Woodard Wednesday: I'm scared to write this

What are you afraid to do?

Ok, I'll go first.  I am afraid of everything.  I'm also afraid of nothing.  I'm glad we had this talk and I could be so insightful.

Let me explain.  I have some scary things going on in my life right now.  Let's focus on those so I can work myself into a martini-for-lunch-needing-frenzy.  Here's a list: living alone and being single, watching my baby-boy (Mick) getting old, taking steps to open a new clinic with a team of people depending on me to succeed, and the completely rational fear of a rogue tree branch falling on my head in Central Park during a run ensuring certain death.  It happens; I've heard stories...

me as a cute baby, except it isn't me at all.  totally could have been though so I don't like your judgement

The first point of living along and being single.  The last time I was single, Facebook hadn't been invented.  How's that for some perspective?  Back in my day (yes I just said that) you would go to a loud bar and order overpriced drinks, stewing in your misery and hoping to find someone who's misery resonated with yours.  It was poetry.  How did you know if their misery matched yours?  You would go over and say something sexy, yet mysterious like, "where did you buy those pants?  I like them but find that corduroy chafes me like sandpaper."  It was simple, beautiful, and markedly awkward.

Things have changed.  Now, I have learned, you go to a loud bar and order overpriced drinks, stew in your misery hoping to find another miserable being.  But do you talk to them?  Oh no!  That's bordering harassment!  Now, you log in to any number of social apps on your phone and communicate with the people digitally.  Did you catch that?  You are sitting in the same bar, like 10 feet away, but you communicate through an app.  Holy hell, I am getting so freakin' old.

Why am I afraid of this?  How could I not be?  I'm basing my search for potentially finding my new mate on the merit of my phone auto-correcting my spelling.  The potential love of my life might block me because I mention that I am "getting over being sick" but actually reads "getting over being a ...."  You see why this causes anxiety?

I'm also afraid to see Mick, my super-pup, getting older.  He's a yellow lab and coming up on his 12th birthday.  For you non-dog people, that's like 247 in human years.  It's natural and a part of life, but twice a day I give him more pills than taken by someone who watches Dr. Oz.  He's been with me since he was 9 months old after being abandoned in a dog run in Brooklyn.  Knowing he is in the final bit of his life freaks me out.

And finally, building out a new clinic with a team of some of the best humans on the face of the earth: scary as hell.  If it was just me in this business and I failed, no problem.  I can dust myself off and return to a life of professional nose-picking spa services.  There's good money in that and work, work that I prided myself in for many years through college.

But having a team adds a whole new layer of hair-losing/hair-graying stress.  If I fail, what happens to them?  If I somehow miss my mark of perfection, surely their lives are ruined and no hope exists for them.  Reasonable assumption, I think.

Side note: if you are reading this and are on said team, please roofie yourself now so you forget what you just read.  Gentle suggestion, but powerful.

That's a scary list, and I haven't even started to tell you about that itchy rash.

So, why would I have started this post by saying that I am also not afraid of anything?  The answer is clear...

I am delusional.  Proudly so.

I might be single forever, or I might not.  Mick will move on to his next journey, perhaps today, perhaps in several years.  Symbio PT will succeed, or it won't.

Regardless what happens with these points, along with the myriad of other fear generators, I will still be me.  I will wake up tomorrow morning, or I wont.  I will still have this precise moment to live fully and experience the miracle that is my every breath.

I will not be afraid that said miraculous breath is tarnished with the aroma of day old coffee.  I will reach boldly for that breath mint and marvel at the profound simplicity of my life!

But here is my biggest fear, and this shit is real.  I am terrified of the following image: me on my death bed many many years from now, surrounded by those I love in my final moments in this reality, and realizing only in that moment that I lived a life unfulfilled because I was too scared to confidently attempt my dreams.  Knowing then, when the time for action has passed, that I missed my opportunity to possibly achieve greatness because I once decided it was safer, less scary, more reasonable to chose one path versus another.

That scares me more deeply than anything else I can conjure up.  Living a life of safety and comfort, because I am afraid, is a life wasted.  I decline that option, thank you.

My dream, the image that makes my eyes well with tears as I write this, is me on that same bed with all the same people, laughing to the point of pain at all the times I tried something and absolutely, without question, completely messed it all up.  Made a total ass of myself.  Totally crashed and burned.

I have come to realize that a full life is not one of safety that is governed by fear, but rather a life of adventure and trial.  A list of experiences, successful or otherwise, that made me face my fear and decide to cower or stand tall.

2015 was a year of transitions, an opportunity to realize that new realities existed.  2016 is a year to confidently march myself into that new reality.  To show the world that I will either succeed or have a hilarious story to tell.

I look forward to telling you that story someday...

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
Frank Herbert

Weekly review 4: embracing weakness

What is it about struggle that triathletes find so irresistible?  Why do we find things that make us suffer and feel compelled to jump right into them?  How many of us partake in self-destructive behavior, just to make that goal even more glamorous when it is achieved?

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.

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. 

That text is quoted from the DSM-5, which stands for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (now in it's riveting 5th edition).  

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