I don't understand a word they're saying. It doesn't matter.

Every Wednesday morning, I drive to the rink. It's early. Prague is still waking up. The streets are quiet, and my mind is already loud, running through the day, rehearsing conversations, building lists.

The Rat is awake before the city is.

Then I walk into the dressing room, and something shifts.

There are twenty-two men lacing up. Some run companies. Some used to play professionally. One guy built a dog food business from nothing. Another played in the NHL and now owns a luxury real estate agency.

In the dressing room, they're the same — tape, sticks, bad jokes, the smell of gear that should have been washed last week.

They're speaking Czech. Fast. Locker room slang I can't follow. I catch maybe one word in ten. Someone says something, and everyone laughs. I smile — not because I understood the joke, but because I understand the room.

I've been in this room my whole life.

Different countries. Different rinks. Different languages. But the room is always the same. Men getting ready to do something physical together. The nervous energy before the first shift.

The way someone taps your pads and nods.

The unspoken agreement that for the next seventy-five minutes, nothing else exists.

That's the gift of it.

I've thought a lot about why hockey matters to my mental health. And I don't think it's the exercise, although the exercise helps. I don't think it's the competition — although I'm more competitive than I'd like to admit.

I think it's the absence of performance.

On the ice, there is no version of me. There's just reaction. The puck comes, you move. Someone's open, you pass. You get hit, you get up. Your legs burn, you keep skating. The conscious mind — the one that rehearses and manages and defends — can't keep up with the speed of the game.

So it shuts up.

That silence is everything.

I think men need something that makes the Rat go quiet. Not through meditation or breathing or mindfulness — although those work. Through something physical and fast and demanding enough that the voice simply can't keep up and we are fully present.

For me, it's hockey, where, for 75 minutes, I don't need to be anywhere else.

For you, it might be running, climbing, cycling, swimming, or martial arts. The activity matters less than the effect — sixty to seventy-five minutes where your body is working so hard that your mind has no bandwidth left for defence.

The men I play with on Wednesday mornings — I'd trust every one of them on the ice. We talk about business. About the game. About weekend plans. We don't talk about the 3 am thoughts and what we actually carry. The marriages under strain. The loneliness of leading a company.

And I'm not sure we need to.

Not every space has to be a space for deep conversation.

Sometimes a dressing room is just a dressing room. Sometimes the healing is in the lacing up, the skating, the shared silence of men doing something difficult together without needing to explain why.

But I notice the difference between the two things. Hockey quiets the Rat through speed.

The walk by the Vltava River quiets the Rat through stillness.

Hockey gives me seventy-five minutes of relief.

The river gives me something that lasts longer — because it asks me to stay with the thing instead of outrunning it.

I need both.

The seventy-five minutes where I don't think. And the mornings by the river where I finally do.

If you're an expat in Prague and you haven't found your physical thing yet, the thing that makes the voice go quiet through sheer demand on your body, find it.

Join a hockey league. Find a running group. Get on a bike. Sign up for a gym where someone pushes you hard enough that your mind stops narrating.

It won't solve the deeper stuff. But it'll give you enough silence to hear what the deeper stuff actually is.

And if you're already doing it, if you've got your Wednesday morning, your Saturday run, your Tuesday evening class — ask yourself this: is it helping you feel, or helping you avoid feeling?

Both are valid. But only one of them leads somewhere.

I'm Andrew Sillitoe. I help leaders have better conversations. The conversation they can't have anywhere else. If this resonated, please book a call and let's chat.