There’s a scene in the show Black Books where a customer is knocking on the door of the bookshop and Bernard, the owner, panics. He says something like, “Oh god, what do they want?” and his assistant, Manny, says, “They want to buy a book.” Bernard, with dead eyes, responds, “But why me? Why do they come to me?”
That was me, running a bike shop.
People would walk in, smiling, friendly, talking about the weather, and I would feel this simmering internal scream build in my chest because I knew they were about to ask me something I’d been asked five hundred times before. Something I had answered every summer for two decades, And I’d have to smile. And I’d have to sound helpful. And I’d have to be this guy who loved his job.
Because from the outside, I was living the dream.
Own a bike shop, they said. Do what you love. Spend your days around bikes, talking about bikes, fixing bikes. Sounds incredible.
And it was incredible. For a while. Until it wasn’t.
Burnout doesn’t always look like collapse. Sometimes it looks like success. Sometimes it’s doing everything you set out to do and discovering that you hate every minute of it. Sometimes it’s being so tired and angry and broke that you start resenting the very people who are trying to keep your lights on.
I couldn’t show it. If I looked miserable, I might lose a customer. And if I lost too many customers, I couldn’t pay the bills, So I kept the act going. I was two people. The smiling mechanic with grease on his hands, and the guy silently asking, Why the hell are you coming to me?
The same thing happened in racing.
I’m not built like a cyclist. I’m 6’5”, and even at my most fit, I was over 200 pounds. I looked like I should be guarding the paint in the NBA, not trying to climb up switchbacks with guys built like greyhounds. But I kept showing up. I kept grinding. I kept doing the training, even when the payoff was, at best, finishing mid-pack and feeling like I was going to throw up the rest of the weekend.
People thought it was impressive. Look at you, balancing work, racing, life. They saw ambition. What they didn’t see was the exhaustion. The resentment. The part of me that knew I wasn’t going to win but kept showing up anyway because I didn’t know how to stop without feeling like a failure.
Burnout and ambition wear the same clothes. They look like commitment. They look like hard work. But one of them fuels you and the other hollowed me out from the inside until I didn’t recognize the guy standing in my own shop.
Here’s the hard truth I learned too late:
No matter what you do, it eventually becomes your pain-in-the-ass job.
Even the things you love.
Especially the things you love.
And the people who succeed? Half the time, they’re jus the ones who were too stubborn or too stupid to quit. I’ve been both. It works. Until it doesn’t.
If you’re out there grinding through your own “dream,” feeling miserable and confused about why it feels so wrong, maybe it’s not you. Maybe you’re just burned out and no one noticed because you still look productive.
I don’t have a perfect answer, but I do know this. If it feels like you’re drowning while everyone around you thinks you’re surfing, it’s okay to stop and ask whether the ocean you’re in still belongs to you.