Where's My Mojo ?

During a recent SUP race, Clair asked me, how do I get my mojo back? It was reflective of my own situation, both of us having focused on other things found ourselves in a familiar battle on the water. However rather than speeding forward with the fun and novelty of riding skinny boards with accomplishment, we were grinding away on wider boards. I couldn't answer her in the moment, but made a silent promise that I would. Let's explore various concepts and ways back to some joy.

"Mojo" - perhaps seen as motivation is rarely lost all at once. It fades in the same way strength does — quiet, gradual, almost imperceptible until one day the thing that once felt like air now feels like stone. People assume motivation is a character trait, a kind of fire you either possess or don’t. But what we call motivation is, in fact, the brain’s anticipation of meaning. Dopamine isn’t the chemical of pleasure; it’s the chemical of expectation and the sense that something is worth moving toward. When a practice is part of our daily rhythm - paddling at sunrise, tacking up a horse without thinking, running because the body wants to - the brain learns to expect reward. Not the reward of medals or recognition, but the quiet, regulating satisfaction of being in motion in a way that feels like ourselves. The anticipation itself becomes the desire.

When you step away, that prediction loop dissolves. Not the skill. Not the fitness. You can keep the VO₂ max, the glute strength, the aerobic engine, and still feel empty. What disappears is the association between the activity and the feeling of being alive inside it. The brain stops linking movement with identity. That is why returning can feel so hollow: the muscle remembers, but the meaning has to be re-learned. And in that gap, the mind begins to panic. It grasps for intensity — bigger races, harder sessions, longer routes — anything to shock the dopamine system back online. But the nervous system does not respond to being shouted at. It responds to evidence of safety, and to the smallest seeds of reward.

This is why the first sessions back are so fragile. They are not training sessions; they are conversations. The question being asked is not, “Can you perform?” but “Does this still feel like somewhere you belong?” If the answer is pressured — if we measure too soon, if we compare too quickly, if we demand that the old joy return at full volume — the system interprets the activity as threat or demand, and desire retreats further. By contrast, when the conditions help the nervous system to stay flexi, the pace unmeasured, the board stable enough that the breath can settle and choice rewards autonomy, the brain begins to relearn the association: movement can be a place where I meet myself, not escape myself.

Motivation grows again not from discipline, but from recognition. The moment you feel the board glide cleanly under your feet and your jaw unclench without trying; the moment your exhale lengthens because the environment is no longer asking you to fight; the moment the body says, quietly and without drama, this is good — something shifts. It’s small, subtle, and easy to miss. But that is the moment the dopamine loop rewires. The anticipation begins to return.

So the work of coming back is not about proving anything to anyone, including yourself. It is about creating conditions in which the body can remember the precise, unmistakable sensation of belonging to the moment you are in.

While that may answer the obvious issue of loss of motivation. There is so much more, so read on...

SUP is unusually dense with the kinds of signals the body uses to decide whether to open or brace. A board over moving water asks the brain to fuse three streams at once: the horizon through your eyes, motion and gravity through the inner ear, and the constant feedback from feet, hips and ribcage telling you where you are in space. Those visual, vestibular and proprioceptive inputs converge low in the nervous system where postural reflexes, breath rhythm and autonomic tone are tuned moment by moment.

Balance is not a circus skill; it’s the mechanism by which the body chooses between protection and participation. When that loop is smooth, technique feels like glide. When it’s noisy, you feel like you’re pushing a board through treacle—because, in a way, you are: stabilisers spend your energy before the prime movers get their turn. The sea is honest in the same way a horse is honest: it gives you your state back without judgement, and it gives it back quickly, because vestibular signals can shift sympathetic output in milliseconds. That’s useful if you’re falling off a ladder; it’s costly if you’re trying to find flow while the system still thinks it’s under threat.

It’s also why very fit athletes can feel inexplicably flat on a board. Fitness isn’t a single substance you pour from one sport to another; it’s a stack of central capacity and peripheral specificity. You can bring Ironman lungs and engine, or the tendon resilience of an ultrarunner, and still lack endurance in the exact tissues that make paddling economical: latissimus and serratus to set the blade, lower traps to hold scapular position, deep spinal rotators to transmit torque, hip abductors and rotators to keep stance quiet. Lactate threshold lives in muscle, not in reputation. The point at which a muscle group can keep clearing and re-using by-products depends on its own capillary network, mitochondrial enzymes and recruitment pattern. Your quads may sail at threshold on the bike while your shoulder girdle is still learning to do sub-threshold work with finesse. On water, any deficit is amplified by balance: if postural muscles are at their limit, cadence chops, path wobbles, and oxygen you could have spent on propulsion is diverted to staying upright. Nothing is “wrong” with you; the hardware is simply not yet tuned to the demands of this conversation.

Then there is load you can’t see: the way stress, grief, and shifting hormones nudge the set-point of your nervous system to sympathetic (fight and flight). Breath climbs into the upper chest, carbon-dioxide tolerance drops, heart rate climbs for the same output, and the nervous system prioritises survival. That doesn’t mean you can’t race; it means the cost curve is steeper. The route out is not mystical. It’s sensory. Peripheral vision tells the brain you’re not in danger. It’s the oldest biofeedback system we have, older than any smartwatch or other language. When you soften and widen your gaze to include horizon and margins, threat-scanning falls, optic flow steadies the postural system, and the diaphragm is allowed to move again. A longer exhale increases vagal tone, which signals the heart to ease its pace. The beat-to-beat intervals widen slightly, showing the system can shift gears rather than stay locked in a high-alert state. That’s recovery in real time, HRV rises because the system is re-entering flexibility. That’s not “just calming down.” That is the circuitry of safety re-asserting itself so skill can surface.

So perhaps this is what we mean when we talk about “mojo.” It’s not a mood and it isn’t willpower. It’s the felt sense that interoception—the inside signals of breath, pressure, pulse—lines up with exteroception—the demands of water, wind, line. You can coax that state, not by lecturing yourself into motivation, but by improving signal quality while you move. Keep your eyes soft and panoramic , let stroke find rhythm, pair with a longer exhale . Relax your tongue and jaw. Let ankles and hips stay springy so proprioceptors report, quite literally, that the ground—this unstable, shimmering ground—is safe enough to play on. The body is exquisitely conservative, but it is also exquisitely trainable when its conditions are met.

None of this denies the role of engine. Central adaptation still matters—stroke volume, blood volume, ventilatory control, the whole machinery you built in the pool, on the bike, on the road. It’s just that on a SUP the limiting factor often shifts from central to local to postural in a heartbeat, and your perception follows. If you want that perception to change, match the physiology to the task. Build easy volume in zone 2 at paces where technique stays quiet so the shoulder girdle and trunk get time-under-tension without noise. Give tendons the specific loading they need now and layer in work that raises local oxidative capacity in the actual chains you use to paddle.

At forty or fifty, tendons are stiffer, repair is slower, and the cost of force production is higher than it was at twenty. None of this is failure. It’s an invitation to precision. Hormones aren’t just mood music in the background. Oestrogen has protective effects, contributes in mitochondrial signalling and collagen turnover; as levels fluctuate or fall, women see changes in endurance economy, recovery feel, and connective-tissue behaviour. If you’re the one living it, is simple: the same session costs differently now. The fix is not to push the cost onto your nervous system. It’s to grow capacity in the exact places that pay the bill—locally in muscle and tendon, centrally in breathing and mindfulness, and globally in the way you distribute attention across intensity, volume and recovery.

So when Claire asked me that question mid-race, how to get her mojo back, I didn’t hear a question about board width or cadence, I heard the question every driven athlete asks when the outputs won’t come: how do I make my system believe this is worth opening for again? Sometimes the answer is embarrassingly practical. Ride the board that lets you stand comfortably, even if your ego hisses at the width, because wasted stabilisation is wattage you never get to spend on propulsion. Choose lines and conditions where the nervous system can collect wins—clean catches, steady horizon, rhythm that doesn’t ask your jaw to help. Let the data be a witness rather than a judge: HR falling for the same speed, HRV ticking up across mornings, the felt sense of more room in the breath. Those aren’t slogans. They are the measurable signatures of a threat-biased system shifting back toward engagement.

Call it connection if you like. Call it regulation, coupling, flow. Whatever the name, the experience is unmistakable: the board begins to move with you instead of against you; the shoulders stop arguing with the hips; the horizon feels wide again; curiosity returns. When safety returns, capacity returns. When capacity returns, joy sneaks back in—quiet at first, then bold enough to carry you through hard water without that old, brittle bargain. That is what “mojo” feels like when you name it by its real components: vision that broadcasts safety, breath that carries variability, muscle that’s trained for this job, connective tissue that trusts the load, and a brainstem no longer convinced it has to defend you from your own life.

Once desire becomes possible again, momentum follows. The more you do, the more you want to do — but only when the doing feels like a homecoming rather than a test you are trying to pass.

📸 by P3T Photography

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