Redefining Victory After Surgery, Change, and Recovery
We are very good at tending to physical wounds. We ice. We stretch. We submit to physical therapy. We endure discomfort because we believe in healing. Somewhere along the way, many of us also find ourselves redefining victory, not as returning to who we were, but as learning how to move forward differently.
This year provided us with numerous opportunities to practice restraint.
By the time surgery was finally an option, Jim had been living with bone-on-bone hip pain for far too long. Every movement was measured. Relief was postponed first by work, then by radiation. When the first hip was replaced, the second was still so bad he could barely feel the difference. Ninety days later, the second surgery changed everything.
Pain lifted almost immediately.
Somewhere in the middle of recovery, Jim bought an electric bike. Not as a replacement for his road bike, but as a bridge. A way back without forcing his body to leap before it was ready. Step-through frame. Upright posture. Assistance when hills appeared sooner than expected.
It wasn’t surrender.
It was strategy.
Our first ride back happened on Christmas Day.
I hadn’t realized it had been more than eighteen months since we had ridden together. Cycling is how we met. It is the language we share when words fall short. Rolling out together again felt like coming home.
It didn’t look the way it used to.
And it still felt sacred.
We don’t yet know what comes next. Jim may return to his road bike. He may not. For now, we ride side by side in a new way. Slower. Upright. Assisted. Together.
That choice to stay connected to what we love while allowing it to evolve feels like victory.
Life has asked this of me before.
In my thirties, my body made it clear that running was no longer an option. Letting go of something that had carried me for decades felt like grief. What replaced it was cycling. Community. Love. A life I couldn’t have imagined when I was clinging to the old one.
Some seasons end.
Others arrive quietly, disguised as compromise.
Victory is not always about getting back to where you were. Sometimes redefining victory is the most honest form of forward motion.
Sometimes it’s about honoring where you are.
Sometimes it’s choosing forward motion without demanding it look familiar.
This week, I’m celebrating the first ride back not because it marked a finish line, but because it reminded me that joy still lives on the other side of adaptation.
And that, for now, is enough.
©2025 Lori Ann King
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