It took a week almost on the dot for my sense of disappointment to lift. In some ways that surprised me. I think in the past that disappointment would have stayed with me longer. I had waited a week to tell my parents that Sweden was a no-go and to make sure I could actually make them feel better about it — I knew they would be disappointed on my behalf.

“So guys, I found out that I won’t be getting an invitation to Sweden.”

“What? Why?” they asked.

“Someone aged into the masters category. In October she had to compete in the open group because she was 39, but she’s 40 now and had a better total at Nationals.”

My parents were slightly outraged. “That doesn’t seem fair that you could do something as a younger competitor. It shouldn’t count!”

I smiled. I’m almost 46 now, but no matter what you are always your parents’ kid and having them ready to reach for pitchforks and torches to storm the USAPL office in support of me felt good.

“Well, think of it this way. If you got a great time at in the Great Race,” I said, referencing a 10k that my mom ran every year for as long as she could, “and the next year you were going to be in the next age group up, the race coordinators wouldn’t ignore your previous time as they thought about where in the pack to invite you to line up.”

I could tell by their faces they were unconvinced.

“It’s also the best thing for the U.S. team. Part of what is special about going is being able to compete as a team, to get the best team total that is possible. Mystique got 920lbs in competition, which is 22lbs more than what I totaled. She showed she can bring in a strong number, so it’s best for the team.”

Hearing me accept being benched seemed to help them let go of their negative feelings about this. Their pitchforks were returned to the barn, and we sat down to have a glass of wine together.

One of the hard things in sports is losing your starting position. I don’t know if this is the case anymore, but when I was younger both I and my high school teammates seemed to take this a lot harder than our male counterparts. We were much less comfortable with shifting roles on the team. Once you had a place and a role, being divested of it was a big deal, perhaps in part because it sometimes came with a shift in social status off the court. While that shifting social scene was not part of my college experience, it was still true that women on my track team seemed less comfortable with these types of changes. The men on the team seemed much more comfortable duking it out during a practice, whereas we might instead fall into an order, relying on our top woman to set the pace even if she was having a bad day. We’d all slow down rather than let the deck be shuffled. This wasn’t always true, but upending the order was something I think we all tried to avoid, and, as a consequence, we may not have pushed each other to be as strong as we could have been.

I’m not sure why this was the case and if young women today experience a similar dynamic on their sports teams. I hope not. I think we tied our social structure more closely to our roles on the team, and our roles (and how we stacked up in the group) were established by our performance. Any change in that order was disruptive to our sense of how we should relate to one another. It is much healthier to become comfortable with changing roles and to recognize that what is today is not what might be tomorrow. I may overtake Mystique at Nationals in October, and I surely plan to work to do so. There may also be another 39-year-old who will age into our group and knock us both out.

Pulling my mind back to be closer to the experience of competition rather than the outcome was key in overcoming my disappointment. Yes, I badly wanted to represent the U.S. in an international competition. But since Nationals, my mind had slowly drifted away from focusing on that experience to the honor and recognition of being on the team itself. That is a much less healthy mental perspective to competition. It’s the kind of  perspective that creates pressure and leads to choking.

Learning how to accept not only being on the bench but gaining the opportunity to root for and support one’s teammates is important. Perhaps more important, however, is becoming comfortable with one’s role on a team being in flux. I have a chance in October to defend my national championship, an experience I have never had before. I am grateful to Mystique for putting some extra fire in my belly to strive to be stronger and remind me to not take for granted how things may shake out, but to continue to put my heart into the process of striving for the outcome I want to produce. Our roles may change, but at the end of the day, when it comes to international competition, she is my teammate. I’m rooting for her to crush all the 72kg lifters in Sweden. In October, I’m also going to challenge her to be even better than she is now, just as she will do so for me because we want the strongest representation for the U.S. possible. There will be disappointment and joy in the outcomes, but being comfortable with shifting roles, using that to be better, and appreciating the gift teammates bring by competing with us makes us better athletes. We truly only achieve our best when we have the gift of competition to push us.