The first few months after retiring were supposed to feel like freedom.
No 4am wake-ups. No training schedules. No competitions on the calendar. No coach telling me what to do. Just open time stretching in every direction.
I'd fantasized about this for years. All that brutal training, all that sacrifice—finally, I could rest. Do whatever I wanted. Sleep in. Travel. Live like a normal person.
Here's what actually happened:
I started losing my mind.
Not dramatically. Not in a way anyone could see from the outside. But inside? My brain became a haunted house. Every unstructured hour gave it more room to wander into dark places. Replaying old mistakes. Worrying about hypothetical futures. Catastrophizing about things I couldn't control.
Without the training schedule, I had nothing to organize my thoughts around. And thoughts, when they have nowhere to go, tend to eat themselves.
I'd lie in bed at 2am running loops about races from years ago. Conversations I could have handled differently. Moments I'd never get back. Things that didn't matter anymore but suddenly consumed everything.
The freedom I'd been chasing felt like drowning in open water.
This is one of the most powerful themes I explore as a motivational speaker with audiences navigating major transitions. Whether it's executives between roles, founders POST-exit, or athletes leaving their sport—the pattern is identical. Our minds don't do well with emptiness. Left without direction, they drift toward chaos.
I've advised executives who experienced this same disorientation after selling their companies. The deal closes, the wire hits, and suddenly the thing that organized their entire existence is gone. The first few weeks feel like vacation. Then the emptiness sets in. Without a structure to push against, they start pushing against themselves.
In team training sessions on transition and resilience, I help people understand: Goals aren't just about achieving things. They're about giving your mind something to orbit around. Something that organizes the chaos into something useful.
It's not about the destination. It's about what pursuit does to your head.
This is why the advisory relationships I take on are so focused on helping people build new frameworks for their time and energy. Structure isn't a constraint—it's liberation. The people who navigate transitions best aren't the ones who find perfect freedom. They're the ones who build purposeful structure as quickly as possible.
After those first miserable months, I started saying yes to everything. Investments. Speaking. Advisory work. Business deals I knew nothing about. Not because I was passionate about any of it—because I needed direction. I needed something to aim at so my brain would stop eating itself.
The specific goal mattered less than having one.
If you're in transition right now—between jobs, between chapters, between identities—and you're feeling that hollow directionless feeling creep in: that's not weakness. That's just your brain asking for something to focus on.
Give it a target. Pick a direction. Any direction.
The structure itself is salvation.
About Apolo Ohno: Apolo Ohno is a sought-after keynote speaker and leadership advisor known for translating elite performance principles into practical leadership behaviors. His work focuses on authentic leadership, executive presence, and the Gold Medal Mindset - helping executives and teams perform with clarity under pressure, communicate with conviction, and lead with credibility when the stakes are high. In his keynotes and workshops, Apolo helps leaders identify the unseen patterns, narratives, and habits that quietly limit performance, then replace them with a repeatable system for focus, resilience, and decisive action.