Tend the Foundation
A Monday movement piece š
I always wanted to dunk a basketball. Iām 5ā7ā and Jewish, which is not exactly the profile the NBA scouts want, but I grew up in Texas convinced that I was destined for something great in sports, and if thereās one thing the Lone Star State is good for, itās sustaining that kind of delusion well into young adulthood.
So at twenty, playing basketball at my fraternity house in Austin, I figured out a workaround. There was a brick wall behind the court, and if you got a running start and jumped off it at the right angle, you could come back over and around and actually get up there. I did it three or four times out of maybe two dozen attempts. The first time felt genuinely glorious. By the 20th, the luster had worn off, and I had established to my own satisfaction that I had, technically, dunked a basketball, which is all I ever really needed.
What Iāve left out of this story is that Iād been doing many of those jumps after I badly hurt my ankle and had a walking boot. After enough close calls on the landing, I finally concluded that it was probably a bit much.
A few months earlier, Iād torn all the ligaments in my right ankle sliding into a base during an intramural softball game. One of my good friendsā fathers was an orthopedic surgeon, and he was kind enough to explain that soft tissue heals properly or improperly based almost entirely on how seriously you treat it in the early weeks. I took the improper route. Wore the boot only when I absolutely had to and went about my merry life. I was a kid who had stitches eight times before I was eleven, more sprains and strains than Iād bothered keeping track of, and a working theory that I was more or less invincible. Nothing in my history to that point had been damaging enough to seriously revise my theory, so I didnāt.
Fast forward to 2007. Iām training for my second Ironman in two years, living the kind of life where a hundred-mile training ride is just a Saturday, and the reasonable next move is driving straight to Baltimore for my cousin Julieās wedding and dancing until the venue closes. I woke up that next morning, and my ankle looked like a grapefruit. It was purple, swollen to a size I hadnāt seen since the original injury, and I had no explanation for it whatsoever, because nothing had happened. No misstep, no acute event, nothing I could point to and sayā¦there, thatās what I did to it.
Except, of course, it had been going wrong for years.
What an x-ray eventually confirmed was a long accumulation of pickup basketball on a joint that never fully healed and years of building a life of endurance on a compromised foundation. I had heavy mileage and cumulative impact until the bone chips and fragments that had been secretly collecting in the joint space finally ran out of room. My only choice was to get my ankle scoped and start a proper repair process.
I had a choice to make: have the surgery before the race and not go, or after and walk it. I had spent too much effort alongside people I loved not to show up at the start line. My team was there. My community was there. So on race day I walked twenty-five to protect the joint (ran the last 1.2), crossed the finish line, and had surgery the following week.
Lying in recovery, I did something I hadnāt really done before, which was take a clear-eyed inventory of what Iād actually been doing. And the honest version was that I had been ignoring my foundation (with known structural problems) and stacking Ironman training loads, while somehow managing not to connect those two facts into a single coherent thought.
What happened after the surgery ended up mattering more than the surgery itself.
I leaned on the right people in my endurance community, in particular a physical therapist named Kerri, who, when she saw my x-ray for the first time, cried. Not me. Her. She was more upset about what she was looking at than I was, which probably tells you everything you need to know about how bad it actually was and also about how Iād been operating up until that point.
Kerri did a lot of physical manipulation on the joint to get me back to health, and she took her work seriously in a way that made me take it seriously too.
The exercises themselves were, in the best possible way, almost embarrassingly small. Towel grabs with my toes (spreading and scrunching a hand towel across the floor to rebuild the intrinsic foot strength). Single-leg calf raises off the edge of a step (slow down, full up) for the eccentric loading that actually rebuilds tendon integrity over time. Ankle dorsiflexion against a wall, just pressing the knee forward over the foot, reclaiming range of motion that years of compensation had lost. Banded lateral walks for the hips and glutes for the upstream work that protects everything in the lower chain, which youād never think to connect to an ankle injury until someone shows you why. Dead bugs on the floor, slow and controlled, building the core stability that protects force transfer and continues the upstream protection.
None of it looked sexy. It existed entirely in service of the bigger picture. More on that below.
There was no single revelation, no moment when something was said that reorganized how I understood my physical health. What actually shifted was more gradual than that. I had a collective experience of breaking down over years, watching athletes I competed alongside and eventually coached cycle through the same patterns, the same imbalances, the same injuries, and the same surprised expressions when something gave way that had been slowly giving way for a long time. I didnāt want that cycle. I wanted something more structurally sound. I wanted a body that holds together because the whole thing is ready for battle (aka life), not just the parts you train.
Nineteen years later, most of what I learned in the rehab of my ankle is still woven into how I move. I foam roll consistently. I use a Theragun on the tissue that needs it and lacrosse balls and yoga balls for the spots that are too small or too deep for anything else. Contrast therapy, which Iāve written about at length here and believe in as much as anything in my toolkit. The single-leg balance work, the range of motion maintenance, and the upstream hip stability. I treat all of it as seriously as any substantial training itself. I get weird looks in the gym sometimes with band work off the bosu, and I love it. To me, itās a signal that Iām doing the invisible work that matters. And I know it works because Iāve been injured along the way, more than once, and almost every time, what the foundation gave me wasnāt immunity from getting hurt. It was the ability to understand exactly what functionality was missing and how to slowly, patiently put it back in place. Not with a new program and not a specialist search. I know what functional integrity feels like in my body, which means I know when itās missing and what it takes to slowly rebuild it. Patience. Intentional work. The same unglamorous exercises, applied with more care than last time.
What Iāve arrived at, after enough miles and enough recoveries and enough watching other peopleās bodies tell the same stories mine used to, is something Iād call holistic physical integrity. Itās not a program or a framework with a name on it. More like a question: Am I maintaining the full range of what this body can do?
Itās not strength in isolation, or flexibility, or endurance detached from everything that supports it. It is an integrated whole: the way strength and range and capability either compound each other over time or subtly cannibalize each other, depending on how sincerely you attend to them. My ankle story was a cannibalizing story. Volume without recovery. Forward load without the lateral stability. I trained one kind of output at the expense of everything around it for years, and the surroundings eventually had something to say about it.
The goal isnāt to be unbreakable. Itās to build something durable enough to last and sustainable enough to actually do.
That distinction sounds small. It isnāt to me.
I have two boys, Hawk and Henry, who are ten and eight and at the age where physical life is mostly unselfconscious. They just play and move with the joy of what a body can do. I can still keep up with that, and keeping up with that is one of the better things about my life right now. And Iām also thinking about the years further out, when theyāre discovering their own versions of an active life, learning what their bodies are truly capable of, and I want to still be in it with them then. Not watching. Not the dad who used to play and now offers commentary. Present, capable, useful. Thatās what the foam rolling and the towel grabs and the years of simple, unglamorous maintenance have always been for.
I got wheeled out of that office in 2007 having lost almost nothing except the comfortable illusion that Iād been managing a healthy body. I hadnāt. Iād just been lucky the bill hadnāt come due yet.
Luck isnāt a foundation.
