My right side cramped up mid workout and look what that taught me about running a business

One day, right in the middle of a WOD, my body just... quit.

My right side seized up mid-rep. Cramped so hard I had to stop, drop the bar, and spend the next twenty minutes trying to talk my own leg out of a knot.

I've been doing this a long time. I know what a normal cramp feels like. This wasn't that.

It turned out my right side had been compensating for my left for years. It had been picking up load it was never designed to carry alone, because somewhere along the way my left side had gotten lazy, or hurt, or just used to not having to try. Nobody told my right side to do this. It just did, the way a good employee quietly picks up a task nobody wants until one day it's fully theirs and nobody remembers whose job it originally was.

And then, after a particularly brutal week of training, the right side finally staged a strike. And the left side, so used to cruising, so unused to being asked to actually activate, couldn't step in to save it.

Everything stopped.

The Part Nobody Warns You About

I assumed the fix would be straightforward. Rest it, strengthen it, get back to it.

It wasn't. I had to relearn postures I thought I already knew. Unlearn years of compensation patterns so baked in I didn't experience them as compensation. I had to reconnect a mind to a muscle that had essentially gone dark, because for years something else had been doing its job for it.

It's slow. It's humbling. Some days it's just frustrating because you want to go back to the version of yourself that could just show up and go, and instead you're standing in front of a mirror trying to remember how to activate a muscle you didn't know you'd stopped using.

Here's the part that makes this whole experience striking. First, the compensation has been working so well that I didn't even realise it... a shift here, a tilt there and I was comfortable again... until something breaks. Second, my efforts to compensate had been apparent to everyone except myself.

Where This Gets Interesting for Founders

A few weeks ago I met a founder - sharp, driven, clearly good at what he does. He told me, almost in passing, that finance is the one part of his business he's handed off entirely. "I let my finance team do it," he told me, almost like a boast.

Founders are hardy people. Working hard isn't the problem. It's never the problem. Most founders I know would happily work themselves into the ground before admitting they're avoiding something. So when I say founders avoid the parts of the business they dislike, I'm not saying they're lazy. I'm saying the opposite: they're so good at working hard around the gap that the gap itself disappears from view.

Finance is usually the one. Not always though. Sometimes, it's people management, sometimes it's the hard conversations with a co-founder, sometimes it's meeting clients. But finance is the one I see most, because it's the one that's easiest to delegate without anyone noticing it's been delegated. You put a bookkeeper in front of it. A finance manager. A monthly report you skim instead of read. And the business keeps running, which is exactly the problem. It keeps running well enough that nothing forces the reckoning.

Until something does. A downturn. A due diligence process. A buyer's first serious question. An exit conversation where suddenly you need to know, cold, what your margin looks like by client and you realize you've never actually knew, because someone else always did.

The Questions I'd Ask (Including Myself)

I don't think most founders need to be told they're avoiding something. I think they need to be asked something specific enough that they can't answer it on autopilot. So here's where I'd start:

Do you know your numbers, or do you know of your numbers? There's a real difference between having read the report and being able to reconstruct the story behind it from memory.

If someone asked you your margin by client right now, could you answer in ten seconds — or would you need to "check with someone"? Ten seconds isn't a fair bar for everything in a business. It's a fair bar for the thing you claim to dedicate almost all of your waking hours to.

Who would notice first if a number went wrong, you, or someone three steps removed from you? If it's not you, that's not necessarily a crisis. But it's worth knowing, deliberately, rather than discovering it by accident. And, if its someone else, how long before you know?

When's the last time you sat with your P&L uninterrupted, with no one explaining it to you first? Not the summary. Not the deck. The actual document, cold.

If you had to sell the business tomorrow, what's the first question a buyer would ask that you couldn't answer without a phone call? This one tends to be the most honest, because exit conversations don't tolerate compensation. They go looking for exactly the gap you've spent years quietly covering.

None of these questions are about competence. A founder who can't answer them isn't bad at business. Quite the opposite. They're often very good at business, good enough that the business survived the gap. That's the trap. The compensation works, right up until the moment it's tested by something bigger than the system was built for - a downturn, a buyer, an exit.

My right side compensated for years before anyone, including me, could see it. The only reason I know now is because it finally failed loudly enough to demand attention.

I'd rather founders find their version of that gap on their own terms, sitting with a number, asking themselves one uncomfortable question, than wait for the version that shows up mid-rep, with no warning, at the worst possible time.