How to Train When Life is Falling Apart

May 2018. I was training the hardest I had ever trained in my life. The plan was simple, slightly insane, and completely glorious. Qualify for CrossFit Regionals in 2019. I was strong, I was fit, I was on a programme that was hammering me in all the right ways. Every week was a small win.

Then one ordinary Tuesday I slipped off the gymnastics rings during a session. As I came down, my foot caught the rubber matting. So while my body went one way and my face went into the floor, my foot stayed exactly where it was. Flat. Not moving an inch. You could not do that on purpose if you tried.

I felt a pop. The kind of pop where everyone in the room goes quiet.

So I did what every Irish man does in that situation. I lay there for a minute pretending I was fine. Then I hobbled to A&E, fully convinced I had just done a calf strain. They examined me. They told me, good news, it is only a torn calf. Six weeks, you will be grand.

Now, pause. Important context. The reason I was so delighted with this news is that I was flying to Marbella with the lads the very next day. A trip that had been booked for months. And I was sitting in A&E thinking, brilliant. I can still go.

So I went. To Marbella. On a torn calf. Or so I thought. I limped around the place for a week, drank the way you drink in Marbella with the lads, danced badly, swam in the sea, and came home tanned, hungover, and absolutely fine in my own head.

I went to my own GP a few days after I got back, mostly for the sick note. He took one look, did one quick test, and informed me that I had not torn my calf. I had ruptured my Achilles tendon completely. The thing was hanging by threads. He looked at me the way you look at a person who has just confessed to drink driving. Then he asked me what I had been doing for the last ten days. I told him. He went very quiet for a long time.

That was the beginning of the worst training year of my life. And it is why I want to talk to you today about how to train when life is falling apart. Because nearly everyone is going to face a version of this. Maybe not an Achilles. Maybe a baby. Maybe a bereavement. Maybe a job collapse. Maybe your own body, in its own time, deciding it is done with running or jumping or whatever else you used to take for granted.

And what most people do in that moment is the thing that costs them the most.

The Two Failure Modes

When life implodes, almost everyone defaults to one of two responses. Both of them are wrong.

The first is the obvious one. They pull the plug on the gym entirely. They say, "I just need to get through this first, and then I will come back." It sounds reasonable. It is actually the worst thing they could do. Because training is the one variable in their life that they can still control while everything else feels uncontrollable. Take that away too, and the whole structure collapses. Sleep gets worse. Mood gets worse. The very thing they were trying to "just get through" gets harder, not easier.

The second response is the opposite. They double down. "I will train HARDER. I will outrun the stress. I will earn back control by being more disciplined." That works for about ten days. Then they crash, get sick, get hurt, or burn out completely, and they end up back at zero. Often worse than zero.

Both responses share the same mistake. They treat training like it is a single setting (on or off, full power or unplugged) when actually it is a dial. A dial you turn up and down depending on what life is asking of you in any given week.

The two failure modes have nicknames. The first one is "I will become a monk." The second one is "I will become Rocky Balboa." Neither one of these guys is your friend during a hard chapter.

What Actually Happened During the Achilles Year

The first thing I did after the Achilles surgery was the wrong thing. I tried to keep training the way I had been training, but with one functional leg. So there I was doing one legged squats, one legged deadlifts, ring work because (in cosmic irony) the rings did not need my foot. For about three weeks I was a man on a mission.

Then I crashed. Not physically. Mentally. I was looking at the programme I used to run and I was so far from being able to do it that every session felt like a reminder of what I had lost. I started skipping sessions. Not in a "I will go later" way. Genuinely skipping. Lying in bed at six thirty in the morning, pretending I was fine.

The reason was not laziness. The reason was that I had not changed the GOAL of training. The goal was still "be a Regionals athlete." Every session I did was being scored against that bar. Every session was a failure.

What actually fixed it was a conversation with another coach. He asked me one question. "What is training for, right now?" And I had no good answer. So we sat down and worked it out.

The new goal was not "qualify for Regionals." The new goal was "build a body that will be ready when the Achilles is ready." The work was almost the same on paper. The lens was completely different.

Once the goal shifted, training came back. Slowly. Then more. Then properly. By the time I was cleared to load the Achilles, I was the strongest I had ever been in everything that did not involve the right leg. The leg came back. The Regionals dream did not. But I came out of that year a better coach than I went in, which is partly why these days I am the man with the chair at the Hyrox finish line and not the one running it.

The Framework

Here is the lesson, generalised so it works for any hard chapter, not just an injury.

When life changes, the goal of training has to change with it. Not the activity. Not the commitment. The GOAL.

A few examples of how that looks in practice.

Newborn baby in the house. The goal is NOT "stay at my current strength." The goal is "show up twice a week, move well, leave feeling better than I arrived." That is it. You are buying mental health, not gains.

Bereavement. The goal is "use the gym as one of the few places in my week where the world feels normal for an hour." That is the whole job.

Big work crisis. The goal is "build a reliable hour that is not stressful." The programme is secondary. The reliability is primary.

An injury that you cannot train through. The goal is "build everything I CAN build so that the comeback is shorter, not longer."

A mental health dip. The goal is "use the gym as a structured, non negotiable appointment with myself." You are training to keep the floor under your own feet.

Notice what is shared across all five. The goal is no longer about output. It is about identity, structure, and headspace. The lifts will come back. The structure has to be there for the lifts to come back to.

Three Things You Can Do This Week

If you are reading this in the middle of a hard chapter, here is what to do.

First, name the chapter you are in. Say out loud, "I am in a new chapter, and my old goals are not valid right now." Some people find this surprisingly hard. Naming it gives you permission to scale down without it feeling like failure.

Second, set a goal you can actually hit this week. Not this quarter. This WEEK. "Two sessions, no matter how short, no matter how light." That is a winnable goal in a week where everything else feels unwinnable. Hit it. The dopamine from hitting one small goal will keep you in the building until the chapter passes.

Third, tell your coach. If you have one, tell them what is going on. If you do not have one, this might be the moment to get one. Not for the programme. For the second set of eyes. Someone who can say "you are doing too much" or "you are doing the wrong thing" or "this is enough for today, go home, get some sleep." Most people in hard chapters are the worst possible judges of their own training. A coach holds the dial steady when your hand is shaking.

The Body You Build on Your Worst Days

I did not qualify for Regionals. I will never run again. There is a version of me in a parallel universe who never slipped off those rings, and he is probably leaner and faster than I am now. I do not envy him. I came out of that year a better coach, a better person, with a much deeper understanding of what training actually is and what it is actually for.

It is not for the version of you on the best day of your life. It is for the version of you on the worst day. The day when nothing else is working and you still show up, do what you can, and go home. That is the whole game.

Listen to the Full Episode

We go deeper on all of this on this week's episode of the Wicklow Strength and Fitness Podcast. The full Achilles story (including some bits that did not make this article). The full framework with more examples. And, because even the hardest chapters have funny moments, plenty of those too. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows.

Want to Train With Us?

If you live in or around Wicklow Town and you have been thinking, I would love to train somewhere where the coach actually understands what I have going on outside the gym, that is what we do. We coach humans, not programmes. New members start with our Jumpstart Program, designed to set you up properly from day one.

The first step is a free consultation. Tell us where you are. Tell us what is hard right now. We will figure out what training looks like for THIS chapter of your life, not someone else's.

Book your free consultation here.

Train hard. Be kind to yourself.

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