Intentionally Un/Sustainable

A mismatch between intention and understanding.

There are several words I’m sick of hearing and wish I could delete from history. “Optimal”, “longevity”, “functional”, and “intensity” are among them.

Erin Blevins had a great post recently (on Instagram):

“I used to be lean and fit, but it wasn’t sustainable.”
I hear this all the time—and it’s worth unpacking.
Maybe it wasn’t sustainable.
But maybe… you just didn’t do it right.
Maybe you were under-eating, overtraining, ignoring recovery, living off caffeine and cortisol, and calling that “fitness.”
Maybe you didn’t fuel your body for the life you were trying to live.
Maybe you didn’t have the data, the tools, or the support to make results feel good in your body, not like punishment.
Maybe you went too hard and you just don’t care as much as you once did…
Here’s the truth: Sustainable doesn’t mean effortless. It means intelligent. If you held a “sustainable pace” running you’re still running, just holding a pace you can maintain.
It means learning your physiology, fueling your metabolism, training with intention, and recovering like it matters—because it does.

I don’t disagree with any of that, in fact, I think it’s fantastic insight. At some point you realize that there’s a (short) shelf life on “performance” – whatever that means to you. There can be no other way. To perform at a high level is inherently not sustainable – the scarcity is what makes it valuable.

As a display of how far awry “functional training” has gone, look at Naudi Aguilar’s assumption that barbells are a hate crime against your spine. The conviction, and condescension, is so strong that he’s talking shit about a 22 year old who’s already a 4x World Champion and Olympic Gold Medalist (ref.).

On a cosmic scale, “life” is winning at longevity. It has persisted on Earth for over 3.5 billion years. Your life, however, is not sustainable. 80-100 years is the smallest fraction among billions. My point isn’t to be the bearer of nihilism, it’s to remind you to get busy living.

Here’s the caveat, as I wrote in response to Erin:

Then there’s the “strategically placed, intentionally unsustainable” phases to remind us what’s possible 💪🏻 Paid for with “sustainable recovery” the vast majority of the time.

Unintelligently and recklessly going “all in” is a lottery mindset. Maybe you get a flash of success once in a while, but you probably end up broke sooner or later.

It took me until at least my early / mid 30’s to start saying the right things about active recovery. Then I destroyed my right knee at 36 and had to start living those words as I literally rebuilt my body.

Similar to the lottery metaphor, you can’t buy performance on credit. Caffeine, or other elicit pharmaceuticals, still have tradeoffs and the interest rate for your immediate satisfaction is pretty high; not to mention the diminishing returns after each successful “hit.”

You don’t buy performance, you have to invest in it. That take patience. It takes time; time to fuck around and find out; time to make mistakes and assess and adapt to them; time learning from people who know, have seen, and done more than you.

Now, this goes out to the 22 year-old influencers and armchair PubMed scholars alike, you simply haven’t had enough “time-in-action” to know what you’re talking about even if you are more-or-less (factually) correct.

None of this is meant to say you shouldn’t try, you must. Effort is currency. It’s not the only one though. Putting in a ton of effort in the wrong direction leaves you equally lost, and more tired.

The other currency, effort’s counterpart, is attention. We must pay attention. This too, in isolation, leaves us forever paralyzed by our intellectual analysis. So, we must also feel.

Do.
Feel.
Pay Attention.
Adapt.