If you’re only “the athlete,” one injury takes everything. Build a few rooms in your house.

Putting your whole identity in one place makes you efficient and fragile at the same time. A single bad landing can take the sport, the team, the schedule and your sense of who you are in one afternoon, because they were all the same thing. More than one room means a closed door is not the end of the house.

Give one afternoon a week to something with no scoreboard and no connection to your sport: cooking, drawing, a job, a language, a club. Keep it during the season, when it feels least necessary. That is exactly when it is cheapest to build.