The past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind.

I was reflecting last night and was shocked to realize that I've barely been in France for a month.

So many things have happened. Going through a considerable period of change, like moving to a different continent, can magnify everything that happens in your life.

Routines aren't yet established, the people you spend the most time with have completely changed over, and almost everything you do daily is slightly foreign and novel.

It takes some getting used to.

The biggest life update I have in the midst of all that is that I have pushed the date to do the world's toughest event, Kokoro, until next September. I'll finish the semester in December, finish backpacking in May, and then come back home, ramp up my training, and be ready this time next year.

Ultimately, that decision came with a lot of emotion.

I wasn't cleared to participate due to an upper respiratory infection.

I also wasn't sure that I was ready, despite having worked out 2-3 times a day, 6 days a week for months leading up to the event.

Physically, I was hitting all the benchmarks they suggested for the event. However, I began to experience a mental unraveling that coincided with moving 3 different times in under a month and still trying to keep my workout intensity the same.

I went from Atlanta to Arlington, Arlington to Africa, and Africa to France, not including layovers in Doha and Istanbul.

It made me realize that minimizing the moving parts in your daily routine is especially important when doing hard things–whether it's a physical challenge, cutting-edge research, or a startup.

It's imperative to limit the amount of time you're NOT focused on the task at hand. Moving was probably the most counterproductive thing I could have done a month before the event.

How I Processed This

After the doctor's prognosis, I struggled to make sense of the postponement.

I'm now a week removed from it, and I can more clearly see that it was the right call.

But at that moment, I felt something different.

I felt like I had failed.

I had an obligation to do everything in my power to be ready, physically, mentally, and health-wise.

Instead, I piled on a lot of commitments this summer, and never factored in the toll that moving would take.

My whole life, people around me have told me that I take on too much.

This was the first time that they were right.

Making Sense of What's Next

There are two ways to look at it and believe me, I've looked at both.

The first is to accept that I failed.

I can make any excuse I want, and I have plenty of friends who will coddle me and tell me it's okay, but at the end of the day, I still failed at what I set out to do.

I will not be toeing the line on September 22, 2023, as I had originally intended.

For someone who believes I can will myself to do pretty much anything, that's a tough pill to swallow.

The second is to decide that I have not failed. I have only paused.

I'm currently still in the best shape of my life. I now have 12 months before Kokoro. I probably won't exercise too much while backpacking, but I'll still have ample time to ramp back up and exceed where I am currently, before next year.

I've built an incredible baseline of fitness and mental toughness on which to build the second time around. I'm also far more aware of exactly what I need to do to get ready, while I did a lot more guessing over the last 5 months.

In "failure," I still pushed myself to grow more physically than in any other 5 month period of my life, including when I trained for an Ironman.

So, after throwing myself a pity party in the failure camp for a few days, I've come to terms with the fact that this isn't the end of this story.

It doesn't make me any more excited about how the last month transpired. But perhaps in 12 months, it will feel that much sweeter when I successfully complete the event.

Perhaps I'll be even more ready next time around.

In the meantime, my time in Europe will still be filled with various physical challenges.

Yes, that is foreshadowing :)