On Resiliency: Managing Fatigue

Veterans and first responders are no strangers to rigorous physical and mental demands.

We become accustomed to compartmentalizing the part of our minds that asks us to slow down, dial it back, or keep something in reserve. There are times when the mission simply does not allow for those things. Someone is depending on you. Something has to get done. So you learn to put discomfort somewhere else and keep moving.

It is an incredibly useful skill.

Until it is not.

In the military, law enforcement, fire service, EMS, and other demanding professions, periods of extreme stress are often just that—periods. The operational tempo surges and eventually recedes. Maybe it is a trip to the rear. A few days of leave. The end of an operation. A rotation home. A quiet stretch where the phone does not ring.

There is usually some expectation that eventually you will get to put the weight down.

But what happens when you do not?

What happens when the demands stop fluctuating?

What happens when yesterday was hard, today is harder, and you already know tomorrow is waiting with something else?

I have been thinking about that a lot during my training for Chattanooga.

Endurance training is built around accumulating stress. Week after week, I ask a little more of my body. Swim farther. Ride longer. Run longer. Carry fatigue from one session into another and learn to perform anyway.

Eventually, something interesting happens.

The loudest part is not necessarily your body.

It is your mind.

I'm tired.

I don't want to do this today.

Can we just stop?

How much longer can I keep doing this?

Those thoughts are not unique to endurance athletes.

I suspect a lot of veterans and first responders know them intimately.

Maybe the source is not a swimming pool or a long run. Maybe it is a career that took more from you than you realized. Maybe it is an injury. A marriage struggling under years of accumulated stress. Financial pressure. Raising children. Caring for someone you love. Losing someone you love. Trying to figure out who you are after taking off a uniform that once answered that question for you.

Sometimes there is not one catastrophic event.

Sometimes you are simply tired from carrying something for too long.

And that is where our old instincts can betray us.

We are good at pushing through.

We are good at telling ourselves somebody else has it worse.

We are good at burying pain underneath responsibility.

We are good at saying I'm fine and getting back to work.

Those skills may have helped us survive some extraordinarily difficult circumstances. But survival and resiliency are not quite the same thing.

I am beginning to think resiliency is not about becoming so hard that nothing affects you.

It is about learning how to bend without staying bent.

My training is teaching me that distinction in a very tangible way.

There are days when I am tired and the correct response is to get up, stop negotiating with myself, and do the work.

There are also days when I am tired and the correct response is to recover.

The difficult part is learning the difference.

Scripture does not pretend that faithful people never get tired. Isaiah says plainly that even the strong become weary.

"Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall." — Isaiah 40:30

That matters to me.

Exhaustion is not presented as a failure of character. It is not proof that you are weak. It is part of being human.

And the answer is not always to simply push harder.

"But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength." — Isaiah 40:31

Renewal requires admitting that something has been depleted.

That can be difficult for people like us.

Recovery can feel suspiciously like quitting when you have spent much of your life being rewarded for pushing through.

But recovery is not quitting.

Recovery is what makes continued effort possible.

In endurance training, the principle is straightforward: stress the body, recover, adapt, and then expose it to stress again. Remove recovery from that equation and eventually the entire system begins to break down.

I am not convinced people are much different.

We cannot continuously withdraw from ourselves without occasionally making a deposit.

That does not always mean taking a vacation or disappearing from responsibility. Sometimes recovery is much smaller than that.

It is sleeping.

It is training.

It is sitting around a fire with people who understand you.

It is church on Sunday.

It is getting outside.

It is calling someone instead of isolating yourself.

It is admitting that you are carrying something heavier than you expected.

Sometimes it is simply giving yourself permission to put the damn ruck down for a minute.

And maybe that is where my old understanding of toughness needs some adjustment.

Christ did not say, “Come to me after you have proven you can carry it all yourself.”

He said:

"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." — Matthew 11:28

That is not weakness.

That is wisdom.

Rest is not the opposite of perseverance.

Sometimes it is what makes perseverance possible.

Then you pick the ruck back up.

The objective is not to build a life without hardship. That is impossible. Nor is the objective to avoid discomfort. Some of the most meaningful things we will ever do require enormous amounts of it.

The objective is to become capable of carrying difficult things without allowing them to consume us.

Paul described that kind of life well:

"We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed." — 2 Corinthians 4:8–9

That sounds a lot more like resiliency to me than simply refusing to acknowledge pain.

Cast down, but not destroyed.

You can be tired and still be resilient.

You can struggle and still be resilient.

You can need help and still be resilient.

You can put the weight down long enough to recover and still be resilient.

The important thing is that being knocked down does not become where your story ends.

That is one of the lessons this training is teaching me.

I do not have to complete 70.3 miles today.

I have to do today's work.

Then recover.

Then come back tomorrow prepared to do the work again.

Life is not terribly different.

When the entire distance feels overwhelming, shorten the horizon.

Get through today.

Make the phone call.

Go to the appointment.

Meet your friend for coffee.

Get outside.

Ask for help.

Rest when you need to rest.

Then get up and take the next step.

There will be days when the voice in your head telling you to stop needs to be challenged.

There will be other days when it needs to be heard.

Wisdom is learning the difference. Resiliency is having the courage to do both.

Because resiliency is not about proving how much suffering you can endure.

It is about absorbing hardship, recovering from it, and continuing forward.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Paul later wrote:

"Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day." — 2 Corinthians 4:16

I started this journey thinking I was training my body to endure 70.3 miles.

I am beginning to understand that endurance is something much bigger.

We will get tired.

We will carry things that feel impossibly heavy.

There will be days when another mile seems unreasonable.

But we do not have to carry all of tomorrow today.

Do today's work.

Accept today's grace.

Let yourself be renewed.

And tomorrow, take another step.

Because sometimes resiliency is not refusing to stop.

Sometimes it is learning how to recover so that you can keep going.

Tri For the 22 — Because 22 ≠ 0.