Having grown up an overweight child/teen I didn’t participate in sports. Well that’s not entirely true, for a brief stint in High School I was on the Soccer Team and rowed with the Crew Team, but it was so brief that I don’t even count it. Years later as I began to lose weight I started to discover all of these really cool things about my body and what it could do. All of a sudden it could move easier & faster, push weight and work for long periods of time, beginning my journey of physical fitness.
Since then my body has given me the pleasure of countless awesome physical experiences (oh, get your mind outta the gutter! not those! although those have been great too). Going from ‘the fat girl’ to buff personal trainer/fitness instructor is something that I think about a lot. Not because I think I’m all of that, but because I’m amazed at what our bodies are capable of and how much they can change. The human body is an amazing machine.
Which brings me to the story behind this post. Yesterday I had the great pleasure of talking to Rachel of Fitness for Mommies on the phone (tre cool). I needed help deciding which of Coach Al’s Marathon plans to get and was emailing Rachel about her own marathon training. After numerous emails she sent me her phone number for us to ‘discuss’, which was very smart because I would never have let her alone. In the email prior to me calling her she wrote “So, you’ve never really TRAINED like Al lyman (Coach Al) kind of training for a marathon, right?” As we spoke she asked about my past marathon training, did I use a heart rate monitor on my runs, did I work on speed, etc…She broke down Coach Al’s training plans and explained to me that I needed to train at X speed to have a planned race pace of X. It was all stuff that I knew (i’ve read all the books), but it wasn’t until that moment that I realized everything I had been doing with my body athletically, was “just to see if I could do it” and that was it. I heard myself say to Rachel “I’m a wannabe athlete.” It sounds funny, but I meant it. After all of those years of being overweight & sedentary my body was beyond excited just to try & do new things! I lost weight, I built muscle, I walked, I ran, I tried trapeze, I ran two marathons, I competed in figure….all fantabulous stuff that I am very proud of, but I did enough to get it done and never pushed beyond that. All of those experiences came from a place of “I just want to see if I can do it” and I think I’ve gotten so comfortable in that place that until now I never considered pushing myself to the next level. Doing something to see if I can do it and actually training to do it really well are two totally different things! And I knew that already, I just didn’t know it about myself! holy crap! (cue Oprah’s aha music)
So, what does that all mean? What it means is I don’t want to train for this marathon like marathons past. My first one was just to see if I could cross the finish line and the second one was post-baby just to see if I could still run. But for NYC, I don’t wanna “just” anything…I want to train and I want to train like an athlete…the hard core way, push my body to the limits way. I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface, there could be a really good/fast runner in me somewhere! Maybe even fast enough to qualify for Boston next year!
I hope this is all making sense, because a gaziilion thoughts are flowing at once. But the best way for me to sum it up is its as if God called in response to last week’s post and was like “cut the crap. enough of the shallow end. you passed. now go for it.” So I am.
I’m feeling a profound sense of gratitude right now and slightly over emotional (probably hormones). So thank you Rachel, thank you family/friends, thank you readers, thank you God & most of all thank you body. I am an athlete, now it’s time to train like one.
Have you pushed your body to the limits? Trained to compete in a sport? Would you like to take your training to the next level? Talk to me my people!
(*PS: Rachel wrote me after our call saying “You sound so normal” – he he love that!).
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