Push To Failure

At some point about a year ago, after consuming a critical mass of inspirational content — some of it on this very website — about various Sounders fighting their way back from injury, or overcoming incredible odds, or gutting their way on to the staring XI, I looked at myself in the mirror and said, what the hell is my excuse? And I started going to the gym. 

I spent my 30s in a fugue state, physically speaking. I had my two children 20 months apart, sandwiched between book tours, and then, during the titanically heavy lift of early childhood parenting, we launched Ms Marvel, and I found myself in a much bigger spotlight than the one I was used to. Everything I wrote, said and did was suddenly under a microscope. Death threats and rape threats, most of them nonsense but all of them disturbing, became a regular part of my life. I refused to give any of it oxygen by acknowledging the mental toll it took on me, but the body takes no such marching orders, and the result was a slow physical breakdown. I gained weight. I didn’t sleep well. I felt perpetually tired in a way that frightened me.

Finally, I had a surprise hemorrhage that landed me in the ER and necessitated urgent surgery, leaving me so anemic that I couldn’t climb a flight of stairs without stopping halfway to catch my breath. I wish I could say this was a wake-up call, but it wasn’t; I was in the middle of an extremely average run on Wonder Woman, which has biweekly deadlines. I worked from my hospital bed.

So when I finally dragged myself into the gym, I was starting from scratch: de-conditioned, out of shape, ragged, entering my 40s feeling as though I’d aged 20 years in the space of 10. Fairly active in my youth, I had to relearn everything. How to run with proper form. How to lift weights without recruiting the wrong muscles. I do nothing halfway, so I started out with group classes at HIIT Lab, among people a solid decade younger than I was (with the exception of the omnipresent elderly woman, a fixture in all gyms, who is 90% sinew and looks like she could kick your ass). 

Was this a bit ambitious, given the circumstances? Yes. Would I recommend going from 0-60 like this to anyone else? No. But you learn things when you are lying on the floor in a pool of sweat, mostly about glycogen being a limited resource. 

“I don’t think I can do three more of these,” I rasped one morning to the instructor, a very fit Hawaiian woman. The weight I could lift with ease 90 seconds ago was dangling from my fingers. 

“Good news,” she said serenely, “You don’t have to. Just push to failure.”

In the gym, failure is not a bad word; it is a goal. It means you have used up all of your available glycogen and you can’t lift a blessed thing anymore. You have achieved your personal best. You have found your limit and planted your flag there. And that, I realized, was all any effort in life amounted to: you go until you can’t. When you hit can’t, that’s your personal mountaintop summited. That is the achievement. Measuring yourself against some other arbitrary yardstick, some other person’s story — run as many miles as this guy, sell this many books as that author, get this or that promotion — misses the point. You may even find it holds you back. When you work with what you have instead of against it, you can often go a lot farther than you thought before you hit failure. You can go from being physically shattered to getting through a 50-minute HIIT class with a bunch of 20-somethings. You can achieve things that feel almost miraculous.

After the game against the Galaxy, someone online said something I thought was insightful: this was almost a miracle season. But here is the thing, friends: pound for pound, an almost-miracle is the same as a miracle. We came within minutes of pulling off one of the biggest upsets of the year. Even though the ultimate prize remained out of reach, we are left with the euphoria of having been there together to see it.

Getting that close to perfection is often more frustrating than bombing out entirely, which I understand. But sometimes you have to look back at all the distance you covered to get to that point, to get to almost, in order to fully appreciate what you’ve managed to accomplish. I still feel pretty new here — this is my fourth season following the team — but from a storytelling perspective, this has been the most compelling 9 months I’ve witnessed so far. A faltering campaign turned all the way around in the space of a few weeks? Helped along by two reserve team kids — a hometown boy with a heart of gold and a guy who went blind in one eye and powered his way to the starting XI through sheer tenacity? And they’re friends? I could pitch this to my editors tomorrow. This is the kind of story that makes you feel like anything is possible, at a moment in history when we desperately need anything to be possible. 

We pushed to failure. It got us all the way from bottom of the table to the Western Conference final. That’s a hell of a run. That is, in fact, almost a miracle season. I’m ordering my Georgi jersey. I’ll see you at Lumen next year. 

Willow is co-creator of the Hugo Award-winning comic book series MS MARVEL, writer of the GLAAD Award-winning POISON IVY series, and has written for some of the world’s best-known superhero comics.