The Story Your Body Is Listening To
"I'm too old for this."
He said it in our first session, almost as a reflex. Forty-five years old, still physically capable but pulling back from everything. Not because his body had stopped working but because his story had.
I've heard some version of that sentence hundreds of times. What I've come to understand is that it isn't just a thought. It's a program running in the body.
The science of narrative has been quietly building a case for something most performance culture ignores: the stories we absorb don't stay in the mind.
When we become deeply absorbed in a narrative, what researchers call narrative transportation, we mentally simulate its events, activating the same neural networks we'd use if we were physically performing them. The story runs in the body. Which means the narrative you inhabit about your aging, your limits, your decline isn't merely a perspective you hold. It's a set of instructions your nervous system is executing.
This has real consequences for how athletes age, and I'd argue for how any of us age.
The dominant cultural story about the aging body is a story of irreversible loss. It arrives from so many directions, medicine, media, the visible changes in the mirror, that it becomes nearly impossible not to be transported by it. And once you are, the body begins to comply.
The athlete moves more cautiously, interpreting sensation as warning rather than information. They slowly pull back from challenge. The story becomes the physiology, not because the body lies, but because the body is always listening.
Recently, I was coaching a 75-year-old woman named Cheryl through her first half marathon. At mile 11 her legs were heavy, her breathing labored, her body was cramping up in the Miami heat and the internal voice was doing what it often does at mile 11: telling her the story was already over.
That moment is where most people surrender. Not to the body, but to the narrative. They collapse the two, as if the discomfort is proof the story is true.
Cheryl didn't collapse them. Not because she was unusually tough, but because she had learned to do something specific: recognize that more than one story was available to her in that moment, and choose which one to inhabit.
She finished. And watching her finish changed how I thought about the work I do.
She embodies what I think of as durable optimism. Fragile optimism assumes cooperation from the body and collapses when discomfort arrives. Durable optimism does not depend on ease. It rests on a deeper conviction: that multiple interpretations are always available, and that the first story the nervous system offers under strain is not the only possible one.
This is harder to build than it sounds. The decline narrative is not wrong, exactly. Bodies do change, recovery takes longer and certain capacities diminish. Any story that pretends otherwise won't hold up, and for good reason. Most of us, athletes especially can tell the difference between a narrative that's real and one that's performed.
What restorative storytelling does, and what the research supports, is something more honest: it tells the truth about difficulty while refusing to let difficulty be the whole story. It acknowledges the mile 11 moment without treating it as the final word.
The practical result is an athlete who can hold two things at once, the reality of physical change and the possibility of what's still available, without resolving the tension prematurely in either direction.
I think about this beyond athletics, too.
The question of how we age, what stories we tell about what's ending and what's possible, may be one of the more consequential questions of a life. The narrative of decline is culturally seductive because it's partially true and because it offers a strange kind of relief: if the outcome is fixed, you don't have to keep choosing. You can stop showing up offensively and start managing defensively. The story does the deciding for you.
What I've watched over years of coaching is that the people who grow with the most vitality are not necessarily the ones with the best genetics or the most disciplined training. They're the ones who refuse to let a single story, however culturally dominant and however reinforced by direct experience, become the only story. They allow themselves to have narrative flexibility. They keep finding, as Cheryl did at mile 11, that there is still another story available.
When I shared Cheryl's story with other athletes I was working with, the questions changed. People stopped asking can I really do this at my age and started asking how did she train for it. The story multiplied possibility simply by existing as a counterexample to the dominant narrative.
This is what the research on restorative narratives points toward: stories don't just describe what's possible, they expand what people believe is available to them. And that expansion is not metaphorical. It shows up in how they train, how they recover, how they interpret pain, and how long they stay in the game.
The man who told me he was too old in our first session competed a stand up paddleboard journey 82 miles from the Bahamas to Florida. His paddle was not record setting but what he did was harder than setting any speed record: He changed the story he had been telling himself for the better part of a decade, and his body received new instructions.
The story you tell about your aging body is not a reflection of your physical reality. It is a variable, and unlike most variables, it's one you can actually change.
