There is a familiar story about people who live with a demanding medical condition and train hard: the body makes them listen. Josh Wit is about as well placed as anyone to tell that story, and when it is offered to him he corrects it.

The show introduces him as an engineer turned parkour practitioner, coach and organizer, a coach with the Brisbane Parkour Association and its vice president, diagnosed with type 1 diabetes before he began training. The diagnosis came at eighteen, he says.

He kept it to himself. “I wouldn’t project it to anyone,” he says, and he kept that up “for a long time, like years and years and years.” He thinks that was partly luck. There are “different levels” of the condition, and his, he says, “seems to be a little bit smoother” than some people’s, so he could stay quiet where others could not. By his account he still has to “pay just as much attention to it” as they do. “It was not easy,” he says, “but it worked.”

What the condition did force, from the start, was management, done to the doctor’s instructions. He is careful to say he is not an expert on it:

“I’ll do what they tell me to do and I’ll manage it as best I can. But that’s it. And the rest I’ll just ignore.”

The rest, in that passage, is the expertise beyond the instructions, not anything his body was telling him. He followed the instructions, and when the doctor said he was doing well, he accepted it and kept doing what he did. What nothing forced was anything finer. No instruction asked how he felt before a particular jump, and listening for that is what he says he had to learn, slowly.

The listening he learned works at a finer scale than injury. He sets it against a rule he says he picked up from others in parkour: work hard, but if you have just twinged your shoulder, skip the fifty muscle-ups. His own version starts where that rule stops, at the kind of jump where you have to land exactly on a narrow target:

“It’s way more sensitive than that. It’s do you feel off right now, so should you be doing that one and a half meter precision to that low wall because if that off feeling causes you to miss that wall, it’s going to suck.”

Off is not a twinge. There is no injury to point at, nothing that would end a session on its own. It is a reading, and not a steady one. His doctor asks him, “How sensitive are you?” Sensitivity, in his account, is not fixed. “It changes from day to day, from week to week,” he says, and when it shifts, “you’ve got to recalculate again.” The instrument he listens with needs recalibrating while he uses it.

In the same answer he corrects the story he had just been offered:

“It doesn’t force you, because I didn’t feel forced. But I had to learn over a long period of time that […] if I actually start listening to what my body’s telling me, the outcome is better even if it might hurt the ego at the time.”

Forced would have been quick, and it would have been the condition’s doing. What he describes was slow, and it was his.

You do not need his diagnosis to recognize the shape of it. The listening people usually mean is the coarse kind, the twinge that ends a session. His is finer, the off feeling that might change the next jump, and in his account even a condition that demands attention did not ask that of him. If his account holds, nothing hands you that kind of attention. It is chosen, one jump at a time, against the part of you that wanted to make it.

He calls it, simply, “a huge practice.”

This field note references the Movers Mindset episode “Josh Wit: Diabetes, training, and balance,” published March 17, 2021.

This work was produced using AI language models directed through an editorial system designed by Craig Constantine. The author selected all source material, designed the creative framework, directed the editorial process, and made all acceptance and revision decisions. The prose was generated by AI under sustained human editorial direction.