by Martin Collis, Ph.D.

Things have not gone as well as I would have liked in the fitness and discipline department. Another back injury eroded my ability to exercise and with it my resolve to discipline other aspects of my life. As Bertrand Russell noted "our happiness depends more on our physiology than we like to think." Russell went on to say "unhappy businessmen would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change in philosophy."

I like good news. I like to write in my morning journal when things are going well, or check my stocks when the Dow Jones or the TSE are going up and read the box scores when the Seattle Mariners win. My life, of course, is filled with good news, I live in a beautiful home, have a great situation at home with my executive coordinator Dino, date a beautiful, kind and intelligent woman and travel widely as a speaker and consultant. I wouldn't trade places with anyone.

Yet injuries can still bring on that 'dark night of the soul' when you lose faith in your body to perform. Loss of faith leads to loss of confidence which is hardly surprising, as right in the middle of the word 'confidence' is 'fide', meaning 'faith'. I always liked Mohammed Ali's "My brain's making appointments that my limbs can't keep."

So how did I respond to my injury?

On the positive side, I aggressively went after treatment and got some excellent physiotherapy. If you are an athlete (and we're all athletes, though some of us are in training and some not) it is so important to treat athletic injuries appropriately, which often means professionally.

I worried. This did me no good at all. Injuries, and particularly back injuries, impinge on everything and whether you are sitting, standing, watching a movie, trying to sleep or taking a walk you get constant reminders that you are not the fully functioning individual you would like to be. This can be dealt with, but I made things worse by projecting into the future and see myself crippled with back pain. It was a very human thing to do, but not a very smart one, because thoughts about permanent disability are stressful. Now I was not only suffering present discomfort, but the stress of facing a future dominated by back pain. Why do we do this? Robbie Burns wrote about the human tendency to worry about the past and the future in his poem 'To a Mouse'.

"But I can backward cast my eye in prospects drear
And forward though I cannot see I look and fear"

I often think F.E.A.R. is an acronym for Future Expectations Awful Repercussions.

I pretty much stopped stretching. My original back injury occurred while I was stretching, so I now had the perfect rationalization for missing the part of fitness I like least. The sad thing is I know it's a rationalization, but it still disappeared from my morning program. One of these days I'll appreciate the joy of flex.

So where am I now?

It's a bit like the story of the two hunters who took a floatplane to a remote lake to go elk hunting. The pilot dropped them off with a firm reminder the plane could only accommodate 2 elk for the return trip, so they could just shoot one apiece. When the plane returned the hunters have 3 elk and put tremendous pressure on the pilot to take the extra elk. The clincher comes when they say "we had 3 elk last year and the pilot took them all." So the third elk is stuffed in the little float plane which races across the lake, barely lifts off the water, clips a tree top and crashes. One hunter says to the other "Where are we?" the other replies, "About 100 metres short of where we crashed last year."

I feel a bit like that. I'm trying to prepare for my annual triathlon, and have dealt with a variety of "the injuries of excellence." To top things off, my practice times are actually slower than last year.

I have lost virtually no weight (just under .5 kg or 1 lb). In general, I eat well, but carelessly I am easily seduced by culinary delights. But I have stepped out of my comfort zone and since my back has recovered I've averaged 5 swims/week, I've purchased a new bike and am wrestling with the technology associated with it. I am currently running through Mystic Vale three times/week. My massage therapist Peter Carl is helping my muscles recover, and telling me I must drink more fluids.

So there's the diary for this issue of WELL. The triathlon is in 3 weeks and I'm changing my goal from under 3 hours to "finish." The real goal is to compete in my annual benchmark of performance. The word 'compete' is often misunderstood and I hear so much about the evils of competition. The origins of the word are Latin with 'petere' meaning seek, while 'com' means with. So that competition literally means seeking together, or using others to get the best out of yourself.

The 'comfort zone' phrase is also worth some comment. Many people want to be different, but they don't want to change. Doing new things can mean feeling inadequate and out of place. But as G.K. Chesterton noted, "If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly." Sometimes when I'm struggling in the pool or trying to fix something on my bike, I hear a voice I remember from childhood, "Why don't you act your age?" It didn't work for me as a kid and it doesn't work for me now as an older adult. So I'll struggle along way outside my comfort zone, trying to remember my discomfort might be proportional to my growth and as Bob Dylan noted, "He not busy being born is busy dying."