Lindsey Vonn and the Hidden Cost of Resilience
Lindsey Vonn's return to Olympic skiing at 41 is genuinely remarkable.
After seven years of retirement and a titanium knee replacement, she trained her body back to elite-level performance and earned her spot at Milano Cortina 2026. The sheer determination, grit, and resilience required to do this? Most of us can't even fathom it.
The world has celebrated her courage. And there's truth in that celebration.
But as I watched the updates about her crash on Sunday at the Cortina d'Ampezzo downhill—just 13.4 seconds into her Olympic run—I found myself sitting on my couch in front of my warm fire on a chilly Minnesota day, feeling something different.
The irony isn't lost on me. Me: just like my own cuddle cat, Benny, content by the fire. Lindsey: a working husky, built to pull sleds through blizzards, unable to stop.
But I recognize the husky mindset. I spent years being that sled dog—performing and pleasing, mistaking productivity for worth, overriding every signal my body sent until it forced me to stop. The main difference between Lindsey and me? My crash and burn moments happened in private, not on a mountain in front of the world.
Our culture loves this story. We honor white-knuckling. We celebrate leaning in. We applaud grinding through pain. We're told that anything is possible if you just have the right mindset.
And look…I'm not here to be the pessimist in the room. Nobody wants to be around someone who shoots down every ambitious dream.
But here's what I see that most people celebrating Lindsey's "warrior spirit" are missing:
Lindsey is human.
While she may have exceptional muscle composition and an extraordinary ability to push through discomfort, she still has a body with bones and a central nervous system. And that body needs to process stress, register pain signals, and it requires recovery.
And there was never any room for that in the equation.
The Pattern We're Not Talking About
Nine days before Sunday's crash, Lindsey fell at the Crans-Montana World Cup race in Switzerland, rupturing her ACL. By her own admission, she competed at the Olympics with "zero percent" of her ACL intact.
This wasn't her first rodeo with catastrophic injury. Her career includes:
Multiple ACL and MCL tears
Three tibial fractures
A bone bruise she skied through
Chronic knee issues requiring a full replacement
Countless crashes requiring helicopter evacuations
Each time, she came back. Harder. Faster. More determined.
The world calls this resilience. I call it what happens when we're taught to override our body's signals.
And, it's a pattern worth examining.
The Invisible Costs We Celebrate
Here's where it gets uncomfortable: We have no idea what price Lindsey has actually paid for these achievements.
We know about the physical toll—the titanium knee, the surgeries, the airlifts off mountains. We watched her scream in pain on Sunday as medical staff loaded her onto a stretcher, her left leg broken.
But what about the rest?
Her first marriage ended in divorce. Subsequent relationships have also ended. While we can't know the specifics, it's worth asking: What happens to intimate relationships when every ounce of personal capacity goes into performance, training, leading the team? When there's literally no time for presence and nothing left for connection?
I work with women at the top of their game—executives, founders, leaders in male-dominated industries. They come to me after achieving everything they set out to accomplish. They have the corner office. They have the respect. They have the results.
They say things to me like, "How do I give 100% in every area of my life?" "I have off the scale energy, but right now I'm wondering how to give my all." "I'm surrounded by people, yet I feel so lonely."
And they're exhausted in ways they can't quite name.
One client recently told me: "I joke that I'll rest when I'm dead. But honestly? I'm not sure I remember how to rest anymore. And I'm starting to realize that might actually kill me."
What the Body Knows
For my clients who ignore the signals their body has been sending, the price shows up as:
Chronic muscle tension despite physical therapy, therapeutic massage, and dry needling
Persistent GI issues that no elimination diet can solve
Autoimmune conditions that seemingly appeared "out of nowhere"
Relationships that feel like one more thing on the to-do list
An inability to be present with the people they love most
A flattening of emotions… the good things aren't as good as they once were, and the bad things don't seem to bother them. They just feel meh.
This is what happens when we operate like Lindsey’s had to operate. When we believe that grit, mindset, and determination alone will carry us through. When we treat our bodies like machines that should perform on command.
Your body isn't a machine. It's a biological system with very real capacity constraints.
The Approach Nobody's Talking About
If I were coaching Lindsey through the decision to compete at Milano Cortina 2026, I wouldn't have allowed her to "push through, train as usual, and clean up the aftermath."
Because here's what I know after working with high-achieving, deeply attuned (HADA) women for over a decade:
The same strategies that got you to the top will eventually break you if you don't evolve.
Mindset and white-knuckling worked for Lindsey,,,until her body had its own plans. And now? A fractured leg, another surgery, and questions about whether she'll ever ski again… at any level.
At a certain point in life and career, a more nuanced approach isn't optional—it's essential.
This is what I call Full Capacity Living. It's based on understanding that high-achieving women are operating dual high-performance systems simultaneously: the visible external performance system everyone sees and celebrates, AND the internal nervous system regulation that makes sustainable excellence possible.
Most productivity advice ignores this reality. It assumes you can just optimize your time management and power through. But that only works until it doesn't.
The Three Elements Nobody Mentions
What actually creates sustainable high performance? The kind where you still have energy for the people and experiences you love? Three things that work in concert:
Pace - Not the same pace every day, but strategic variation that matches your actual capacity at any given time on any given day. Some days you're built for sprints. Other days, showing up at 70% is the win. Both are enough.
Input - What you're exposing your body to matters. The constant information stream, the comparison scroll, the always-on availability—these aren't neutral. They're actively depleting your capacity for what matters.
Energy - Understanding that your body has real biological limits that no amount of positive thinking can override. Your internal systems don't care about your vision board.
This is the PIE Principle. And it's what's missing from Lindsey's approach and from the approach of every woman who's white-knuckling her way through.
The Question We Should Be Asking
I was genuinely rooting for Lindsey. I wanted her to prove that women over 40 can compete at elite levels. I wanted her to win big. Not only for herself. But for Team USA. For all of us watching.
But after Sunday's crash, I'm left wondering: At what point does proving we can do the impossible become a cautionary tale about ignoring what's actually possible for our very mortal bodies?
Lindsey's story is legendary. But it's also a mirror.
If you're reading this and feeling a knot in your stomach, that's your body… and it’s trying to tell you something.
If you recognize yourself in the pattern of pushing through, recovering just enough to push again, and wondering why you can't seem to sustain your performance without sacrificing somewhere else—you're not broken.
You're operating like you've been taught to operate. You're doing exactly what our culture celebrates.
The question is: Is this actually working for you?
Because there's another option. One where you maintain your edge, achieve your ambitious goals AND have energy enough for the life you're supposedly working so hard to build.
It requires something different than grit alone.
It requires understanding how your unique internal system actually works, and adapting your approach as your capacity shifts. Which it will, constantly.
It requires acknowledging that you're not superhuman. You're beautifully, powerfully, human. And humans have limits.
And that's not a weakness. It's the truth that offers you freedom to perform sustainably.
A Different Kind of Courage
Here's what I wish someone had said to Lindsey nine days before Sunday, when she tore her ACL at Crans-Montana:
"You've proven everything you need to prove. You've already shown the world what's possible. The truly courageous thing now would be to honor what your body is telling you. To choose the long game. To recognize that there are forms of strength that don't require you to break yourself to demonstrate them. You don't have to perform your worth. You've done enough."
That kind of courage—the courage to not compete when competing means competing on a destroyed knee with zero ACL support—that's the courage we don't celebrate enough.
Because that's the courage that gives you the flexibility and strength to bend your knees, pick up your grandchildren and be truly present for them. That lets you ski for joy at 60. That lets you maintain the relationships that actually matter.
Lindsey will heal from this latest injury. She always does. The question is whether she'll heal into a different relationship with herself and with her own body's signals. Or whether she'll see this as just another obstacle to overcome with determination.
For the women reading this who see themselves in Lindsey's patterns: You have a choice she may not feel she has.
You can choose sustainable excellence now, before your body makes the choice for you.
The corner office, the results, the respect… you can have it. Just don't let it cost you everything else.
That's not settling. That's strategy.
Lisa Bobyak founded Living Fully Balanced LLC because she got tired of watching brilliant women break themselves trying to maintain excellence—in part, because she'd been one of them. For over a decade, she's worked with female founders, executives, and leaders who've achieved everything they set out to accomplish, only to realize the cost was higher than they wanted to pay. She helps high-achieving women build sustainable strategies so they can keep their edge without sacrificing their health, relationships, or the life they're working so hard to create.
If you're a high-achieving woman who's tired of choosing between excellence and sustainability, you shouldn't have to break yourself to prove your worth.
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