Consuming Failure

It's easy—even comforting—to say failure is just part of the journey. All it takes, supposedly, is a mind willing to look beyond obstacles and see setbacks as but learnings along the grand path. Yet, knowing this and believing it when you're flat on your back are entirely different.

Right now, I'm lying in bed. I'm sick and I'm reflective. I'm getting plenty of rest and I'm combing over the past few years of life experience. My current affliction is physical, not born from my own dissatisfaction or regret about where I've put my time or effort. Yet even in this state it is easy to feel somehow stuck. Like each setback could mean restarting from zero, pushing goals ever further out of reach. It's temporary, but it can be persistent.

Seven months ago, I was feeling ambitious, readying myself for my first ultramarathon. Instead, after just two minutes and twenty-two seconds on a mountain bike, I found myself lying on the pavement with cracked ribs, a fractured collarbone, and a separated shoulder. I hadn't even reached the trailhead. My only actual drop of luck was that I had crashed directly across the street from the ER.

My rather painful lesson was in the difference between disc and rim brakes, where the consequences of not knowing are far more comfortably learned by seeing crash videos on Instagram.

Adding insult to injury, I found myself stranded on my ride home, immobilized in an unmaintained rental car in the middle of Nevada, wondering if I needed emergency surgery. I was rather uncertain about my immediate future. It would end up taking more than a few days before I could return home to Oakland and fully understand the severity of my injuries.

At that point my expectations for the ultramarathon had sharply declined. I was resigned to the fact I would be lying in bed or on a couch, barely able to work for the first couple of weeks after my injury. No work meant no income, and no income meant no healthcare.

In moments like these, failure feels all-consuming. Despair creeps in, natural and inevitable. Yet at some point, it has to transform into something else—resolve. At some point, you have to climb that piss-covered mountain, plant your flag at the summit, and resolutely set your mind toward your next attainable goal. And from my pillow palace, that's exactly what I did. Slowly, progressively, and eventually: totally. This is what I mean by consuming failure. It’s that moment you reach time and again where grief over the situation has run its course, leaving you spent, worn out, fed up with it. The dust settles, and you realize, perhaps grimly, that this really is "as bad as it gets.”

With the damage fully visible, you've got to go from staring to not staring and get on with your life. Absorb it, internalize it, and use it as material to rebuild. It's sort of like easing off the brake and easing on the gas again.

So here's to skipping mountain biking in 2025—and instead dedicating myself fully (and I mean fully) to physical therapy and recovery.