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 most people in my position would never put in writing. There was a stretch of years where I stopped being an athlete. I still trained. I still moved. But the competitive fire, the identity, the purpose that came from pushing my body against hard things? Gone quiet. And without it, I drifted.
I gained 30 pounds. I stopped racing. I let the platform I built go dormant. 17,000 LinkedIn members, 200 podcast episodes, events in six cities, all of it sitting on a shelf while I chased the thing I thought would fill the gap: money.
I'm not writing this for sympathy. I'm writing it because a lot of people reading this know exactly what I'm talking about, and nobody says it out loud.
How It Happens
It doesn't happen all at once. You never decide to drift. You make a thousand small decisions that each seem reasonable, and one day you look up and you're somewhere you didn't choose to be.
For me it was 2020. COVID hit and survival mode took over. The world locked down, the market went hostile, then irrational, then hostile again, and I was heads-down at ZRG trying to navigate all of it. The work mattered. The business kept growing. But I was optimizing for revenue and safety, not for the things that made me who I was.
Training slipped from competitive to maintenance. Maintenance slipped to just enough. The events had stopped. The podcast went quiet. Somewhere in there, between the anxiety and the grind, I stopped being Ken Lubin the athlete and became Ken Lubin the search guy.
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 here, because vague costs are easy to ignore.
I lost my best thinking. My clearest ideas have always come on long rides or mountain runs. When those stopped, my thinking got murkier. I was still good at my job. I just wasn't operating at my ceiling.
I lost my stress management system. Training was never just exercise for me. It was how I processed the anxiety of building a business, carrying a team, and dealing with the constant uncertainty of professional services. Without it, the anxiety had nowhere to go. It just stacked up.
I lost my identity anchor. When someone asked 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 guy who did hard things on purpose? That answer got quieter every year.
The Turn
I can't point to one moment. The turn was slow, like the drift. But at some point I looked at the 2013 version of myself, the guy who won the Death Race, built a community of 17,000, and interviewed extraordinary people about competition and leadership, and I decided I missed that guy enough to go get him back.
Executive Athletes 2.0 isn't a rebrand. It's accountability. Rebuilding this platform in public, writing these posts, relaunching the podcast, saying out loud that I'm on a comeback. I'm doing the thing I know works: tell people, make it public, make 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. The 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 the way Executive Athletes always mattered. Not because it pays well. It might not. Because it's true.
The journey back is the content. The messy middle is where the real story lives. If you're in that middle right now, if you see yourself in the drift, in the gap between who you were and who you're being, know this: 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.