When Speed Slows Down: What Usain Bolt’s Struggle Reveals About the Cost of Athletic Extremes
- Tennille Jacobs
- Sep 27
- 4 min read
How Traditional Chinese Medicine reframes the modern obsession with performance, balance, and the quiet wisdom of “enough.”
The Myth of Endless Performance
There’s a viral post making the rounds: Usain Bolt, once the fastest man alive, admitting that he now struggles to walk up a flight of stairs.
Predictably, the internet responded with ridicule. How could the man who outran the world’s best sprinters now find stairs difficult?
Beneath the jokes lies something important about how we understand the human body, and what happens when we glorify performance over balance.
Western culture has turned “fitness” into an ideology. We celebrate the push, the grind, the no-pain-no-gain mantra that treats the body as a machine to be perfected.
Children are scouted into sports before they’ve finished growing.
Adults chase “form” through punishing gym routines.
The athlete becomes our archetype of discipline.
Yet the same athletes we idolize often end up broken: hips replaced, joints inflamed, hearts weakened, minds burnt out.
The irony is hard to miss: we call it health while it quietly destroys the body’s ability to stay well.
The Cult of the Gym
Somewhere along the way, the gym stopped being a place of movement and became a shrine to control.“Leg day,” “burn,” “beast mode”.
The vocabulary itself is violent.
The focus is rarely on vitality; it’s on conquest.
We train our bodies the way we train our software: constant upgrading, constant metrics, constant comparison. But the human organism isn’t a machine; it’s a garden.
Gardens thrive on rhythm, not domination.
Gym culture mistakes punishment for progress. It teaches that to rest is to regress, that to listen to your body is to be weak. In doing so, it disconnects people from the very intuition that would keep them healthy.
Yes, movement matters, but the kind that harmonizes, not exhausts.
True wellness requires the courage to stop pushing when every advertisement tells you to push harder.
A Different Lens: Traditional Chinese Medicine
Right now, as I study to become a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioner, this kind of story strikes me differently.
The deeper I go into my coursework, the more I see how perfectly TCM explains what’s happening in bodies like Bolt’s, and, by extension, in ours.
From a TCM perspective, Bolt’s body was extraordinary because it burned through extraordinary reserves.
Years of explosive training depleted his Jing - the body’s deep essence, its non-renewable store of vitality. Jing fuels growth, fertility, and longevity. Once spent, it can’t simply be “worked back.”
Sprinters like Bolt also tax their Lung Qi, which governs respiration and the distribution of energy, and their Kidneys, which anchor stamina and recovery.
Every burst of speed draws from that well.
The younger you start, the faster you burn.
So when a retired athlete struggles with simple exertion, it isn’t failure - it’s the biology of depletion catching up with the mythology of limitless drive.
When Movement Becomes Violence
In TCM, balance, not exertion, is the core of health.
Movement should circulate Qi, not scatter it.
Exercise that harmonizes the body, qigong, tai chi, walking, dancing, playful motion, builds strength through flow.
Exercise that punishes the body burns Yin, drains Jing, and leaves the system dry, like soil baked under constant sun.
Many of us, even non-athletes, repeat the same mistake.
We confuse punishment with discipline.
We try to earn rest instead of recognizing rest as part of rhythm.
It’s the same imbalance showing up in another form: a culture that only respects the Yang: action, doing, striving, while forgetting the Yin: rest, recovery, reflection.
Western fitness culture worships heat and motion.
Everything is about speed, sweat, and transformation.
Yin, the cool and receptive principle, is treated as laziness.
Yet every flame that burns without its opposite wind eventually devours itself.
Health isn’t about how brightly you burn, it’s about whether you can keep the light steady.
The Quiet Wisdom of Enough
Here’s the part that resonates personally. I’ve never been an athlete.
My activity has always come from play, not performance.
I’ve never over-exercised, never followed a rigid gym routine, and yet my body has stayed remarkably consistent through the years.
Many friends who trained intensely in their teens and twenties now struggle to maintain energy and balance in their forties.
From a TCM view, the difference isn’t luck; it’s economy of Jing.
When you live in tune with your body’s natural rhythms, energy replenishes itself.
When you fight those rhythms, even in the name of “fitness,” depletion becomes inevitable.
There’s a deep intelligence in knowing when enough is enough.
The body whispers long before it screams, but modern life has taught us to ignore whispers.
Listening Before You Move
Bolt’s struggle isn’t a fall from grace, it’s a mirror for the rest of us.
If the world’s most disciplined athlete can run out of fuel, perhaps the problem isn’t personal weakness but cultural delusion.
We’ve mistaken performance for health and exhaustion for virtue.
True strength isn’t how fast you move, it’s how gently you can sustain the motion.
The body was never meant to be conquered.
It was meant to be listened to.
Finding Your Way Back to the Body
While I continue my journey in Traditional Chinese Medicine, the heart of my current work remains holistic wellness: helping people reconnect with themselves so they can begin to listen to their bodies again.
Because the first step toward healing isn’t another workout plan or stricter diet, it’s reconnection.
When you start to hear what your body has been saying all along, balance begins to return on its own.
Through my intuitive guidance and trauma-informed holistic practices, I help people remember how to inhabit their own rhythm: how to pause, breathe, and feel what’s true for them.
That’s where real transformation begins: not in forcing the body to perform, but in learning to partner with it again.
If you’re ready to explore that kind of inner listening, I’d love to walk with you on that journey.
TL;DR
Usain Bolt’s story shows how overexertion and the glorification of “performance” can lead to depletion rather than strength.
Western gym culture celebrates Yang energy—doing, striving, achieving—while neglecting Yin: rest, reflection, and stillness.
From a TCM lens, this drains Jing and disrupts harmony.
Real health begins by reconnecting with yourself and learning to listen to your body’s wisdom.
My holistic practice helps people cultivate that reconnection—the first step toward genuine, sustainable wellness.
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