Hood ornaments

I find more and more that so many of us have a fear of failure, and therefore a fear of putting ourselves out there. Sport can break your heart. When it comes to putting yourself out there in the face of potential failure, you can only have your heart broken if your heart is in it. I debated writing this because I consider this story fairly ordinary. We all have parts of our lives when we have struggled. Then I thought, maybe that’s the point. How these relatively ordinary tests can either break us down or build us up. This passage from one of my favorite books (Again to Carthage) kept surfacing.

“What I mean is that someone sees a race, and they think that’s what you do. They sort of know you had to train, but they weren’t watching then, so they don’t understand how incredibly much of it there is. But to us, it’s almost the whole thing. Racing is just this little tiny ritual we go through after everything else has been done. It’s a hood ornament.”

I am someone that ties a big piece of my identity to being a competitive athlete. That piece of my identity has been threatened many times. The successes have been the dangling carrot or hood ornament that have kept me going. But it has been moments of weakness and struggle, the twists, turns and bumps, that helped me to become less fearful.

Running in high school

I was an average high school athlete. Even within my family, I was not the gifted one. My older sister beat me in every high school race, and my younger brother was the one to run for a D1 college. What I lacked in natural talent, I made up for in pure stubbornness. I loved to run, and not competing for my college didn’t stop me. I started signing up for local 5Ks and 10Ks and then the summer before my sophomore year I decided to start training for my first marathon. I called my best friend Adam, who had co-captained the XC team with me in high school. He was excited for my plans and we talked about me trying to come to Wyoming for some altitude running. He died two weeks later. He was the second friend of mine from high school to pass at a young age. I was angry for a long time, it wasn’t fair that I had lost these young friends so soon. Running became an escape for me. The harder and longer I ran, the more I could focus on the pain in my lungs and legs instead of in my heart and mind. I have heard before that endurance athletes are either running away from something or running towards something. I was trying to run away from that anger and pain, and it would take me a long time to find a way to run towards something instead.

Adam and I at high school XC New Englands

 My first marathon, for Adam

A few years later I was racing triathlons. I competed in an Ironman race in Florida with my then boyfriend Brian and several of our friends. I surprised myself that day by qualifying for the age group world championships and an elite license. Essentially having an elite license means that I can race in a category with other elite women for prize purses. For a long time, I defined my success as an elite triathlete as my ability to earn a paycheck.

I had the choice between remaining as an age group athlete or taking my elite license. I would have likely received more praise and even sponsorships for being a top age group triathlete than being a middle to back of the pack pro triathlete. I took my elite license because I wanted to truly test myself. The only way that I would know what kind of athlete I could be, was to go up against the best. I wasn’t going to get there by being a big fish in a small pond. I needed to dive headfirst into the sea. I was still running away though, this time from the fear that I wasn’t good enough.` When asked why I decided to take my elite license, I responded simply that I had nothing to lose. In reality, I felt like I had a lot to use. I had a lot of fear, and much of that fear was centered around how I would be perceived by other people. To some, I was inspiring. I was afraid I would let them down. Some wanted me to fail. I was afraid that I would prove them right. My family and friends supported me no matter what. I was afraid that they would make sacrifices for me for nothing. I was afraid that I would disappoint sponsors, and that they may even stop supporting me. I was afraid that I would waste my coach’s time and effort, only falling short. Most of all, I was afraid that I would prove to myself that I wasn’t good enough, that I didn’t deserve to race in the elite field.

I would love to tell you all that I came onto the elite field blazing and crushed the competition, proving everyone and myself wrong that I couldn’t do it. I was far from rookie of the year. In fact, there were several races where I was the last professional to finish. Those questions in my mind about whether I deserved to be there were constantly surfacing. Why couldn’t I break through? Why was it taking so long to find success? Did I make the right choice? After one race where I was the last pro, I called Brian and tearfully confessed to him that I felt like I had made a mistake and didn’t belong in the professional field. He responded simply “well someone has to be last.” He was right, all the female athletes I had looked up to had bad days. Several of them were even at my side with encouraging words after the race. The difference is whether the bad days defeat you or drive you.

One particularly ugly race in which I had a mechanical issue on the bike and then a lackluster run, I thought about throwing in the towel. Then I remembered that I would be seeing friends and their kids on the way home. What would I tell the kids if they asked about the race? That it got hard and I wasn’t going to place so I gave up? Even if I didn’t have a great result, I had the opportunity to model resilience for others. You all have that same opportunity every day here. Your peers, and even the faculty children, are always watching you. You can show them that off days drive you. Another race where I had heat sickness on the run and my feet were covered in blisters, I contemplated quitting. My coach’s words came back to me that once you walk out of a race because you’re not feeling it or not going to do well, it gets easier and easier to do it again.

Signs from friends kids that still hang in my training room

In the med tent 

I still had this nagging fear and voice in my head telling me that I wasn’t good enough. It was one thing to feel as though I was confirming others doubts about my abilities, it was another thing entirely to confirm my own doubts. If I invested so much of myself in this sport, and wasn’t successful, than who was I? I finally asked my coach one day, “give it to me straight, why can’t I break through?” She replied simply “you get in your own way.” Realization washed over me, I was allowing myself to be defeated and it could all be tracked back to not trusting myself. If I wasn’t hitting the numbers I was supposed to in a race, I imploded. Before I had any fancy gadgets to measure my effort, I had had to totally trust myself. I began taping over my watch during workouts. I stopped wearing my heart rate monitor during races. I learned to trust myself again, and I finally broke through in a personal record performance and a 4th place finish at Ironman Florida in 2014. I had figured it out, I was back in the game.

Coach Tara and I

To keep my newfound momentum going, my coach and I concocted a plan to catapult into the next season. I prepared for and raced a spring half marathon to work on my run speed and was able to clench a personal record at the distance. Things were on track. A couple weeks after the race, I was on an easy run when I felt a little pop in my hip. Over the next few weeks, the mild discomfort became major discomfort. My MRI came back clear, but my intuition was telling me that something was definitely wrong. My doctors and coach figured that it might just be something I had to push through. Maybe I was making this pain a bigger deal than it actually was. Maybe I needed to just suck it up. I kept running until I got to a point where 30 seconds was almost unbearable. I pushed my doctor to order another MRI, this time with contrast. The radiologist himself called me a few days later saying “do not run, you have a large labral tear and a stress fracture in your femur.” A few weeks later, I was having surgery. That kicked off 4 months of PT and additional months of building back to the shape I had been in. My first run in 5 months was 4 x 30 seconds on the treadmill. The entire 2015 season was over for me. I had conquered some major mental hurdles but now I was being sidelined by physical ones.

When I was a kid, I thought I was invincible. After all, when I wouldn’t share my gobstoppers and my brother kicked me, it was his leg that broke on my shin. A cycling collision with a car in 2008 proved that I could break, at least physically, leaving me with a major head injury and a badly broken jaw. My accident and then surgery on my hip were the two worst physical injuries I have had. They were not the hardest injuries for me to deal with mentally. It would be much more minor injuries that would almost defeat me.

My bike after the accident

Coming back from hip surgery, I was very optimistic about the 2016 season. I got an early start and traveled to Puerto Rico to race a half ironman. Again, I ditched the data and tried to trust myself, running my way into 5th place, and earning a paycheck. I was back, this was going to be my best season yet. Talk about a comeback. I started to prep for an Ironman in Texas in May. I was 3 weeks out from the race, feeling fantastic, when suddenly my other hip started to give me trouble. I stopped running and went to physical therapy. The day before I was supposed to leave, I tried a short run on the treadmill. It was a struggle to make it for 10 min. There was no way I would be able to run a marathon. Back into the MRI machine, another stress fracture in my hip. I was becoming frustrated, I had done the hip rehab, I had been careful in my training and recovery, now I was sidelined in my best shape, again. I had a glimmer of hope though. I could still swim and bike and could get back for Ironman Lake Placid in July.

Biking and swimming allowed me to maintain a lot of fitness, and a very short run build later I was lining up in Lake Placid, one of my favorite race venues. The water was cold and the swim is my weakest discipline, so I was pleasantly surprised to come out of the water with some fast women in the chase pack. Running along the beach and trying to unzip my swim skin, I tripped in the sand. I felt a little crunch and went down. A collective “Ohhhhhh” came from the crowd, but I popped back up to cheers. My knee was a little sore running to my bike but I was more worried about how I had just totally embarrassed myself. I had one of my best bike rides ever. At the turn around, I counted women ahead of me and I was in 6th. I couldn’t believe that I was riding right behind strong women that I had looked up to for years. I was having my best race ever. I finished the bike in 4th, feeling awesome and ready to run. Until I stepped off my bike and realized I couldn’t walk. For 30 min I refused to believe my race was over and tried to run several times. Eventually I admitted defeat and accepted a pair of crutches. Upon returning home, I learned that hyperextending my knee had caused a compression fracture in my tibia. This was a fairly minor fracture, I would be on crutches for just 6 weeks, and yet I fell into a dark hole. I had finally learned how to trust myself in the elite field, I had recovered from hip surgery, I had done my time being injured, why did this keep happening to me? I created quite a little pity party for myself. Fortunately, I’m married to Brian, and he does not participate in pity parties. He refuses to allow me to give in to defeat. Surround yourself with those kinds of people. The type that will celebrate your successes but who will also challenge you and hold you accountable. It’s easy to want to be around people that are always telling us we’re awesome, but they aren’t who help us grow. You have to want to go to a workout hoping you aren’t the strongest one there. Then you try to hang with the person that is. I wrote in my training log one day after a masters swim practice “got my butt kicked by Phil.” The next week my coach wrote in my log, “go to masters again and swim in Phil’s lane.” Phil greeted me with a smile and then promptly told me that he was going to try and lap me on the next interval. He, along with several others, not only became some of my best training partners but also my closest friends.

Masters swim with Brandon and Phil

I had come through some physical and mental hurdles, but my biggest obstacle was still ahead. When I became a mom, my biggest worry was that these two pieces of my identity, that of being a mom and that of being a competitive athlete, could not coexist. My “comeback” from Annabel was my hardest one yet. Pregnancy and labor had changed my body. I was sleep deprived and feeding a small, needy human. And I had a lot of guilt about taking time away from my family to train and race. Once I started back up with my coach, I was convinced she was trying to kill me. I wasn’t hitting close to the numbers I hit before Annabel, and again the doubts crept in. I kept writing in my training log that I was struggling through the workouts, and coach kept giving me tough numbers to hit. I would think to myself, does coach not see these comments? Does she not realize I’m coming back from having a baby?! Doesn’t she see that I can’t do this? Really, it was that she often knows me better than I know myself. She knew that eventually I would start hitting the numbers and be a stronger athlete and person for struggling rather than being comfortable. The ability to be uncomfortable and truly relish in suffering is what makes the difference between a good athlete and a great athlete. What helped me through that time was that I wasn’t just trying to prove something to myself anymore, I owed it to this tiny human to show her that anything is possible with a little grit.

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Rather than causing me to lose that athlete piece of my identity, Annabel helped me to find purpose and joy in it again. Through all the injuries, losses, setbacks, pregnancy, I learned that I could fight my way back over and over again. Once I knew I could fight, I wasn’t afraid that these obstacles would defeat me. The fear was replaced by gratitude. Gratitude to be able to compete, to test myself, to be able to show Annabel and myself that anything is possible. In my first professional race back I had no sponsors and the conditions weren’t great. And yet, I smiled the whole day. My purpose was tied to more than just the result or the paycheck. The race was a hood ornament, not the journey. There wasn’t any room left for fear, and I finally crossed a finish line truly happy.

“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” 2 Timothy 4:7

Whatever you do, athletics, academics, arts, find a way to run towards something rather than away from something. Get out of a small pond and challenge yourself. Get out of your own way, trust yourself. Find joy in the struggle. Replace fear of failure with gratitude to be able to compete.