My relationship with training has included strong periods, long interruptions, and several attempts to rebuild — different gyms as I moved around Dublin and Wicklow, and a few returns after work, travel, injury or moving house got in the way. That's part of why I value it. Progress isn't an identity you acquire permanently; it's something you repeatedly practise.
Technical work often involves weeks of uncertainty before you know whether an idea is working. Training is more immediate.
The bar moves, the time improves, the movement becomes available again — or it doesn't. I find that honesty useful, and a genuinely useful counterweight to work that mostly happens behind a screen. Padel adds a more social, reactive form of exercise on top of that — a different kind of problem to solve, with someone across the net instead of a metric on a dashboard.
I'm not trying to present myself as an elite athlete — I'm not one. The interesting story is the recurring process of rebuilding, not any particular number on a barbell.