Once you take championships and tournaments out of the equation after decades of finding motivation in them, it becomes incredibly difficult to find a reason to work out. Add the physicality of rugby on top, and my body started to fall apart. It took my quality of life deteriorating before I got myself going again. A different kind of motivation.

What better place to do it than back on the rugby pitch with a friend who is nine years younger than me, but broken in his own way. We were doing a longevity session with bands, kettlebells, and light weights, not paying attention to the time. Just as we were finishing, old teammates and new kids started to appear. It was time for summer touch, a version of rugby with no tackling or serious contact.

Next thing I knew, I was playing with them. First time I’d touched a ball in about five years. As if I’d never left, I was hitting gaps, changing the point of attack, drawing in defenders. It was all reactive. But as soon as I made a break, I was caught. My body was nowhere near as responsive or as fast as it had been. There wasn’t much thinking behind it, like my body remembered faster and better than I did.

And it wasn’t only the game that came back. It was the whole life around it.

I’d assumed for years that what I was reaching back to on days like this was the winning. I retired as a champion. Whatever nostalgia I have, I’ve been telling myself, is nostalgia for glory. Sitting on the grass afterward, I realized I’d misdiagnosed it.

What came back with the touch rugby was the shape of that time. Specifically, being younger in a way where the goal line was always visible. University meant getting the degree. Rugby season meant winning the fixtures. Someone else drawing goal lines. My only job was to move towards them. Whether I was doing well was easily visible to everyone.

I ran the counterfactual in my head. Same age, friends, missed parties, ran distances, long evenings, body that didn’t ache in the morning. Then take out the goals. Would I want to go back?

I wouldn’t. Take the goal line out and what’s left is just being twenty-three with nothing to move toward. That’s not freedom. That’s the actual definition of lost. I mistook the goal line for freedom because I had somewhere to move to, and I didn’t have to think about it.

Adulthood is qualitatively harder after those structures end. Now you have to define what success is AND pursue it. You get a blank page, draw your own line, and be prepared for the possibility that you drew it wrong.

I avoided that work for years without noticing. I thought success was the corner office, the marriage, the prestige neighborhood, the fancy car, and skipped the hard part of deciding whether I even wanted the hoops everyone around me was jumping through.

For a long time after I retired, I kept chasing versions of that old line, tournaments to win, seasons to survive, without asking whether they were drawn for a man who still existed. He didn’t. He stopped existing somewhere around the time my speed did.

The job now is to draw the line myself, knowing I might draw it wrong, and finding out that this is what the running feels like when nobody hands you a highlight reel at the end.