Searching For Balance

Not gonna lie. The last few weeks, even months, have been kind of rough. It’s nothing super-complicated. More like the natural result of having one kid in college and one looking at colleges and a wife that works full-time. I also work full-time, obviously, and I’ve got a reasonably successful side-hustle going at As For Football, and for that matter, my wife Sally also has one in her private yoga studio. So we both stay running almost all the time, and worse, my younger daughter hasn’t started driving yet, so add in her schedule on top of ours…

It has felt like a lot.

Circumstances like this will often lead to little resentments in marriages, and for as much as I feel like Sally and I have a pretty good partnership, we are hardly immune to the petty jealousies inherent in constant struggle and exhaustion. I got to the point this past weekend where I finally admitted to Sally that I’ve just not been happy. I’ve felt all out of balance, and it hasn’t helped that my younger daughter has been on me to take more time for myself. Like, that’s great advice, but… WHEN?!

With my team after the Swim Across the Sound

At the same time, I’d been struggling with a series of small workout-related injuries since transitioning from heavy swim training for the Swim Across the Sound to the more balanced swim/weight training regime that I use to prepare for ski season. We finished the Swim in early August. I then helped Emma train for high school swim season, went on vacation to Maine for a week, got back in the pool with Emma for two weeks after that, and finally, late in August, transitioned back into the weight room. I pulled a quad the first week, my lower back the next week, a muscle in my upper back the week after that, and my lower back again -- on the other side -- the following week. This was absolutely maddening.

Meanwhile, I’d put on a little weight, and I’ve got to be honest, started drinking more than I think I’d realized. This peaked with a weekend bender over at my friend Bill’s -- I just tried to let out all the frustration of the previous months -- and afterwards, I swore off drinking until the end of the year.

I did not think that this would be a big deal. What happened instead was that I lost something like five pounds almost immediately, and I started both swimming and lifting better than I had in months. I actually felt like myself in the pool. This felt amazing. Even revelatory. 

Friends, I’m almost 50. Times like that have become truly rare and precious.

The experience was a lot more profound than I’d expected it might be. It was a little like being on a runner’s high all the time. I felt like my personal life was falling apart, but suddenly I was swimming and lifting like a teenager. My mind and body both snapped back into that same hyper-competitive state in which I lived all the time back as a high school student and later as a cadet at West Point. I got in the zone, and I just sort of lived there for something like two weeks straight.

I’m telling you, this was an extreme experience. I hit a literal runner’s high about a week ago that lasted for hours. I got into it during warm-ups, felt it building through the back half of a set of 50s, and then managed to ride it for the next half hour or so in the water and then for another 45 minutes in the weight room. I held my heart rate right at its aerobic threshold throughout that entire time, gunning the engine just enough to keep it going, and that feeling buoyed me for 10 full hours afterwards.

I don’t even know how to describe this. It was -- physically -- perhaps the most intoxicating experience of my entire life. Certainly, I did not expect to feel like that after some random midweek workout late in my 49th year of life.

If you knew me back at West Point, you may know where this is going. I might’ve been my best self in the pool back in those days, but I was not happy, nor could I find anything like balance in my life back then. In fact, my friends called me Angry Dan just because I walked around a little pissed off all the time. I held that edge because it helped me compete and win when it mattered as a Division I athlete.

Finding myself back in this same headspace was not a fortuitous development in my homelife. As I’ve said, I’m nearly 50. I can’t sacrifice everything for my sport anymore. Swimming isn’t worth the death of my marriage and the destruction of my relationships with my kids. And really, it’s funny how fast that stuff can start to unravel when you don’t necessarily put it first in your life.

Yoga in the zone

So we went away this weekend, and if I didn’t drink a lot, I definitely did drink a little. In fact, I’ve had several glasses of wine with my wife over the past week or so, and I’m back up to 197 pounds from a low of 193.3. We are both actively working on our marriage, and I felt… better… last night and over this past weekend than I had in weeks. Overall, my lie feels like it makes a certain amount of sense again.

But then I went to the pool yesterday, and that was shit. Technically, I swam okay. My times weren’t, like, way off or anything. But I couldn’t find that gear. That ineffable… whatever it is. The edge that at one point made me legitimately great in the water. I’d had it when I was pissed. Having found a little peace, though, now it’s gone.

Gotta be honest here. I can’t help but mourn its loss a little bit.

Is there not some way to be great in the pool and still happy at home? 

I know that true greatness comes from a kind of single-minded focus that I now remember almost like one might remember a past mental illness. I absolutely cannot afford that now, nor is it truly desirable. And anyway, what’s the point? No one cares if some random 50-year-old is having great workouts -- for him, at his age -- in some random gym in Coastal Connecticut. 

No one cares. Hell, no one is even going to notice.

Class of 95 tailgate. This was in the morning before things got crazy.

Sally says that I just haven’t found the right balance yet, that somehow I can have it all if I just keep searching. I find myself a little skeptical, but then, that’s why this very search has been and continues to be the most compelling challenge of my life.