Home Grown

I've finally reached the point where I can again truthfully say I love being home. You probably think that is a normal statement, but it's not always true for me. I love to travel and go on adventures, see new places and experience new things. Bobsled allows me to live like that 6 months out of the year. I get to travel, meet new people, make new friends, eat new food, live all over the place, and be challenged by new experiences daily. I love it! This kind of environment pushes me to keep learning and growing. I don't think you'll ever catch me saying I miss school, but I have missed that aspect of school. I love to learn and be challenged. Placing yourself in this kind of environment is not always easy, but the rewards are endless.

That being said, coming home can be a little bit of a letdown. Here I do the same things everyday and live in a very settled routine with most of the same people. Wake up, go to work, workout, unwind, sleep. After months of travel and adventure, this requires some getting used to. It's essentially the same routine I have during the season, but it feels completely different. I know I've talked about it before. Living the vagabond life for months makes home sound so appealing, but once you get back into real life, you just want to strike out on another adventure. After experiencing all this at the end of last season, I knew what to expect this year. I thought I had prepared myself for it, but I'm not really sure if you can prepare for such a drastic change. It still took some getting used to and settling in. I'm so blessed to have friends and family who are always so excited to have me back in their lives again. That definitely helps ease the transition, but it wasn't as easy as I'd anticipated.

The real goal of any successful athlete to is live on a fairly even emotional plane all the time. You learn not to get too low on a bad day because it will only distract you from your goals. You also learn not to get too high on a victory and overlook everything else. Overall, you see the big picture and keep an long-term perspective. Triumphs don't make you invincible, and failures are not the end of the world. That applies to life too, and that's what I've been working on for the past two months. I know that competing for me is a huge high and being at home and recovering from the season can be a low. I can't get distracted and allow either end of the spectrum to deter me from my goals.

For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven.  Ecclesiastes 3:1

I keep reminding myself of this verse when life seems slow. I need an off-season to prepare myself for success in the next season. I need this time to strengthen and mature physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. And that's what being home has come to represent for me. A time to rebuild in an environment where I feel safe. This is a place I can make mistakes. I can stumble and fall, and I have people around to catch me or pick me up, dust me off and encourage me to get right back up on the horse. It's a place where I can grow in areas I can't while I'm off on an adventure. I can still take on challenges and learn, just in different ways than I do during the season. I've definitely had to work on staying emotionally balanced; another area I'm working on is growing mentally/intellectually.

My close friends and family will attest to the fact that I love to read. I love using my imagination and dreaming about where the author is taking me and who the characters are. I am a fiction girl at heart, and I've recently started making New Year's resolutions to read more non-fiction. My goal last year was to read one non-fiction book for every 3 fiction books. Failed miserably. I barely read any books during the season, and I probably came close to reading a book a week over the summer. (There were possibly 2 non-fiction books in there. Maybe.) So this year I've determined to read one non-fiction book a month. That's only 12 books over the entire year. Considering the sheer volume of books I read, this didn't seem so impossible. I'm a little behind, but doing considerably better at reaching this goal. I figure I'll get ahead this summer in case I slip up next season.

I don't know if it was the book reports as a kid or our rather dry librarian at school, but non-fiction books have always seemed so boring and lifeless to me. I'll also admit I never liked history in school either. Memorizing all those dates and events for tests took all the life out of it for me. I had one professor in college that gave me a new perspective. My history of architecture class freshman year was amazing. I still had to memorize a ton of information, but he brought it all to life. He'd been to almost every location we learned about and taught completely from the pictures he'd taken and the experiences he had while he traveled. He had a rare talent of mixing history with the present that made me want to go experience all those places and history for myself.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
-George Santayana

I believe there are so many lessons we can learn from the past, either other's or our own. I've always known that; I've just never made myself do something about it. I know, as everyone does after they've made a stupid mistake, that hind sight is 20/20. I also know that I learn more from my failures than I do my successes. Failure really makes you examine the situation and find out what you can do better next time so you don't repeat your mistakes. Unless you like to fail, which I most certainly do not, I want to learn how to avoid future failures, and that is the reason I am reading non-fiction books. I want to learn from other people's stories, their successes and failures, their struggles and triumphs. I figure if you want to be successful, emulate someone who has succeeded. So know, I am learning about success, something I'm very passionate about. It took me a little while to see how reading non-fiction could be something I'm passionate about, but now I'm excited about reading the story of other people's lives.

I'm currently in the middle of Redemption: A Rebellious Spirit, a Praying Mother, and the Unlikely Path to Olympic Gold by Bryan Clay. Amazing book! If you're an athlete or not, I highly recommend reading this book. It's a surprising story of a troubled kid who finally let God in, and it changed his whole world. He's talks about track and also about how to use whatever you're doing for God's glory. If I had to pick a favorite part, it would be this excerpt:

My life became an act of devotion and worship. The gift and responsibility I had been given as an athlete weren't for me anymore; they were for God. [...] In working out and striving for excellence, I was giving my gift back to God and saying, "Use my body so I can bring glory and honor to You." Being a champion in life led me to become a champion on the track, not the other way around. My track career and faith became intertwined. God constantly used my career as a tool to teach me about my walk with Him.

One of my other favorite parts of the book is about Bryan's mom. Every time he'd get into trouble, she'd keep telling him, "You are destined for something great. God has a plan for your life, and He's not going to let you screw it up." Haha! Love it! I can definitely appreciate this woman's approach and her message. I'm so happy I have people in my corner who pray for me and tell me like it is, even if it's not what I always want to hear, and that God doesn't give up on us when we screw up. So, if you're looking for a good non-fiction read, pick this one.

Another aspect of my intellectual growth is mental preparation. Sports have always been and will continue to be mentally challenging. At some point most athletes and spectators have probably heard "A game is played on a five and half inch court, the space between your head" and "A game is 10% physical and 90% mental." If athletes do not know how to mentally focus during competition, they become incapable of executing their physical skills to their ability. I work hard all summer to physically get bigger, faster, stronger, but I also have to work on building those mental muscles as well. When it comes time to finally get back in a bobsled, I need to have done so many mind runs, watched so much video and pictured so many different scenarios that I don't have to think while I'm careening down the track; I can just slide and physically react because my mind already knows what might happen. In other words, I have to become a student of every aspect of the sport.

Here's a shot of me doing a mind run before practice in Calgary. I close my eyes and picture going down the track. I've spent way more time doing mind runs than actual runs down the track.

We also watch tons of POV (point of view) footage to prepare. This helps us with timing and seeing how fast the sled is moving in curves. It definitely doesn't compare to actually driving a sled, but it helps prepare you for how fast everything will be flying past you.

Track walks are another great learning tool. Here's a shot of Ms. Megan Hill and I walking the track in Park City, UT. I've learned so much this season by talking to other pilots and learning from their experiences.

Bobsled is so unique. Specifically as a bobsled pilot, we are in a sled for about one minute per trip; 2 or 3 trips a day; 5 to 6 days a week; for approximately 16 weeks out of the year.  To save you the trouble of doing the math, that’s less than 3.5 hours of actually bobsled pilot seat time left to perfect my skills and maximize my potential in a season. For a bobsled push athlete/brakeman, it is even less as they push a sled for a maximum of 6 seconds and rotate their time pushing a sled with other brakemen during the week throughout the season.  Imagine if you only had 3.5 hours to do one year’s worth of work before a test, presentation or competitive/major event? Yeah...that's my sport. Hence the need for so much mental training. We don't have the luxury of wasting any second of ice time, so every day matters. On top of wanting to learn from every run, we have a safety factor involved as well. If a pilot is not mentally focused, you crash. And as the season stretches on, you become weary both mentally and physically. That's when all that summer mental training kicks in and carries you through. 

So as you can tell, I'm learning more and more each day that none of the areas I'm working on are exclusive. They are all intertwined. If you're weak in one, it will affect all the others. So while I'm home this summer, I'm working on all of them. I have support to catch me if I fall and push me if I'm standing still. Keep Moving Forward!



I had a chance to see some fruit from all this learning I've been doing lately. Last Friday was a really stressful day at work. We had a big project due, and I was working crazy fast to finish on time. I had been wound so tight all day, I felt physically ill by the end. I had a treadmill workout that evening, and all day I'd been talking myself out of it. "Maybe I'll just tell John I'm not up to it. I don't feel good. I better not run today." Blah, blah, blah. Even walking from my car to the door of the gym I was not feeling this workout.

But I made a decision this summer to leave everything from my life at the door of the gym. As one of Bryan Clay's coaches said, "Life will still be there when you leave. You can pick it up on your way out, but while you're at track, be at the track." So, when I walked in the door, I didn't have a choice to cop out; I came to run and that's what I was going to do. Amazingly enough, I finished the workout without a problem. It was actually easier than I'd anticipated because I'd worked it up to some horrific thing in my mind. And on top of that, I was having a great time. It was a tough workout, but I didn't mind. I wasn't thinking about my stressful day; I was just being me. Made me think of this great Chariots of Fire quote:

I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.
-Eric Lidell 

Being an athlete is when I feel God's pleasure. That day at the gym made it really clear to me. Just like that excerpt from Bryan's book stated, I know this gift is from God, and it's my gift back to him. Next time I'll know that from experience and hopefully I won't spend the whole day worrying about it. Learning from failure and success and keep moving forward.

So, I'm learning oodles and growing lots. I'm working on developing all those areas: physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. And all that has happened because I had time to focus on it at home, where life is more settled. So, yes, I love being home.