Doing something different with someone else in mind. Is it easy? No. Does it make life easier? Yes and it always opens up new possibilities. Doing the same thing and doing what I want when I want it never leads to anything new. So is it easy? Well…. I guess if it makes life easier and better then the alternative, then yes it is a pretty darn easy choice to make.