Starting Over: Learning Beyond Athletic Identity

Retirement from competitive sport brings an unexpected gift: the humbling realization that you're about to become terrible at everything again. After years of operating in a world where I knew exactly how to improve—more miles, better nutrition, smarter recovery—I suddenly found myself in the peculiar position of being a complete novice at, well, nearly everything else.

I recently revisited Josh Waitzkin's "The Art of Learning," and it felt like finding a map just when I'd realized I was pretty lost. Waitzkin, the chess prodigy who inspired "Searching for Bobby Fischer" before reinventing himself as a world champion in Tai Chi Push Hands, had cracked something I was desperately keen to figure out: how to transfer the art of getting better from one domain to an entirely different one.

The hardest part about post-athletic life isn't the absence of competition—it's the absence of competence. For years, I lived in "performance zones," a comfortable space where I knew my strengths and could reliably execute. Training had patterns, improvement had metrics, and progress felt measurable and predictable.

Now, whether I'm navigating business meetings, learning new skills, or simply figuring out what comes next, I'm firmly planted in the "learning zone"—that uncomfortable territory where confusion is the norm and expertise feels impossibly distant.

As always the growth is found in discomfort. While I spent years optimizing performance in familiar territory, I did little to put myself completely out of my zone of comfort, other than the physical obviously. “The only good thing about loosing is learning” is something my old mentor used to say and on a grand scheme being very good at one thing makes you ordinary at many others.

As an athlete, I had a complicated but functional relationship with failure. Missed splits, poor races, training setbacks—these were data points, feedback mechanisms that clearly pointed toward what needed adjustment. The learning loop was tight and the metrics were clear.

The beauty and curse of sports is that it’s a world with unusually clear feedback systems. Most of life doesn't come with split times or power meters. The mistakes feel messier, the lessons more ambiguous, and the path forward often unclear.

I’ve never been particularly good at embracing losses but redefining them as necessary steps on the way to getting better certainly help. In then end, expectation of expertise just flowing into your lap is quite delusional I guess.

I find stories of Waitzkin or Arnold Schwarzenegger really intriguing. Their skill is not trapped in the 64 squares of a chess game or the gym- they became world class at the next thing. Which in turn gives me hope that the years spent learning how to learn in sports weren't wasted preparation for something that's now over. After all a VO2 Max is a flimsy thing. They were preparation for everything that comes next. The patience developed through base training, the persistent approach to identifying weaknesses, the comfort with delayed gratification and of course surrounding yourself with people that care…

The goal has to be finding the art of becoming a beginner again without losing the wisdom earned along the way. Tackling new challenges with both humility and confidence, carrying forward the process while releasing attachment to previous identities.

The transition from athlete to whatever-comes-next doesn't have to be about starting from scratch. It's about applying the same principles that created success in one area to the slightly messy, uncertain, exciting work of building something new.

So here I am, officially mediocre at most things outside of swimming, cycling, and running, and somehow more excited about learning than I've been in years. Because if there's one thing Ironman taught me, it's that the most rewarding journeys are the ones where you can't see the finish line from the starting line.

That’s all for this week…

I hope you enjoyed this weeks edition with a fine cup of coffee. Until the next…

Jan.

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