203 - You Can’t Rush Adaptation

In this episode, I talk about something I’ve been learning the hard way: you can’t rush adaptation.

Whether it’s health, running, work, podcasting, or becoming a father, some things just take time. You can show up. You can do the work. You can adjust the plan. But you can’t force your body or your life to change on your exact timeline.

I’ve been frustrated with slow progress lately, especially with low testosterone, fitness, energy, and rebuilding momentum. But this season has reminded me that slow progress is not the same as no progress.

This episode is about patience, honest effort, and learning how to keep going without pretending the process is easy.

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You're not lazy. You're not lost. You just know there's a gap between the life you're living and the one you're capable of — and that gap is getting harder to ignore.

Every week, I pull apart the mental patterns that keep capable people stuck — comfort disguised as patience, avoidance disguised as strategy, mediocrity dressed up as balance. I bring in philosophy, personal stories from the trails and the trenches, and conversations with people who decided to stop waiting.

This isn't a show about hacks. It's about the harder work: getting honest with yourself, building the discipline to act on that honesty, and becoming someone you'd actually respect.

Keep getting after it.

Transcript

Welcome And The Core Idea

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Fallen in love now's all fallen apart. Thank you. That was a little brief uh cameo from my wife, Alessandra.

unknown 0:11

That's not going on because I wasn't looking ready.

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Ali says it's not going in because she's not looking ready, but little does she know it is. Welcome back to the Getin' After It podcast, my friends. Happy to have you here today. And as always, we're gonna be diving into some things that are very important uh to me. This episode, uh, I was thinking about what's next on the list. And really, I've been talking a lot about goals. I've been talking a lot about getting to certain points and becoming the best version of yourself. I think a lot of that process can be hard in terms of being patient, having to wait a long time to see those results come through. And if you've been a listener of the show, you know I've I've struggled with that um with this podcast itself, with running in general, and a lot of other things. Like life is not easy, it takes a lot of time uh to get good at things. And the idea of today's episode is all about how you cannot rush adaptation. It sounds rough, right? You can't rush adaptation. I know that's something a lot of us wish we could, but for example, if you're if you're injured, you can't heal faster. You can't force your body to heal faster, you can't force a marathon time that you haven't earned yet, and you can't force a sales pipeline to close before it's built. Or for me, soon, a newborn to fit in a life that I already had before he showed up. And you can only create the dish the conditions and give it time. That's the part that nobody wants to hear, myself included, because most of us do not struggle, do not struggle with knowing what to do. That part, a lot of us understand. We struggle with how long it takes to see if it works, and that can be very, very um discouraging at times. And I want to start off by talking about a stoic quote that you guys have heard before on this podcast, but Seneca says that we suffer more in our imagination than in reality. And I think that's half true here. Let me break it down because the other half is that some of the suffering is real, and no amount of reframing six weeks feels like six days. And both those things can be true at once. And I want that to, and I want to sit in that instead of rushing past it with a tidy lesson.

Low Testosterone And Real Patience

SPEAKER_00 2:29

So we're gonna start by talking about my testosterone. Fun, right? Fun topic. But I know it'll all make sense in a minute. But the last time I brought this up, I told you that I've been dealing with low testosterone. My last blood draw came back at 136 total. Very low. That's not a number number that you want to see close to your 30s. Like that is something that probably my son will have when he's born out of the womb. At least I hope he's just a tank when he comes out. But I felt it everywhere. It's it's running, it's mind, it's fitness, it's recovery, and it's even emotions. Like it's wild what it does to you. Hormones are so important. And if you feel like you're struggling, I'm the biggest proponent of you getting checked out. Go see a doctor, have him draw your blood, ask him to check your testosterone, your other hormones that are important in your life to keep you going. So, anyways, but running really feels harder than it should. My energy is gone early in the afternoon, and I can sleep eight hours and still wake up feeling like I only got four. Workouts that, you know, used to leave me energized now leave me needing a nap on the couch by 3 p.m., which isn't who I've been for most of my adult life. And it's hard. And here's the part that messes with my head worse than the fatigue itself, because I remember what it felt like to not be like this. I remember when I when running gave me confidence instead of making me question what happened to my body, without making me start to ask if running is is actually for me, if I'm strong enough to keep going. And it's the one thing, it's one thing to be patient building towards something that you've never had. It's a different kind of hard to be patient rebuilding towards something you already know is possible because you've lived it. My doctor told me it's probably gonna take about six weeks for me to start feeling normal again, and that was about three and a half weeks ago. I believe him, but believing the timeline does not make me okay with it. It sucks. It's not fun. But you can trust the process and still be annoyed because you feel stuck, and that's completely normal. Those two things live in the same body at the same time. And I think most people who are grinding through something slow already know exactly what I mean. Like if you've had an injury and you're building yourself back, that is the same thing I'm talking about now. It's like you cannot rush it. You have to go through, you have to do what the process asks of you. And I've been trying to name the difference between those versions of patience. And here's where I've landed. Patience towards the unknown asks you to trust a door you've never walked through. And patience toward a return asks you to trust a door you used to walk through every day, and one that's now closed for reasons partly outside of your control. The second kind carries a grief that the first kind does not because it feels like you've lost something. You're not just waiting for something new, you're mourning a version of yourself while you wait to meet the next one. That's how I feel. And kind of heavy. But I'm sure you've gone through something very similar, and that's completely normal. But the question is, what does adaptation really require? What does it need? What is it, what's the cost? Here's the mistake I keep on making, and I I bet that you make some version of it as well. I think more pressure equals more progress. That's what my brain tells me. And it doesn't. Adaptation needs stress, real stress, or nothing changes. A muscle doesn't grow unless you load it. A salesperson does not get better without hard calls and real rejection. A podcaster doesn't improve without publishing something imperfect and doing it again the next week. But stress without recovery breaks the system instead of building it. I've done this to myself more than once. Pushing easy runs too hard or jumping back into mileage before my body earned it back. Training like the runner I wanted to be instead of the one I actually was that day. These are all things I've I've gone through. And I've tried pushing the process. I want progress to happen fast. And I'm sure all you guys do too. Because it would be so nice if one day I'm like, you know what, I'm gonna go after a sub three. And I just run a few times and I feel strong, and boom, I bl I go and I do it. That would be so nice. That's the ideal. That's not how it works. It takes months to get to that pace. And oddly enough, I think about my sub three a lot when I need proof that progress sometimes is slow and it it works, but you have to be consistent. When I started that training block, hard effort for me sat around like a 730 pace. Um, that for me was fast. And to break three hours over 26.2 miles, I needed to hold something close to around a 650. And you don't talk yourself into that gap. You have to you have to earn it. That's the only way. And so I started with what I could do. I started with with where I was, and then I added from there. Speed work first, and then longer workouts, and then just showing up week after week until race day. And a seven-mile progressive run at that time where I was starting at you know what my fast pace was when I began, ending at race pace, that was hard. But I kept on going. Most of that block though was boring. And this is the part that I don't think enough people talk about because like it sounds sexy when I talk about, oh yeah, I was training for a sub-three marathon. Like, and then I I got my pace down and I was going faster and faster. But a lot of that was just the most repetitive work. Like, I remember sometimes my coach would send me my uh training block for the week, and I would say, Oh my, oh my gosh, I have to do this all over again. I have to do what I did last week, and I thought I did really well, but I have to up it this week, and I don't know if I can. I might need something different. But that's the thing. I remember asking guys and and other people who have already broken that sub-three marathon gap, and their answer was always the same, especially my coaches, which always frustrated me, but I knew she was right. And it was keep going, trust the plan, and don't panic. That don't panic part was for the runs where I completely missed my race paces, or I didn't have enough energy to finish that run. And that's the important thing is like the workout that terrifies you today becomes ordinary later on, but only if you stay in it long enough to become the person who can handle it. And that takes time. There's no other way to get around it. You can't take a magical pill that makes you ultra fast the next day. I wish that was possible, but then again, it wouldn't be worth it. It wouldn't be worth it because the things that we do that are difficult, we value them because of the lessons that we learn in the process. And it doesn't mean that every hard thing that you go through will produce some kind of value for you. Sometimes going through hard things like a life uh unexpectancy might just suck. But the question is, who are you going who are you while you're going through it? Are you someone who just bitches and moans, or are you someone who says, Okay, this sucks, but I'm gonna keep going? Like this is not gonna define me. I gotta take the next step. I think that tells a lot about who you are. That is character. Character is who you are when no one is watching. But enough of the sub three because I want to talk about something very important on this subject, and that is when slow progress feels like failure.

When Slow Progress Feels Like Failure

SPEAKER_00 10:06

This has happened to me so much. The podcast with running, fitness in general, Ali and I having a baby, um, relationships, like career-wise, that's one thing that like I I probably should talk about is like you know, my career, which we'll get into actually in a little bit here, but I want to talk going back to the podcast. 200 plus episodes into the show, and I've had the thought, shouldn't this be bigger by now? I'm not gonna pretend that that doesn't show up, that that thought doesn't come up because it does regularly. But I think the better question isn't why isn't it bigger? It's what's the actual goal? Part of mine is reaching even like one person per episode who needs it. Part of it is leaving a record that my kids can listen to when they're going through things that are when they're my age, or if they just want to have a audio platform they can listen to of dad. And growth matters to me too, and I'm not gonna pretend that it doesn't, but slow progress is not the same as no progress. I actually I posted a TikTok this week, and it was just I was doing some creator insights. Um, that's a tool I've been trying to utilize with my social media, but um, there was one that was just like a single image trend that people have, and I just posted a picture of me running up a hill, and all it said is don't confuse slow progress with no progress. A lot of us do, myself included, many times over. And I think the important piece there is just when you recognize that you're not getting to a point as fast as you would like to. There's a lot of dissecting that you can do in your processes, in your strategies, in how you're showing up that will tell you if you're doing the right things or if you need improvement. This podcast is one of those things all the time. Like I always want to create content that is valuable to the listener, but allows me to learn as well. And so I'm always thinking about okay, what strategy can I take or what approach can I take to produce something that's valuable and interesting to the listener. But this is where I have to be honest with myself, though. Patience cannot become an excuse to stop paying attention. Complacency is waiting without examining anything. And patience keeps ask it keeps acting, it keeps asking questions, it keeps changing what needs to change, while accepting that result isn't fully sometimes what you want. Those look similar from the outsides, but they are not the same thing. Sometimes the process really does need to change. Sometimes the strategy is wrong, or the goal has stopped being worth the cost. And quitting is a wise move. But more often we quit right in the middle when it gets uncomfortable. Not because the thing itself was wrong. I've watched people train for a half marathon, they've crossed the finish line and they decide to take a few days off and they stopped running right there. And they could have had a great running career, and they've talked about, you know, this was amazing. Like I built myself confidence. I didn't know I could do this, but I still did it anyway. And then they surprised themselves by showing up and crossing the finish line, and yet they stopped. And, you know, maybe that was always the plan, and there's there's nothing wrong with that if that is the case. But some of them stopped before finding out what the next version of themselves could have looked like. Like I'm saying, I I know I talk about running a lot, but I also know it's not for everybody. Running is not for everyone. I think it's very healthy, it's good for you. It puts me in a good mental space. Um, so I think it you know could do the same for everybody. And I'm not saying you have to go out there and push yourself and feel like you're dying every time. I think just getting out in the sun, running, feeling good about yourself, that teaches that gives you a lot more confidence than you would think. But your thing can be different than running. It could be a high rocks, it could be CrossFit, it could be walking, it could be weightlifting, it could be yoga. There's so many options out there for you to be active that help with your mind. That's why I love it. But, anyways, this show has taught me the same lesson from a different angle. Somewhere around episode 50, I remember thinking the growth curve should be bent upward by then. It hadn't. I had two options at that point. Quit or figure out what I actually meant by success here. And I chose the second one. And it took another hundred plus episodes before I had real clarity on what this show is actually for. The clarity didn't show up because I waited passively. It showed up because I kept making episodes, I kept paying attention to which ones actually connected with me and the audience, and I kept asking harder questions about the purpose behind the work instead of just the size of the audience. The output looked the same from the outside for a long stretch. Underneath it, the thinking was changing every month. That's something I don't really talk about as much as I should in this podcast, but it does change shape quite a bit. For me, that's a good thing. I like that. And I want to go back to my career.

Sales Growth And The Comparison Trap

SPEAKER_00 15:09

I want to talk about sales because sales is interesting to me. I started my career in marketing, I ran a digital marketing agency with my brothers, and uh I decided that I wanted to get into sales once that closed. Um, but I almost walked away from it in February. It's really recent, actually. But looking back, the issue was never that I couldn't do it. And I expected myself to perform at the level that I hadn't earned yet. Like I watched other people succeed around me, and instead of asking them what skill I was missing, I started asking what was wrong with me. That is brutal. Comparison, it's good in the sense of like it shows you what you want, but if you're comparing your skills to other people's and you haven't developed that yet, that's a problem. That will get you in a bad headspace. You've heard the term or the phrase comparison is the thief of joy, but really I think that should be because comparison is good to some extent, but I think instead of comparison is the thief of joy, it's it's envy is the thief of joy. Letting the comparison get to you is the thief of joy. Or telling yourself that you're not ever going to get to the point that your colleagues are at. That's what's going to rob you of your joy. Not the fact that someone's doing better of you. If you let that rob you of your joy, then I think you're in the wrong headspace. But I think when you start comparing your outputs and your um skill sets to someone who's been in the industry for 10 plus years and they're they know what they're doing, they know how to talk to people, they know exactly how the product that they're selling works, that's not fair to you. And it's gonna rob you of your joy. And I started asking myself, like I said, what was wrong with me? My mind is really good at turning feedback into negative thoughts. And you might be something, you know, you might have something similar happen to you. But for example, like the reality is, hey, I haven't learned this skill yet. But in my head, that turns into I'm not cut out for this. Or right now, with my current physical state, I say, hey, I'm slower right now. That turns into I've lost my discipline. One is a fact, and one is a figment of my imagination, like Seneca says, I suffer more in my imagination than I do in reality. That applies here. Or my show hasn't grown the way I hoped. That's a fact. But that can turn into maybe nobody cares. Confuse a skill problem for an identity problem, and you make the process heavier than it already is. Sales is a skill built from listening, asking better questions, handling rejection, and following up when you do not feel like it. Nobody matters that, nobody masters that before they've gone through being bad at it first. And that's one thing that I thought I could skip. I honestly thought that, hey, I could just show up. I know how to talk to people, I know how to have these conversations, but I didn't know sales processes, I didn't know certain techniques or skills that I needed to learn to enhance that. Instead, I just thought, hey, I'm in this role, I should already know it. And I didn't expect myself to learn. It's so funny for me telling this part because I'm someone who preaches about becoming the best version of yourself. But when I had sales in the beginning of my career, I didn't think I was good enough for it. When in reality, it was just I took facts as, hey, I'm not built here yet. I don't have a pipeline here, I haven't had the reps that I need to get to where I want to be into you're bad at this. And I'm sure many of you do that with this the dreams, the goals, or the career that you're in now. How many of us talk ourselves out of doing something great because we've had a few bad at bats with it? You know, we go on a couple runs, it it feels like we're dying on those runs, and then we call it quits because we feel like we can't get better. When in reality, you stick with it, you start where you're at, and you go slow through that. You go slow, you trust the process, you just surprise yourself. I never considered myself to be a runner. I didn't start running until about 2021, and it's been about five years, which is wild. Because again, I never considered myself a runner. Um when I started running, my paces were in 11 minutes, 11 minutes per mile, which you know, I was proud of that at the time, and I should be because that was the most that I could have done at that moment. And then I started raising the bar. I realized if I trained more consistently, it's just like weightlifting. I'd get those bigger muscles from weightlifting if I was consistent, if I stayed with the training program, even on those days when my muscles were screaming at me, they were sore, and I needed to recover, still show it up, still got it done, and the results followed. And running was the same exact way, just as any important thing in your life will kind of play out to be.

Fatherhood And Subtraction For Adaptation

SPEAKER_00 20:06

But I'm interested, honestly, in how I'm going to adapt as a father. A lot of you know that I have a baby coming September, and my wife, who is about seven months pregnant now, um we're so pumped. We cannot wait. It's wild. But I'm gonna be required to adapt. I'm about to become a dad, and it's forced me to think about this this whole topic differently. Can I still run and be present? Can I still build this show, help my wife, grind at work, and not miss one thing that matters most? I don't want I don't think the honest answer is that it'll be easy. Because it won't be. There's going to be a learning curve coming. And for me, I already have in my mind that that is not a failure. That's just what real life change asks of you. The lesson I'm sitting with right now is that most adaptation requires subtraction, not addition. My instinct has always been to add, you know, add more workouts, add more content, add more effort, more discipline stacked on top of what I'm already doing. But a new season doesn't usually ask you to add more, it asks you to remove what no longer fits. That's hard sometimes because we get so comfortable with the version of ourselves that we are today that when life when life asks you to make a change, when it asks you to subtract things that are no longer serving you, it feels uncomfortable. It feels weird. But it's important. Like, hey, maybe I run at a different time now. Maybe the show gets more focused on instead of more frequent. Or maybe I say no more than I used to. I've watched people try to skip this part entirely. Like, get married and keep leaving living single. P.S. I did that in early marriage. You can't do that when you're married. Um Have a kid and keep training. Like nothing changed. Like take a new job and expect the same energy left over for everything else. It doesn't hold. The season changed, which means what counts as excellence has to change with it. Running 60 miles a week might be excellent in one season, but running 25 miles a week consistently might be excellent in the next. That's not settling. That is what adapting is. Like adapting doesn't always feel like progress. Sometimes it does feel like loss. The old rhythm, the old freedom, the old version of you that could train and work and create and still recover on the schedule that you had. I look back at the guy that sometimes and that I was, um I sometimes miss him. At least right now, in the season I'm in, where I don't feel as strong as I used to be. I'm not as fast. I don't have as much energy. I miss that guy. And I I wish I could be out on the trails running 20 plus miles right now, but I can't. My body doesn't allow me to. But I am doing what I can. And I I promise you that I will get back to that point. It's it's gonna take some time, but I'm confident that I can do it because I've done it before. I've been in seasons where I have low testosterone and I've rebuilt myself. It just takes a little bit of time. And, you know, I think, you know, like I said, I missed that guy, but maturity might just be learning to stop worshiping the old season. You know, my fitness, my energy, my consistency, all of it becomes evidence that I can build again. It's not proof that I failed. It's proof of what's possible when I put the work in. Even if the path back doesn't look identical to the path that got me here in the first time. So Allie and I talked about this after we ran uh that ultra marathon together out in um out in Moab, Utah. Um neither of us really expected the results that we got. I think Allie was very impressed with what she had. I was uh very impressed with what I had. I beat my time by about 40 minutes, my previous 50K. And, you know, I think that we're gonna have the same experience when we have a baby. Like, yeah, there's gonna be a learning curve. But I think we'll look back and say, man, I didn't expect us to be able to stay consistent with these things, even if it's not a 50K. If I'm still showing up and doing what I can, that is what is important, and that is how we become better. Like I said, there might be seasons where you're doing 60 plus miles a week, and that's great. But there's other seasons where you have a baby, you have a wife that you need to take care of, you have responsibilities, you have a job that you need to focus on to provide for them. And fitness, although it's important, is not the major priority at the moment. That doesn't mean that you have an excuse to take it easy, to start eating unhealthy, to let your body gain a few pounds and look in the mirror and say, Man, I really lost it. That's not an excuse. It is figure out what's next, find a training plan that works. And I think that version of you will look back and say, I'm proud of who I've become.

Five Questions For Any Slow Season

SPEAKER_00 25:08

But there's questions I think that, you know, if you are wondering if the thing that you're doing now is serving you, um, but doesn't seem to be changing, these questions that I would I would ask is where I would start. Like, ask yourself first, does this still matter to you? Not to who you were five years ago, not to your ego, not to who is ever watching. If the honest answer is no, let it go. That is not weakness. If it still matters, are you actually doing the work? Not thinking about it, not planning it, not posting about it, doing it consistently. If the answer is no, your problem isn't adaptation, it's action. But if you are doing the work, have you given it enough time? A week doesn't tell you anything about a training plan. A handful of calls doesn't tell you anything about a sales career. And we want certainty before the process has had a chance to say anything back to us. Are you measuring the right thing? Rebuilding fitness, the first sign of progress might be consistency and not pace. In sales, it might be sharper conversations and a cleaner pipeline, not closed revenue yet. On the show, it might be clearer thinking and better episodes, not download numbers. Measure the wrong thing and you'll miss the progress that actually is happening underneath the surface. And last, does the plan need to change? Sometimes yes. Like patience is not the same as stubbornness. Get honest, ask your ask someone further along than you, take that feedback, then give the new plan real time before you judge it too. Some people never adapt because they keep swapping the stimulus. A new goal every month, a new plan every week, a new direction every time. Something gets hard. But that's not adaptation. That seems to be restlessness. And I felt it plenty of times in my life. And here's the honest tension in all five of those questions. You have to hold patience and honesty at the same time. And most of us are better at one than the other. Some of you listening to this need to hear that you haven't given something enough time yet, that you're judging a process before it's had the chance to even work. Others of you need to hear the opposite, that you've been calling something patience for two years when it actually needs when it's actual avoidance. And it's time to make an honest change. I can't tell you which one applies to you right now. Only you know that. If you're willing to actually look. And it's uncomfortable. But that's what this whole show's about. We're getting uncomfortable, we're getting out of our comfort zones and getting better in the process. That's what getting after it is. Getting after it looks different in all seasons of life, which is why it's a very interesting topic to me. Because it's something that changes all the time. But if I were to ask you, okay, well, what should this week look like for you? If you take one thing out of this episode, let it be this.

A Practical Plan To Keep Building

SPEAKER_00 28:04

Stop asking whether you've arrived. Start asking whether you're building. Here's how I'd apply that practically starting today. So, first, name the actual stress that you need, not more of everything, the specific thing that would challenge the specific system that you're trying to grow. For me right now, that's showing up to easy runs at an easy pace instead of forcing them and making calls even on days where my energy is low. That's me. You figure out yours. Second, protect the recovery as hard as you protect the effort. Sleep, food, rest days, whatever lets the adaptation actually land, that's important. Because most of us treat recovery like the reward for discipline instead of the mechanism that makes discipline work. Third, pick one honest measurement and track it weekly. Not the outcome that you're chasing, the measurement, the input that tells you whether you're actually doing the work. Is it calls made? Is it miles run? Is it words written? Whatever applies to the season that you're in, start tracking that week by week. Fourth, set a real check-in date before you judge the process. Give yourself six weeks at a minimum, a full training block or a full quarter, something longer than your patience wants to allow or that you want to allow because you want progress to happen faster. Write that date down. Fifth, ask someone further along than you whether your plan makes sense. Easy as that. Ask someone who's done the thing that you want to do if you're heading in the right direction. That's something that I think a lot of us do not rely on is the knowledge other people have. And most people, if if they enjoy doing what they're doing, if it's a podcaster, will love to talk about podcasting with you. A runner will love to talk about running with you. Whatever that is, find someone who you admire in your category, in your niche, and talk to them. Ask them what they're doing. Ask them how they got there. And the last thing I'll say, number six, is write down what you would tell a friend in your exact situation. Most of us hand out better advice to other people than we give ourselves because we can see their process clearly and judge our own only by how it feels in the moment. Read your own advice back to yourself this week. That is important. Because I really do think like I give myself a hard time a lot of the times. Because I, you know, like I said, I mourn sometimes the person I used to be, the person I was when I had 600 testosterone, total testosterone, but now I have 136. And there's a lot of things in my life that have taken a taken a setback, I guess you could say, that have had a setback. And I beat myself up a lot. But I have done this before where I've written that down. If I would tell a friend who was going through the same exact thing as me, I would say, hey, listen, your body, like testosterone, man, that that really does run your entire body. That's how you build muscle, that's how you get good sleep, that's how you think clearly, that's how you regulate your emotions, that's how you recover, all those things. And if you don't have that right now, you know what, man? Be a little bit graceful with yourself. Understand that, you know, you're gonna have to have patience. And if you're doing the right things, if you're showing up as much as you can, if you're you're doing what you can in this season, then that's a success. And you can't compare yourself to other people because of what they're posting, or you can't compare yourself to who you used to be because this is reality now. And life sometimes deals a crappy deck of cards. That's just how it is. But you can get through it and you'll be better for it. That's what I would tell my friend if they were dealing with this. But sometimes it's it's a lot harder to give yourself that advice. Now, I want my son to grow up asking better questions than what's wrong with me. Because I've done that a lot. I want him asking what he can learn or what skills he's missing, whether he's given something enough time, or whether he's actually being patient or just being passive. He's going to hit seasons where the work is honest and the results are slow anyway. But I want him to know slow does not mean hopeless. And I want him to know effort has to be honest too. You cannot call it patience if you've stopped showing up. You can't call it faith if you won't act. So if you are in the middle of something right now and it feels like nothing is moving, don't assume the middle means nothing is happening. The middle is usually where the actual change is taking place. It's quiet before you can feel it. It's not glamorous and it's not fast, but it's where you become the person who can carry what you're asking for. I think about my son a lot when I think about that. He's not here yet, but he will be soon. And everything I do in this exact season, the recovery, the pipeline building, the slow rebuild of my own body, is going to shape what kind of father shows up in his life. He won't remember the 136 or the six-week timeline that my doctor gave me or the 10-mile work or 10-mile workout that I had in the in the hills of Utah. He'll remember whether I was someone who kept showing up when things were hard and slow. That's the actual legacy, not the highlight, it's the habit. You don't get a different life by demanding one. You get it by staying in the process long enough for it to change you. That's true in running, in health, in work, in marriage, in fatherhood, in faith. You can't rush adaptation. You can only keep creating the conditions for it and trust that the season that's wrecking you right now is the same one you'll look back on and call that one the season that taught you everything.

Share It And Keep Getting After It

SPEAKER_00 34:04

If this one hit home, guys, please send it to someone who's stuck in the slow season right now. Leave a rating on Apple or Spotify if you haven't yet. It's uh the main way new people find the show. And uh I always appreciate it. So thank you for sitting with me and and going through this topic. And I just, it's an important lesson for for I think everyone to remember. Uh we forget about it a lot because you know we we get excited about goals, we go out strong, we start hot. And when that starts to fade, when that excitement starts to dwindle, we question whether we're actually meant for this, whether we're cut out for it. But it's it's staying in the game. It is it is adapting where where we need to, subtraction where we can and not addition. But seriously, I appreciate it. And if you want to tell me what season you're adapting through, reach out. I read every message or leave a comment on this uh episode either on Spotify or YouTube. And uh you guys are the best. I really appreciate you guys, and as always, keep getting after it, my friends.