This is the post I wasn't sure I'd write. The money, the anxiety, the years where survival mode replaced performance mode. And how I'm clawing back.
I'm going to tell you something that most people in my position would never put in writing: there was a stretch of years where I stopped being an athlete. Not officially — I still trained, I still moved — but the competitive fire, the identity, the sense of purpose that came from pushing my body against hard things? That went quiet. And without it, I drifted.
I gained 30 pounds. I stopped racing. I let the platform I'd built — 17,000 LinkedIn members, 200 podcast episodes, events in six cities — go dormant while I chased something I thought would fill the gap: money.
I'm not writing this for sympathy. I'm writing it because I think a lot of people reading this know exactly what I'm talking about, and nobody is saying it out loud.
How It Happens
It doesn't happen all at once. That's the thing about drift — you never make the decision to drift. You make a thousand small decisions that each seem reasonable, and then one day you look up and you're somewhere you didn't choose to be.
For me it was the 2008 financial crisis. I was building Executive Athletes, doing the podcast, running events, creating community — and making very little money. When the market collapsed, survival instincts kicked in hard. I pivoted to what paid. The work was good. ZRG Partners was growing. I was being useful in the world. But I was optimizing for revenue and safety, not for the things that made me who I was.
The training slipped from competitive to maintenance. The maintenance slipped to occasional. The events stopped. The podcast went quiet. And somewhere in there — in the anxiety of building a business through a pandemic and a market that was hostile and then irrational and then hostile again — I stopped being Ken Lubin the athlete and became Ken Lubin the executive search professional.
The dangerous thing about losing your athletic identity isn't the weight gain or the lost fitness. It's that you lose the framework that makes everything else work.
What the Drift Cost Me
I want to be specific about this because vague costs are easy to ignore. Here's what I lost in concrete terms:
I lost my best thinking. My clearest strategic ideas have always come on long rides or mountain runs. When those stopped, my thinking got murkier. I was still good at my job. But I wasn't operating at my ceiling.
I lost my stress management system. Training wasn't just exercise — it was how I processed the anxiety of building a business, of carrying responsibility for a team, of navigating the relentless uncertainty of professional services. Without it, the anxiety had nowhere to go. It just accumulated.
I lost my identity anchor. When someone asked me who I was, I had good answers about what I did. But the thing that made me feel like myself — the athlete, the competitor, the person who voluntarily did hard things — that answer got quieter every year.
The Turn
I can't point to one moment. The turn was slow, like the drift. But there was a point where I looked at the version of myself that existed in 2012 — the guy who won the Death Race, who built a community of 17,000, who interviewed extraordinary people about the intersection of competition and leadership — and I decided I missed that person enough to go get him back.
Executive Athletes 2.0 isn't just a rebrand. It's accountability infrastructure. By rebuilding this platform publicly — by writing these posts, by relaunching the podcast, by saying out loud that I'm on a comeback — I'm doing the thing I know works: telling people, making it public, making the identity visible so the behavior has to follow.
Where I Am Now
I'm not going to pretend I'm back. I'm not. I'm 30 pounds lighter than my peak weight in the wrong direction, and the fitness gap between where I am and where I've been is real. But I'm moving every day. I'm back in the mountains. I'm racing again. And I'm building something that matters to me in the way that Executive Athletes always mattered — not because it pays well (it might not), but because it's true.
The journey back is the content. The imperfect middle is where the real story lives. And if you're in that middle right now — if you recognize yourself in the drift, in the gap between who you were and who you're being — I want you to know that the identity doesn't expire. You're still the athlete. You just need to start acting like it again.
I'll be here, doing the same thing. Let's go.