The Ground You Lose

Late 2019 I could hardly manage a flight of stairs. Late 2024, 35-pound pack, 5-6 mi., 5-6 days most weeks when not in flare. Five years of clawing and clutching at slow nonlinear work to get that point.

The real target was 45 pounds. If I could do that locally, I could go into the wilds alone and get back under my own power. It started to look possible, maybe.

Then December hit.

What December Took

A run of hard flares, on and off, the way they do. Face down dick in the dirt. The kind you're not getting up from, and the body recoils under that kind of load. It couldn't care less about your discipline, resolve or plans, so...

Less movement, less range, less everything. Not zero, but close.

By the time I noticed the bill, the damage was already done. Flexibility quietly gone, strength way down, and some weight gain. Down to 2-3 miles, 2 days if I'm lucky. The 35-pound load-out became a distant memory.

No springtime Alpine fishing trips. Maybe next year.

A Note on What This Is

Lupus, RA, intracranial hypertension, POTS, and the rest of it. A loaded pack, remote terrain, and real consequence if it all goes sideways. I'm not posting to model or advocate.

I'm writing about it because I suspect there are plenty of others like me. People from extreme sports, the trades, or other high-performance backgrounds who are now dealing with illness or injury. Still rubbing dirt on it, still saying we'll be fine.

Still trying to do the thing, whatever that may be.

This is not a how-to for doing stupid shit you probably shouldn't do. This is how to avoid adding extra stupid on top of the stupid nobody can talk you out of.

What I Ran Into

The resources that got me to December are still in the rotation, that's still foundational. But illness progresses and by April I'd stalled at 2-3 miles and couldn't push past it. The same inputs, a different body, so I needed to look deeper.

I found Vanja (Moves Method) and started working the end-range mobility and strength part. Saw some progression, enough to know the direction was right. But I kept hitting a ceiling.

The tissue wasn't moving well enough to reach the positions I needed to train. Without access to the position, I couldn't load it. Without load, the nervous system had no reason to treat it as safe territory.

That's where Kelly Starrett came in. What I took from his framing was to warm up more and free up the tissue enough to move better, for better positioning and more effective loading. Soft tissue work: rolling, targeted prep with stretching and isometrics. Not as recovery or cool-down, but as preparation.

The sequence that started making sense: warm up more and free up the tissue first, then load the range you've just unlocked. Repeat until the nervous system stops treating that range as a threat. Creating enough slack so the movement and strength work can actually reach the range where progression looks possible.

Why This Matters for Flare Bodies

A body that's been through prolonged flare activity isn't just de-conditioned. The nervous system is running in hyper-elevated protection mode. Unfamiliar positions don't just get flagged, access gets cut off. Tissue tightens at the edges of movement to keep you in the middle and passive stretching doesn't change that.

Most of what we experience as flexibility isn't tissue length suddenly changing. It's the nervous system deciding a position is safe enough to allow.

What changes it is load. Controlled, gradual, end-range load.

Strength work applied to the positions you're trying to reclaim. But you have to be able to reach the position first.

Free it up enough to start training at your end-range.

The Mental Health Part

Something that doesn't get said enough about losing physical capacity...

It narrows and shrinks the world. The loss isn't measured in miles, it's measured in places. A lake becomes too far, a trail becomes uncertain, backup plans become the only plan. Eventually you just stop looking at maps, because looking starts to feel like wishing.

The places I go to fish aren't interchangeable with closer more accessible places. They're specific and require a body that carries weight over distance. When capacity erodes, those places become hypothetical.

When the places you go to feel like yourself become hypothetical, something else starts to erode too.

I'm 57, not trying to be an athlete. No grand illusions about being twenty again. I'm just trying to steal a little sliver of aliveness back from illness.

Before I can't.

Where I Am

Two to three movement sessions a week followed by 3-4 miles. Light pack, 20 pounds, working back toward 35. Some progression, but still well short of December.

December is the goal, not performance, not optimization. Just back to the floor I had, maybe by this fall if I'm lucky.

The cost of moving faster than the tissue is ready for is already in the record. That story is here.

The pack gets heavier when the body says so.

Resources

Both have extensive free content on YouTube, that's where I started, and where most of the work happens:

→ The Ready State — Kelly Starrett. Soft tissue prep, rolling, mobility, isometrics. The tissue-first framework in practice.

→ Moves Method — End-range loading, strength through full range, nervous system retraining.

Foundational Rotation:

→ Movement by David — gentle system work, daily mobility
→ Strength Side — real-world strength and movement patterns
→ Squat University — knee and foot mechanics, alignment
→ Knees Over Toes Guy — full chain loading, long-term flexibility
→ Bob & Brad — accessible PT and pain management

Connective Tissue:

→ Capacity Is the Adventure
→ Adaptive Trailcraft: The Urban Pivot

Related:

→ Layer One: Start Where You Are
→ Raising the Floor: Tools That Helped Me Function Again

Why Those Lakes Matter:

→ Thriving in Fullness: Owning Your Experience
→ Aliveness at the Edge

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Peer reflection, not medical advice. Your body is yours — what works for me may not work for you.