The next big thing
When I was a kid, all I wanted was to be an Olympic gymnast. I would stay up late at night watching tapes of meets. Every day after school I would go to our local gym and stay there for hours. There was a series of books somewhat like the babysitters club, only about gymnasts, and I would read them over and over, literally hundreds of times. Sure I was six inches taller, six years older and many pounds heavier than the successful gymnasts, but that wasn’t stopping me. Surely heart would get me there.
So how did I end up? Heart didn’t get me .. nothin’. I started as a beginner and ended as a beginner with a fear of flipping backwards. The girls I started with were, by the time I quit, practically elite gymnasts, while the greatest distinction I ever achieved was being the first in our gym to do a cartwheel on the beam. When I was in high school my obsession turned to cheerleading. I decided on a whim to try out for the high school team in eighth grade and holy moly, I made it!
For six years, I spent nearly every day after high school and college practicing chants, dances, and stunts. After that, I would go to practices at night for an All-Star competition team which meant more gymnastics, dancing, and stunting.. But what I really wanted was to be a flyer. You know, the girl that gets thrown up in the air and gets to do the cool stuff… scorpions, heel stretches, basket tosses etc. Unfortunately for me, just as in gymnastics, the most popular choice for flyer is not the 5’7 1xx lb girl. Turns out, when we briefly had a coed squad, I was actually not the Worst flyer in the world, but I was Surely the one that my base and spotters most hated to pick up!
Pic of my Samford cheerleading days!
Of course the most obvious thing to do in this situation was to diet my way down to where people didn’t moan and groan picking me up, but that didn’t work out either, no matter how hard I tried. Stopping every morning for breakfast at Mcdonalds and every afternoon at Taco Bell or similar probably didn’t help either. Again, lots of heart, little success.
The coolest thing I did as a cheerleader was wear the cute outfits and occasionally get to ‘fly’ in a stunt while my support team cursed me from beneath. I could tell similar stories with pole vaulting, pageanting, (Although I DID win the titles of Miss Teen Polk County, and Miss Winter Haven… hello big time!!) and a gazillion other activities.
If only I had spent all that time working on something that could actually help me now, say running, or swimming? I wasn’t smart enough to realize at the time, that you should look for something where the odds aren’t completely stacked against you. I thought running was something one did to avoid getting fat, and I thought swim team was dorky. Well, the swimmers I know now sure are getting the last laugh now!
All that brings me to present day, where, I like triathlon so much that I am writing a public blog where I mostly philosophize about triathlon. I spend a lot of time training (duh), I have a coach, I got certified as a coach, I spend my time reading, thinking, and talking about triathlon.
I’d say I’m pretty entrenched. I’m entrenched yet concerned. How is this time any different from before? You see when I first started all those things, I was truly naïve enough to believe that I might be able to succeed at gymnastics, cheerleading, diving (yes, that one was quite short-lived. Let’s get the tall, tubby girl who’s afraid to flip backwards for the varsity dive team!) despite all the odds that were against me.
In the beginning you see progress, but after a few years, you realize that the progress is a lot harder to come by. Success comes in many forms and there’s plenty of people who never made the cheerleading squad, or could do back tucks, etc. who would look at my foray into those endeavors as successful. And there are many other people who were ten times better than I could ever dream of being who were in turn comparing themselves to the people just ahead of them!
Bailey.. she ain’t worried about progress!!
I was thinking about this whole process in the pool. I feel frustrated right now, because as much as I’m swimming, I’m not seeing any progress. To someone a few lanes down, I’m probably ‘fast, ‘ to me, the person leading our lane is ‘fast’ and that person knows that their swim is laughably slow compared to a ‘real’ swimmer.
For where I’m about to go, let’s stay focused on SPORT as I’m close to getting mired in the deep end here. Thinking about this logical progression and where it eventually ends, I was wondering if it’s ever truly possible to be satisfied for a certain personality type to be satisfied with ‘the status quo’. When do you just say ‘ wow, I did good, I am happy with my progress/performance’ and REALLY mean it.. without any caveats or little voices you don’t admit to that say ‘If I could just do x,’ then I would be Exactly where I want to be? Food for thought
