Falling isn't the problem and avoiding risk isn’t the answer.
I wasn't looking at the trail. I was distracted. Lost in my thoughts. The run had barely started. A stone was sticking up out of the path, and my foot found it before my eyes did.
Then I was on the ground, scratched up wondering what I tripped on.
I checked myself. Dusted myself off. Cracked a little smile thinking “that must have looked hilarious”. I got up and kept running.
Most adults haven't felt that moment in years. The world tips, the body takes over, and for half a second you're a passenger. Children live there. They fall off bikes and monkey bars, and they get up, because getting up is simply what comes next.
Somewhere in our thirties we stop falling. We build lives of flat floors, handrails and car seats, and after enough years we forget that a falling is OK. At some point some people build their lives around not falling.
On a trail every stride is a small decision about rock and root and slope, and the ground has no interest in what you were thinking about. Lose the thread for three steps and you will meet it up close.
That's why I trail run. The gym is a lab: controlled, measured, predictable. But life is uneven ground you can't fully see, and the only real defense is being really present. The trail a place I train that demands it every second.
After forty, people start talking about risk as something to eliminate. Fewer chances, softer surfaces, less exposure. I understand the instinct.
The goal isn't to remove risk. It's to embrace some and manage it.
There's a trap here, and I've watched men walk into it. A man who hasn't trained for many years knows he's fragile. He can feel it. So he fears the fall, and he avoids anything that might cause one. The less he does, the less ready he becomes. The less ready he becomes, the more he fears. It feeds itself, over years, until his world starts to shrink.
Training breaks that loop because it gives you evidence. You've taken hits before. You've gotten up before. You know how to fall because you’ve been through it before. Some people never learn to fall. They spend their lives learning not to.
There were people around when I went down. At 25, I would have been mortified. At 56, I found it funny and just moved on. That's one of the small gifts of getting older. For your younger years you live inside other people's expectations. Then one day you notice you've stopped. What matters gets clearer. It's a kind of freedom.
After forty, you're the one people count on so you have to find a way forward. That goes beyond the physical. When the pandemic turned my business upside down, that was a hell of a fall. Something I didn't see coming, a hard landing. Then the only question that mattered: now what? It took me a while to get off the ground that time around but my wife and my faith helped me get back on my feet.
It’s OK to fall. We all do. Train for it so when you do you can keep going.