Introduction   

What would have been different if I knew then what I knew now?

An entire genre of literature and movies, a broad swath of introspection, and a morass of self-doubt, armchair quarterbacking, and re-lived past-glory-that-almost-was are consumed with this question. What would have happened in that key moment of my youth if only I had the wisdom, knowledge, and perspective that I have now? How would things have been different?

We can’t go back in time. We can’t make the catch we missed when the scout was there to see it. We can’t get a second try at the experiences of our youth when we were strong and had nothing to lose but didn’t quite live up to our goals.

We don’t get re-do’s. But sometimes we get a second chance.

I was an athlete through high school and college, taking advantage of any athletic opportunity that came my way as long as it involved running or strength. If the sport didn’t involve the feeling of suffering to push yourself to your best, I wasn’t interested. Basketball, cross country, soccer, lifting weights in the 1980s at a YMCA gym where the men were not happy to have a 15-year-old girl invading their space. Going to that same YMCA in the summer at 9:00 a.m. to shoot hoops and stake out my turf on the basketball court so that when the 11:30 guys showed up they had to invite me to play if they wanted to run full court. I was often pushing myself into spaces that didn’t want me because I wanted to be better, harder, and stronger physically.

But I also had a gift for putting lots of pressure on myself to succeed and perform.

In college I finally had a track team for the first time. When I showed up for the first day of winter indoor track, the coach asked me what I wanted to do.

“Everything,” I said.

“I guess you should be a heptathlete then.”

At my first practice freshman year I had never jumped over a hurdle. By my senior year, I was not just running, but racing, the 100m hurdles, and I got to compete at the NCAA Division III National Championship. I graduated a collegiate All-American in the heptathlon, an accomplishment I still take pride in because of the stubborn single-mindedness that helped me to achieve that goal.

But I could have been so much better if I had known then what I know now.

My freshman year featured classic newbie gains — no one had any expectations for me and I was too new to have developed any for myself, so I massively over-performed at the end-of-year regional championship. Sophomore year was less memorable — I had the hard work of trying to transition through advanced beginner and intermediate technique. But I also saw that Nationals was going to be a possibility for me. By junior year I was on the cusp of qualifying for nationals, but I was struggling with injuries largely related to poor nutrition (it’s hard to be a vegetarian with limited nutritional knowledge while under the workload I was doing in training).

My mental state was also as fragile as glass, and I took myself out of competitions mentally because I put so much pressure on myself to qualify for nationals. I thought I needed to be there so that my senior year wasn’t the first time I would be on that stage. At regionals, I exited a competition after the first day of the heptathlon ostensibly because of injuries but in retrospect because I didn’t believe in myself, wasn’t comfortable with taking risks and failing, and didn’t know how to interpret certain kinds of physical pain to know what was ok and what was truly making an injury worse. Self-doubt, negative self-talk, and fear of failure made me crash and burn.

I spent the summer after my junior year lifting weights, building up my aerobic capacity, and visualizing the events. I was going to succeed where I had failed the previous year. A little more protein in the diet and research on nutrition and training put me on the right path. I qualified for nationals, and on top of it had a wonderful group of teammates wishing me well. Together we that had gone from a few individuals in my freshman year to being a powerhouse in the region. We succeeded together, and I had a lot of support and positive energy entering nationals. But there was still this gritty edge to my concentration. This was my last chance to be an All-American. I had to earn that medal, and there was only one opportunity to do it.

In retrospect, during that competition I had still held back. I got disconnected from my long jump approach and had a terrible time finding the right take-off mark, costing myself almost a foot of distance. My shot put was off, but my javelin (my worst event) came through with some extra distance. What I most regret, though, was holding back in the 800m when I should have put it all on the line. I should have started building my kick sooner, should have hit it harder in the second half of the final curve. Somewhere along the four years, I had lost my confidence in my ability to push through the pain that was always part of that race. Maybe somewhere in the back of my brain I actually had a sense of how small my reserves had grown over the previous six events, but I will always believe I didn’t leave it all out there in the last race, the last track competition I would ever have in my life. And I regret that. It felt like my willpower, though stronger than it had been, was still more like glass than iron.

Imagine how I felt when I discovered at 43 that despite knee surgery and some creeping injuries, I could compete in a sport and be truly competitive again.

I had remained active after college, and although this was well before Crossfit emerged, I had stayed connected to weight training and maintained a lot of my muscle mass over the years. It ebbed and flowed depending on my training, but I would always at some point cycle back to the weight room to train.

When my better half, Sam, and I were forced to find a new gym and stumbled into one that focused on Olympic lifts and powerlifting, I got hooked. I was suited to this sport. It was a good fit for the way my body liked to develop, and I had a foundational knowledge for some of the lifts.

It wasn’t the heptathlon, but it was an opportunity after more than 20 years to re-engage in a competitive environment in which I could experience all the pressure of having to perform in a certain moment if I wanted to win. I could relive that experience of competition and pressure and discover if I had learned enough in the intervening years to have transformed my competitive mentality from glass to iron.

This blog is about the experience of discovering a new joy in competition, of being able to chase that tangible goal of winning while having so much less need for that outcome. It is about learning to embrace the fear and anxiety and passion that you feel in a competitive environment. It’s about not being afraid to risk failure. It is about taking on the pressure in the moment to perform — to succeed or fail — in front of friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers and taking joy in all of the feelings that come together in that moment. It is about succeeding in the mental spaces in which my younger self fell short.

It is about testing whether I have truly have become the competitor I always wanted to be and finding out whether I have transformed my competitive mentality from glass into iron.