Rising Above Part 2
This is Part 2 of a 4 part series. read part 1 Here.
Lose Yourself
2015. Starting to come out of my shell at camp. I felt very daring to be doing something silly in the front of the picture.
The next year rolled around, which would be my second year doing CG Games Prelims. I learned all the events ahead of time, watching video explanations of the events with butterflies in my stomach and pouring sweat out on the practice field. The week of Prelims, I did all the events more than once, to get my best times.
2015 Bear crawl drag.
The first day of competition, I was surprised to hear people calling my name as I ran my timed mile and cheering me on dragged that drag bag. I was the one who quietly came to camp, put my head down, and worked. I didn’t go to socials. I knew who most of those people were, but I didn’t think they noticed me, much less thought I was worth cheering for. That was when the magic of CG Games gained new light in my eyes. Everyone was out there supporting each other even as they competed against each other, genuinely wanting each person to feel successful. It brought us closer. It made me feel seen.
Halfway through the week, I was in the top 30, well-placed to qualify. And then, despite everything, I watched as my place dropped. And dropped. And dropped.
I finished 74th that year. I reassured myself that that was better than the previous year because twice the number of people had competed. But it wasn’t enough to qualify. I was devastated.
Rise
That truly could have been the end of this story. I thought about giving up. I watched the people that I worked out with celebrate their qualifications. I’m not going to lie, I was jealous. I thought, “That person isn’t that much faster than me. I should have qualified.” It came from a place of insecurity, I now know. I shouldn’t have qualified that year, and part of me feared knowing that.
But instead, something in me changed. The very next morning, I went to my workout with a fire burning in my heart, one that hadn’t seen much oxygen since my soccer days. I set out to prove I could qualify.
“See?” I told myself that first morning, “I can beat that person at side shuffles IN THE WARM-UP!” (By the way, as a trainer I don’t recommend trying to beat people in the warm-up. Your body needs that time to, you know, warm up. But I was 29). Then they would blast past me in the workout, but where in the past I would just think, “Of course; I’m not fit or fast like them,” I now dug into that competitive fire and tried to at least keep them in sight. Instead of assuming I couldn't keep up with the fastest people, I decided that eventually I would.
It became a bit of an obsession. I HAD to prove to myself and everyone else that I could qualify for Finals. I’d never been the best of the best in soccer, just really good. Great but not great enough. In fact, I felt that way about a lot of things in my life. At camp, at least in my mind, it had been the same. I yearned to be seen. I thought the only way to do that was to be successful, and success at that time meant CG Games Finals to me.
New Years Eve morning, 2015.
I showed up, even when I didn’t want to. I trained hard, even when I didn’t feel like it. I went up in weights, from 10 lbs to 15 lbs to 20 lbs. When I didn’t want to do any more at the end of a workout, I would think about Games and push a little longer, holding my goal in my mind like a beacon. Day after day. Week after week. At first it was hard to tell a difference, but eventually my body changed. Muscles became visible that I’d never seen before. I pushed to keep up with the fastest people until one day I did. I started to believe in myself a bit more. The fear that I wouldn’t be enough grew a little smaller.
(In a side note, I changed a lot of things that year. I finished doing neurofeedback, which helped immensely with my anxiety and depression, so I was able to start weaning off the multiple medications I was on back then. That, in turn, helped me lose weight. I was doing therapy again, so feeling better about myself bit by tiny bit. I had more energy in general. I started doing yoga to help with my mental health and mindfulness. I was feeling more and more adept at my job with Fit4Mom, and using the things we talked about in class like improving your body image and positive self talk for myself as well. I got more help for my kiddo, who was also struggling with anxiety, it turned out. And I finally started writing out the novel I’d been planning for the last four and a half years, which felt amazing. I continued to let more friends into my life, both at camp and outside of it, which meant I had more and more community support.)
But as the competition approached, I began to wonder if it was enough.
More people had signed up than ever before, and the odds were worse, the athletes better.
CG Games rolled around again. I was terrified.
2016 Working hard to convince myself I was going to get up and do another event.
The first day of prelims, I beat all of my practice times significantly and that put me in the top 30. But I had been there before, and there was another day of prelims left--my place was going to get worse. I convinced myself that I was not going to make it: there were too many people, I hadn't done enough, I wasn't good enough.
Then I went to the second day of prelims. I argued with myself the whole morning, but with the encouragement of my friends, I convinced myself I could do better and ended up redoing three of the four events--and one of them twice that day. I crushed all of my previous times. It was an incredible feeling, once again discovering I could do so much more than I thought I could, this time surrounded by friends cheering me on, cheering them on in return.
The email I’d been waiting for for years. I didn’t believe I’d really qualified until I got it.
I finished, not in the top 50, which was my wildest dream goal, but in the top 30--26th, to be exact. I got the email I'd been working for for the past 3 years: I had made it to the Finals. After that, I felt like I could do anything.
Keep reading for Part 3 below.
*The names of the sections of this blog post are the names of the songs I was listening to to pump myself up for each competition. You can find my full CG Games playlist here.