Lost at Sea

Over the years people have said it to me "Of course you're in shape, you were a professional athlete. You don't know what it's like to be overweight."

I usually grin and take out my phone.

Because I have this photo on there of me at 107kg. Not just carrying a bit of extra timber. Very overweight, and more than that, miserable in a way I could not have explained to you at the time.

It was taken after I'd finished up in the fitness industry. I'd left the gym floor, which was the only place I'd ever felt properly useful. I was still coaching a handful of people but the thing I'd built was behind me. I took a corporate job because it seemed like the sensible move, and in that job I felt like I was cheating myself every single day. I felt like I was losing myself.

At the same time I was single, and nearly every friend I had was getting married and having children. I wasn't. I was watching it happen from the sideline.

I was lost at sea.

There's no single moment where you decide to let yourself go, to lose yourself. You just find yourself that bit further from the shore each week, and one day you look back and you cannot see the sand.

But this wasn’t the first time I drifted out to sea.

The same thing happened when I finished rugby, and I can still see the room it happened in.

Michael Cheika the Leinster coach asked me to come to his office. I walked in the way I walked in anywhere back then, smiling, ‘Howaya’.

He got straight to it. There's no contract for you next year.

I genuinely cannot tell you what he said in the next couple of minutes. I know he kept talking. But somewhere in that first sentence I had already decided. Rugby is over. It’s finished. Twenty-eight years of age and nobody was going to talk me out of it.

I left his office, got in the car, drove home and texted a few teammates, my sister, my closest friends. Finishing up. It's done. Yep, happy with my decision.

‘Happy with my decision’.

I took the rejection and used it as the excuse to finish, because being the one who walked away hurt less than being the one who wasn't wanted. That took me about ninety seconds to do and about fifteen years to see.

What I understand now is, I was already good at that. From very early in my life I was well used to being hurt, ignoring it, and carrying on with the hurt still in me. That was a skill I'd learned as a child and I was excellent at it. I have fond memories growing up as a kid, but the early years were chaotic. Not knowing when I would have a fatherly figure around left me uncertain, always ready to run. Butterflies in my stomach were just a normal constant feeling, they protected me from whatever was coming next. They built internal furniture to store the rougher feelings.

If you've spent your whole life not stopping to feel things within your body, you won't notice what's happening to your body either.

So it happened then, and it happened again when I took the corporate job, and I didn't see the second one coming because I thought the first one had been about rugby.

It was never about rugby, it was about a pattern, and it was about transition.

Your body goes through extreme stress during a transition. Sleep goes. Routine goes. The thing that used to structure your week disappears and nothing replaces it. Boozing creeps up because it numbs the loss and grief. Food becomes something to do rather than something you decide. Hours spent sitting or lying down overthinking, and not physically moving. Waiting for that day something magical will happen, a fairytale of serendipity that transforms everything.

It doesn't matter which transition it is.

Finishing your sport. Selling the business you spent fifteen years building. Moving country. Getting married. Getting divorced. Becoming a parent. The death of someone you adored. The kids leaving the house. Being made redundant.

Every transition is an earthquake, and your body is trying to balance on the ground when it happens.

It’s mental, it’s emotional, but it’s physical first, and the body is where the record gets kept.

There's a third photo on my phone.

It was taken a few weeks ago. I'm carrying my son.

Ninety-two kilos.

The same weight I played rugby at.

What actually sits between the 107kg photo and this one is many years, two countries, a lot of quiet work and a fair amount of getting it wrong.

The reason it matters to me is becoming a father is a transition too. Broken sleep, limited time, your life rearranged around a little human. It could have gone the same way as the other two.

It didn't, because this time I knew what was happening.

And because now I have someone who fully depends on me. I want to be there, I want him to know I am there. And I want to be physically capable of it, for all the moments that matter.

The weight loss isn't the achievement. What I discovered inside me on the way from 107kg back to 92kg is.

I found my discipline again. Not the kind that means saying no to everything. The kind that means I can train smartly and still have a life. Still go for pints with mates. Still eat what's put in front of me at a restaurant and enjoy it. Still show up for the things that matter. I found that the discipline is getting back up on the horse when I really didn't want to, and when it didn't suit.

There were people who stayed with me through each of those, and other, transitions. They stuck around when I was lost at sea and I hadn't the words to tell them I was. They were waving from the sand, and they didn't stop waving.

I owe them.

I owe them the best version of me, the most content version of me.

And if I could go back and tell myself a few things, sitting at 107kg not knowing how I got there, it would be these.

Gary, no one is coming to save you. You will have people who want to, but only you can actually do it. There's no lightning bolt. It drags on for weeks, months, years, until the pain of staying where you’re at finally outweighs the pain of moving forward.

Gary, take out a piece of paper and a pen, not your phone or keyboard. Write it out, where you are and everything you’re feeling and doing. Then write what it looks like if you promise yourself to only look forward, how would you feel, what would you do with your body to prepare it for the moments that are coming, because it is what carries you forward.

Gary, slowly start to pick up the receipts, the evidence that you give a fuck about yourself.

Gary, don't ignore your body, lean into it. Use it to restore your confidence, your belief, it is the doorway to everything good that will happen for you.

When you're in a transition and your head is full of noise, thousands of thoughts and none of them helpful, the body is the way out. Not because training fixes your problems, but the body is where the steadiness comes from. It's where the energy is made and transferred. When you move, when you train, when you look after the vessel, the chatter quietens and you can actually think clearly.

I spent years trying to think my way through things while ignoring the one thing that could have steadied me. I wish I'd known to go to the body first. To let it lead, and let the head follow.

Your body takes you everywhere.

It carried you through every single moment that has ever happened to you, and it will carry you through whatever is coming next, whether you look after it or not.

Every memory you own arrived through your body. Holding your child for the first time. The sound of the final whistle. The room you walked into the night you met her. The knee you got down on in front of her. The weight of your friend’s hug. None of that came through your mind. It came through your body and your mind filed it afterwards.

Transitions will keep coming. They always do, that’s life. Don't let go of your body when they arrive, because that's exactly when you'll need it most.

Gary.