The ultimate blind spot of entrepreneurial endurance is treating your body like an interest-free loan.
My physiotherapist asked what I did for a living in my twenties. I told her. She nodded the way a mechanic nods when you finally bring in the car you've been ignoring for 80,000 miles.
Ten years of loading trucks, sleeping on office couches, and eating whatever was closest doesn't disappear because you sold the company. It moves into your lower back. Your shoulders. That thing your knee does every morning that takes ten minutes of walking before it stops.
I spent a decade treating my body like it was on the payroll. Something I used until it broke, taped together, and kept using. I ate gas station burritos in my truck between pickups because stopping for a real meal felt like losing money. I skipped the doctor for years because who had time. I sat in a warehouse office chair for fourteen hours, passed out on the couch at midnight, and called that rest.
I remember a week where I threw out my back loading pallets on a Thursday. Couldn't stand straight. A buddy told me to go to urgent care. I took four Advil, wrapped an ACE bandage around myself, and drove the route anyway because we had a delivery window and nobody else knew it. By Monday the pain had dulled enough that I forgot about it. I never went to the doctor. That was eleven years ago. My physiotherapist found the exact spot on our first session.
Now I live the life I told myself I was building toward. I surf most mornings. I walk everywhere. I sleep eight hours. And three days a week I'm lying on a table while a woman half my size puts her elbow into scar tissue that's been hardening since I was twenty-two.
She told me the knots in my shoulders aren't from anything I'm doing now. They're from years ago. Layers of tension that calcified because I never stopped long enough to recover. She said it works like compound interest except in the wrong direction.
That's the trap. You trade your health for the business during the years you're building. Then you trade the money back trying to buy it once you finally have time. And the exchange rate is brutal. A decade of damage doesn't resolve in a few months of smoothies and stretching. It takes years. Some of it doesn't come back at all.
You've felt this even if you haven't named it yet. The headache that shows up every afternoon like clockwork. The lower back pain you manage with Advil and a standing desk you never actually stand at. The way you sleep seven hours and wake up feeling like you slept three. The gym membership you've been paying since January that you've used maybe four times.
You keep telling yourself you'll deal with it. After the launch. After this quarter. After things settle down. You know things don't settle. You've known that for a while. And the whole time your body is running a tab you won't see until it shows up all at once.
A buddy back home ran a landscaping company. Fourteen-hour days in the California sun. Built it up, sold it at forty-one. Two months later he was in surgery for two herniated discs. The doctor told him the damage was years old. He'd been in too much pain for so long he'd stopped recognizing it as pain. His normal was someone else's emergency room visit.
That's the part that gets me. You adjust. You stop noticing. The stiffness in the morning just becomes how mornings work. The tightness in your chest just becomes how stress feels. You accommodate the damage because stopping to deal with it feels like weakness, and by the time you finally have the space to feel what's been happening, the list is long and none of it is new.
I paddle out most mornings now and there's a moment right before I pop up where my whole back lights up. Just a flash. A little receipt from twenty-six-year-old me who thought he could run forever on energy drinks and gas station food and never see a bill.
There's always a bill.
I'm healthier now than I was three years ago. Stronger. More mobile. But I'm not where a thirty-seven-year-old should be and I know it. The work I'm doing on my body is harder than anything I ever built in business because there's no shortcut. No workaround. Just showing up to that table three times a week, doing the boring stretches every night, and sitting with the fact that I'm paying for years I thought were free.
The money came back. The time came back. The body keeps its own books and it doesn't forget a thing.
— Best, Jose
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