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I’m so sick of being injured. I’m sick of feeling like I’m riding off my Olympic success from 2016. I’m tired of holding myself back in training and feeling fragile, always around the corner from my next injury, and treating my body like a porcelain doll. I want to feel strong, durable, and fast again. I want to be able to trust my body again and full send it in workouts without fear of breaking. I’m 30 years old. I’ve been to an Olympic Games and made 5 US teams. I won a US National Title and even was part of a World Record. But none of it ever feels like “enough” and I always feel like I’m chasing more resume lines to secure my spot in this sport and earn the respect of my teammates, fans, and even my haters. I also have this intense feeling of time slipping through my fingers while I desperately try to grab on to the passing minutes, days, months, and years. I keep trying to recreate my past successes and in a twist of fate I keep getting further away from those benchmarks. I can see my competitors around me getting younger and younger and I know I won’t be able to do this forever. Running used to bring me so much joy. But now I’m at the point where I can’t remember the last time that felt true. Even when running is going relatively well, I’m aware of the tension and stress I hold in my body, unable to truly relax and enjoy it. Lately I’ve been feeling the joy I used to feel running, but I get it when I’m riding my bike outside. Even the most mundane bike ride feels good to my soul the way I think running used to. So here I am, 30 years old, feeling like a kid again on a bicycle. And I’m asking myself: should I just call it and make the switch to riding bikes and competing in triathlons? Why wouldn’t I do that? My internal monologue goes something like this: What if I’m not as good at cycling/triathlon as people tell me I could be? That also sounds like a lot of pressure, just in a different sport. Will people think I’m a quitter for walking away from track? What kind of example is that setting to young girls who are injured right now? Am I telling them they should just hang it up and quit running? And what about my relationship with running- am I really ready to say goodbye to the track forever? I do love track. I love the feeling of my body being in prime fitness and flying around the oval. More than anything I love the people in the track community. I would hate walking away from it with this bitter taste in my mouth. This season was challenging, but I did make huge strides towards a healthier, happier me. I got to train with friends in Flagstaff, I had 40 weeks of uninterrupted running, and I had 3 solid races. I have a coach who understands me as a person at a level I never thought possible from a coach-athlete relationship. The life of an athlete who competes in an Olympic sport revolves around these 4-year cycles (for better or for worse). The tricky part for me is that we are a year away from the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics and it’s actually too late to make a go at the US triathlon team (even last summer when I talked to USAT it was already too late to make the switch). So if I want to go to Paris, my only chance would be on the track. Which leaves me with the question: Can I do this for one more year? or maybe the question is just: Do I WANT to do track for one more year? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve flip flopped on my answer over the last month. Writing a definitive answer here doesn’t feel right at this point, but what I will say is… I want to try. And when I say “try” I really don’t mean “try to make a team.” I mean that I want to try again to remember my love for track and for running. I know it’s there somewhere. I know I love the people- the athletes and all the supporters. But my love for the actual act of running is what I want to be able to reconnect with before launching the next chapter of my life. I have a feeling that in order to tap back into my love of running, I’m gonna have to let go of the result, which is something I’ve never really been able to do. I know I’m not the only one, but I attach so much of my happiness and my self-worth to my work product, which in my case means making teams, earning medals, and running faster every year. Why do I feel like I have to EARN happiness? Why do I feel like I don’t DESERVE to just enjoy the process? I get super tied up in the narrative of “I’m an Olympic athlete. So if I’m not making teams and going to the Olympics, then who even am I?” I know deep down that achieving those things won’t actually increase my happiness, but I can so easily get caught up in lie that they will.
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