You spend your twenties and early thirties treating your health like a credit card.
I have the spine of a fifty-year-old. I'm thirty-seven.
A doctor in Lisbon told me that three months ago. She pulled up the scan and pointed at two discs that looked like they'd been stepped on. Degenerative, she said. From years of what.
From years of loading trucks at 4am because the driver called in sick. From years of sleeping on a cot in my warehouse office because driving home and back would've cost me an hour. From eating gas station food at my desk and sitting in a truck cab for twelve hours because a shipment couldn't be late.
I built a logistics company with my body. I just didn't realize my body was keeping a tab.
That's the trap. You spend your twenties and early thirties treating your health like a credit card. Swipe now, pay later. And it works. For a long time it works. You can run on four hours of sleep. You can eat garbage and still function. You can ignore the back pain, the stiff knees, the shoulder that clicks when you reach overhead. The business needs you and you're young enough to absorb it.
Then you sell the company. You build a life with no alarm clocks and two hours of work a day. You finally have time to surf, to walk, to cook real food, to sleep eight hours. You have the life your body was supposed to get.
But your body already paid.
I started surfing about a year and a half ago. First morning in Ericeira, I paddled for maybe twenty minutes and my lower back seized up so bad I had to sit on the beach for an hour. A kid, maybe sixteen, paddled circles around me. He'd been out there since dawn. His body just worked.
Mine used to work like that. I remember loading forty-pound boxes for hours without thinking about it. Driving fourteen hours straight and walking into a meeting like nothing happened. I didn't appreciate any of it. I didn't know it was temporary.
You know this feeling. Maybe it's not your back. Maybe it's your sleep. You trained yourself to run on five hours for so long that now, even when you can sleep eight, your body wakes up at 4:30 and won't go back down. Or your stomach. Years of stress and bad food and your doctor uses the phrase "lifestyle-related," which is a polite way of saying you did this to yourself.
Or maybe it's the thing you don't tell anyone. The anxiety that showed up after the stress ended. The chest tightness that three doctors say is nothing but still wakes you up at 2am. Your nervous system ran at full speed for a decade and nobody told it the race is over.
I see a physical therapist twice a week now. She works on mobility I lost somewhere around twenty-six and didn't notice until thirty-five. She asked what I did for a living and I told her about the digital products, the travel, the laptop-on-a-beach thing. She said that sounds amazing. I told her it is.
She asked why I looked like I was about to cry.
Because I finally have the life. And my body is cashing every check I told it to hold.
My mom is sixty-seven. Raised nine kids. Cleaned houses for three decades. Her knees are gone. Her hands hurt when it rains. She never talks about it. Not because she doesn't feel it. Because she never had time to notice. Pain was just the weather in her body and she had too many kids to stop and check the forecast.
I notice everything now. Every click, every ache, every morning where it takes me ten minutes to move like a normal person. When you're in the middle of the grind, pain is background noise. When you're free, it's the only sound in the room.
The kid I saw in Ericeira didn't stretch. Didn't warm up. Just grabbed his board and ran into the water. I spend twenty minutes on mobility work before I can paddle out. I take the supplements. I do the exercises. It helps. Slowly.
But there's no getting back what I spent. Your body doesn't do refunds. It does payment plans.
I surf three or four mornings a week now. Some days everything cooperates. The waves are small, my back holds, and for forty-five minutes I feel like the guy I was at twenty-five. Other days I know within five minutes it's not happening. I come in, sit with my coffee, and watch the water.
That version of me at twenty-five would've been something out there. Strong, fast, fearless. He was in a warehouse in Long Beach instead, lifting boxes and sleeping four hours a night to build a company that would eventually buy him this view.
He just didn't know the body was part of the price.
— Best, Jose
