The Best Thing That Ever Happened to You Was Hitting Bottom
By Derek Neighbors on December 17, 2025
I called my wife from work, convinced I needed to go to the emergency room.
It was the afternoon after my first CrossFit workout. My arms were so stiff and achy I couldn’t straighten them. The pain was alarming. I genuinely believed I had done permanent damage. I was not exaggerating.
Turns out I had just forgotten what building muscle felt like.
That was how bad it had gotten. I couldn’t distinguish normal muscle soreness from injury because I had been so disconnected from physical effort for so long. My body had become so foreign to me that its basic signals were unrecognizable.
It was the best thing that ever happened to me.
The Success Story That Wasn’t
From the outside, everything looked fine. Better than fine.
I married young. Had kids young. Poured myself into work. Started my own company. Started two thriving nonprofits. Sat on boards and government committees. Coached my kids’ sports teams. I was pulling insane weeks of massive productivity, building things, helping people, showing up everywhere.
The cover story was success. The reality was different.
I was coping with the stress by eating everything in sight. I ballooned to 260 pounds. Unhealthy. Undisciplined in the one area that actually mattered for being alive long enough to enjoy any of it.
Each meal felt earned by the output. Each compromise felt insignificant. I never cared about my appearance. I told myself that. But the body was keeping score of what the mind refused to acknowledge.
The Mirror and the Contrast
My wife started going to CrossFit. She was getting in shape. The contrast became impossible to ignore.
I couldn’t stand the mirror anymore. Not vanity. Physical misery. The body screaming what the mind wouldn’t say. Something had to change.
So I walked into the CrossFit gym.
The first workout was a Hero WOD. For those unfamiliar, Hero WODs are named after fallen first responders and military personnel. They are designed to be brutal. They are not beginner workouts.
I couldn’t do hardly anything without serious modifications. I pushed so hard I thought I was going to die. Literally questioned whether my heart could handle it. Finished anyway.
Then I went to work. And after lunch, my arms locked up. The pain was sharp, constant, alarming. I called my wife and told her I might need to go to the ER.
That phone call was rock bottom.
Not the weight. Not the mirror. The moment I realized I had become so disconnected from my own body that I couldn’t tell the difference between getting stronger and getting injured.
Why Rock Bottom Works
Something shifted after that day. Not motivation. Motivation comes and goes. Something deeper.
The disgust made going back impossible. Not through willpower. Through impossibility. I had seen something I couldn’t unsee. The productive success story was camouflaging a slow physical death. The output was consuming the vessel.
When you can’t distinguish soreness from injury, you have lost something fundamental about being human. That recognition changes everything.
I started going to CrossFit seven days a week. Three hundred forty plus days that first year. I moved to two-a-days. Started running. Started tracking macros. Moved into Olympic lifting and powerlifting.
The discipline wasn’t forced. It was inevitable. Once you’ve seen yourself clearly, going back requires a kind of self-deception that becomes too expensive to maintain. That’s why disgust works when inspiration fails. Inspiration lets you pretend you’ll change tomorrow. Disgust removes the lie. You can’t unsee what you’ve seen. The path back to comfortable mediocrity is blocked by the truth of what you witnessed in yourself.
The ancient Greeks understood this. They called it metanoia, a complete transformation of mind. Not a new year’s resolution. Not a lifestyle adjustment. The death of the old identity and the birth of something new. Real transformation requires fire. That Hero WOD was the forge. The years since have been the tempering.
The Physical Transformation
I dropped weight. Got healthy. Over the years, the fitness evolved. Trail running replaced some of the lifting. Then ultramarathons entered the picture.
I have been under 200 pounds for years. Under 180 pounds for the last year. Sleep optimization became part of the routine. Blood work four times a year. Supplementation dialed in based on actual data rather than guesswork.
I still don’t eat exactly how I want to. But I am miles from where I was. The 260-pound version of me would not recognize the person who runs ultras and monitors recovery metrics like a professional athlete.
The methods are circumstantial. CrossFit happened to be available. Blood work became accessible. Someone else’s transformation might be walking, or bodyweight exercises in a prison cell, or manual labor. Epictetus was a slave. He had no gym membership. The methods don’t matter. The disgust and the decision are universal.
But here is the thing. It is not about the weight anymore. It stopped being about the weight a long time ago.
It is about movement. Pushing the body to move and the mind to unlock. The physical transformation was the gateway to something much bigger.
The Real Unlock
During this decade-plus journey of physical transformation, I did something that changed everything else. I set a personal alignment using a framework called Core Protocols by Jim and Michele McCarthy.
The alignment was simple. I identified what I actually wanted at the deepest level.
I want courage.
Then I defined the evidence that would tell me I had achieved it.
- I am transparent and authentic with those closest to me. They enjoy and seek more presence with me.
- I am empathetic towards those closest to me. I seek to understand them and shower them with love regardless of what the situation might be.
- I am eating and working out at a level to reach my goals.
- I am reaching the goals I set for myself around my work.
- I am writing and publishing regularly.
- I am working with my hands more.
This alignment became the compass for over a decade of decisions. The physical transformation was one piece. But the transparency, the empathy, the presence with family, the discipline around work, the commitment to creating and publishing: all of it flows from that moment of clarity about what I actually wanted.
Rock bottom wasn’t the end. It was the foundation for everything that matters.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Success can be the best camouflage for decline. Productivity can justify any amount of self-destruction. Busy people rarely look closely at themselves. The output provides cover.
Comfort zones don’t produce transformation. “Kinda bad” isn’t bad enough to change. You accommodate. You adjust expectations. You tell yourself it’s not that bad, that you’ll deal with it later, that other things are more important right now.
The threshold for real change is usually disgust, not inspiration. Inspiration fades. Disgust makes going back impossible.
The deepest transformations have a rock bottom. Most people clean it up for the telling. They emphasize the comeback and minimize the fall. But the fall is the point. The fall creates the foundation. The compression at the bottom is what enables the launch.
The Application
If you are currently in the “kinda bad” zone, I have uncomfortable news. The descent continues until you stop it. Success won’t save you. Productivity won’t save you. The cover story gets more elaborate while the reality gets worse.
If you are at rock bottom right now, I have different news. This is the launch pad, not the grave. The disgust you feel is a gift. It is fuel powerful enough to make transformation inevitable rather than optional. Use it.
This is for you if you are:
- Going through a divorce and wondering who you are without the marriage
- Losing a job and facing the identity crisis that follows
- Struggling with addiction and finally sick of the cycle
- Watching your health deteriorate while pretending everything is fine
- Realizing your success was built on a foundation that is crumbling
- Burned out and questioning everything you thought you wanted
- Grieving a loss that shattered your sense of the world
- Facing a betrayal that destroyed your ability to trust
- Looking in the mirror and not recognizing who you have become
Whatever your bottom looks like, it is not the end. It is the raw material for transformation.
If you have already risen, remember what put you here. Keep the evidence visible. The alignment I set over a decade ago still guides my decisions today. The discipline that seemed robotic in year one has become identity. But I never forget the ER phone call. That memory keeps the standards clear.
Final Thoughts
That day I thought I needed the emergency room? Best thing that ever happened to me.
The disgust at 260 pounds became a decade of transformation. Not just physical. The alignment. The courage. The transparency. The presence with the people who matter most.
This article exists because rock bottom became a launch pad. Writing and publishing regularly is on my evidence list. The discipline to show up. The courage to be transparent about the ugly parts. That phone call to my wife, convinced I was injured, was the beginning of everything good that came after.
What are you accommodating right now that disgusts you? What are you justifying with productivity or success or being too busy? What is your body keeping score of while your mind refuses to look?
The descent continues until you decide it doesn’t. Becoming what you’re capable of isn’t achieved from comfort. It’s forged in the refusal to stay where you are.
Ready to stop accommodating mediocrity and use your disgust as fuel? MasteryLab provides the framework and community for people done pretending “kinda bad” is acceptable.
