I know my Sunday post is supposed to be all about how my week of training went, but this week went a bit deeper than that on a personal level. My workouts were somewhere between tragic and triumphant: a gold-standard representation of mediocrity. And while I strive to rip myself out of that unsavory status, this post is about one of the reasons I seem to stay there. This post is about why, although setting lofty and impressive self-goals, I tend to gravitate towards the metaphorical middle of the pack.
Ladies and gents, I'd like to introduce you to my own struggle. My beacon of self-loathing and symbolic, ego-driven, deprecation.
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| Ice Cream: The Enemy |
How absurd, right? What high level athlete repeatedly finds themselves crippled by such a kryptonite-like bowl of deliciousness? Apparently, this guy does...
Now, let me elaborate. It's true that I do try to write this blog with a current of humor to it. There are few things funnier than the crap a triathlete does to himself in the struggle to cross that finish line. How could a blog about being a triathlete not be funny? And yet, the battle I am about to tell you about is anything but.
Some people are addicted to drugs. Others find alcohol to be their weakness. For that matter, you name any seemingly pleasure-inducing modality and there will be someone in the world who harbors a crippling weakness to it. Mine is food.
Please read this thought provoking paragraph:
Binge eating disorder is defined as recurring episodes of eating significantly more food in a short period of time than most people would eat under similar circumstances, with episodes marked by feelings of lack of control. Someone with binge eating disorder may eat too quickly, even when he or she is not hungry. The person may have feelings of guilt, embarrassment, or disgust and may binge eat aloneto hide the behavior. This disorder is associated with marked distress and occurs, on average, at least once a week over three months.
Reading that paragraph invokes a few primal reactions for me. The most striking being that it describes my relationship with food more articulately than I could have spoken aloud to any therapist. The second being the confirmation that my frequent "carb-loading" portion of my training is in fact more problematic than I had once justified. It would seem that I now have a freshly diagnosable disorder. Well...shit.
How can I demonstrate to you, the reader, my relationship with food? Perhaps this image will carry across what I try to say with words:
Yep, that about does it...
And while I am no longer a preschool-aged female, I do still carry with me this horror-film-inspired love of food. So what gives?
Without bringing us down more than I already have (stupid DSM and its labels), I had some bumpy times during my childhood. Who didn't, right? There was the typical childhood and teenaged struggles that we all go through, with a generous peppering of some heavy caliber artillery mixed in. My coping mechanism became food.
Things were bad; food made it better. I'm sure it's more complicated than that somehow, but that is as good a description as I can muster.
And yet, to my dismay, I seemed to have never outgrown this compulsion. And that is what I am left with this week to tell you. Not about my training or new hurdles I have cleared. Not about milestones reached in my physical abilities. Not about some seemingly impossible race that I just crushed. This week was about an old enemy of mine. This week was about the internal struggle that is my pathological, and don't forget diagnosable, reliance on food.
This week has been hard.
The optimist in me likes to believe that facing this struggle head on will bring me one step closer to closure. That sharing with the world what I consider to be my biggest weakness will somehow break down a barrier. That putting to words what I find to be my ultimate example of self-loathing and failure will somehow allow me to finally put it behind me.
I won't spend the energy telling you what the pessimist in me believes.
So now that I've had my big come-to-Jesus moment right here on this page, I'm left wondering how many of my readers share a similar struggle. Maybe it's drugs, sex, food, attention. Maybe it's something I've never even considered a temptation for weakness. Maybe it's exercise. I wonder how many of us out there, triathletes or otherwise, feel like they lose control of their will on a regular basis. How many well educated, inspirational, successful, go-getters out there feel that same terrifying moment of complete lack of discipline and regulation. Or worse yet, that moment of realization after a particularly damaging episode of failure; the proverbial hang-over after blacking out the night before.
More so than that, I wonder how they have learned to control those tendencies.
I promise my posts will be back to their campy and entertaining antics soon, but for just this moment, I am grateful to you for allowing me to briefly share this bit of inner reflection. For that matter, I would be even more deeply honored to read any comments you might be willing to share about your own struggles.
Perhaps weakness is not so rare?
With love to you and loathing to weakness,
Me
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