“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.
If you are none of these, you can be sure it will kill you, too, but there will be no special hurry.” — Ernest Hemingway
When I was dancing, one of my teachers shared a quote that she had learned from one of her mentors: “If a dancer ever wakes up in the morning and doesn’t hurt, they are probably dead.”
Last weekend, the Learn to Train 6 (LTT6) seminar came to a close with a final Q&A session to all the coaches. One of the questions asked was (to paraphrase), “For anyone who’s had a serious injury, how have you handled it?”
A few jokingly asked, “Who hasn’t been injured?” Collectively, the whole group started laughing.
This isn't to glorify pain as something to be proud of and show off, but I don’t think anyone would argue with the belief that if you're truly going to work to be elite at something, certain things will have to be sacrificed. It might be your body, it might be certain aspects of your health, or it might be family time, relationships, or any of those things. But no one is immune to pain and sacrifice. No one is immune to being broken. The difference with this group is that none of us let it be the thing that metaphorically killed us.
An injury isn’t a hardcore statement of "look how badass I am." It’s a declaration that you risked something. You chose strength. It might have cost you, but you took the risk. If you have the mental fortitude, you can regain the strength and more on top of it if you really learn. You are stronger in the broken places.
I would never encourage people to hurt themselves, but I will ask, how well do you really understand strength without experiencing being broken? When I ruptured my hamstring tendon back in 2007, I was in excruciating pain. I couldn’t walk without a cane, I couldn’t straighten the leg, and it hurt every fucking second. Three days after rupturing it, I drove to the gym, hobbled in, and sat myself on a chest machine and pushed. I leaned the cane against the weight stack.
I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have any idea what the recovery would take. I didn’t have a defined plan of any kind. I knew one thing though—however long it took, I was not going to let myself stay broken. I made every mistake imaginable in the recovery process, but with every setback, it forced me to get back up and go forward. That wasn’t the last injury either. But the point isn't that I'm proud of how good I hurt myself. I do take pride though in what it taught me. And I didn’t let it kill me. I didn’t let it stop me.
Pain and sacrifice are like failure in that they're made worthwhile by the conscientious choice of learning from them. To learn is to grow stronger and gain strength, and strength is always a choice.
Pain may not be something you choose, but you can control how you handle it. Sacrifice may not be something you want to happen, but you can choose what you fill that loss with. You can choose what you learn.
For every hoorah quote that I hear about “no great man or woman has ever avoided failure,” I constantly see people who are so afraid to fail that they choose to simply do nothing. They are so afraid of being in pain or of giving anything up that they choose to be weak. This isn’t simply a physical weakness of body but a mental weakness in the mind. Rather than risk anything to learn something about themselves, they won't take any action and instead be ignorant. Do nothing, learn nothing, and be nothing. They've let the world kill them, and they will always be silent for it.
Talk to any accomplished lifter and he will likely be readily able to go into detail about how much injury taught him and how he came back from it. He will also tell you how many potentially great lifters he saw get hurt once who never competed at a high level again. His lists of injuries aren’t simply scars showing off what he can handle. It's everything he’s learned and gained from them.
Pain and sacrifice accompanies every aspect of life—personal, professional, romantic, and familial. We will always be forced to make painful choices at different stages in our lives. We may give things up, let things go, and be forced to move on. The choice we will face isn't how badly we break but whether we choose to learn or stay broken, whether we choose to remake ourselves stronger or allow ourselves to be weaker. There will always be challenges, there will always be hardships, and there will always be choices we’d rather not have to make. Only you can answer what the stronger choice is and what the weaker choice is.
