Fight the Fear

I find that fitness and life are interwoven in a way that you cannot fully understand until you see how improved fitness can improve your life with your very own eyes. I'm not talking simply about tighter abs making you feel better about wearing a bikini (although certainly that aspect has a positive effect on confidence boosts). I am talking about a deeper kind of confidence that comes from challenging yourself beyond your current capabilities and challenging the very things you are afraid of. I deeply fear failure. Running helped me see that my body can do much more than my brain initially allows.

I grew up a non-runner. In elementary school, I was always the last one to finish the warm up laps at tennis camp; in middle school I was the one responsible for making the whole team run extra sprints at basketball practice because of my lagging pace; and in high school, I was the only person to not make the walk-on track team and was told by the coach that he was sure "I would find something else I was good at." Bottom line, not being able to run was a point of disappointment for me for many years. 

In college, I changed my major many times, never feeling fully satisfied with my choices. In total fear of choosing the wrong thing and being stuck in a career and a life that I didn't want. It wasn't until my senior year of college when suddenly everything started to fall into place. I started modeling more which I realized didn't feel like work at all. I then took my focus in school off of "finding a career" and opened it to "finding something I was passionate about". What I realized was that my unsought passions of  modeling and acting had a stronghold on me. I had never really thought of pursuing my love of these careers because I felt like I was under-qualified. I was supposed to find "something else I was good at" and I did not have the natural talent to pursue these fields. Plus, all I could think about was how much better everyone else was at acting and some of them could even sing and dance too--how could I compete with that? This fear of "not being good enough" was powerful enough for me to deny my own passions. I realized this very fear was paralyzing me from doing what I loved to do. Because I never want to be paralyzed by my own fear of failure, I decided to pursue these fields by blindly moving from my life in Boston to a brand new adventure in LA. Deciding you are going to follow your dreams is a terrifying reality to face. Where would I ever start?

I looked at my life and all the things I would need to accomplish to make this change possible. The most important part of everything I viewed was to start believing in myself to work through life's obstacles. 

Being the fitness minded person that I am, I found a parallel between my fear of acting and my inability to run. I had merely accepted the truth about "not being a runner" rather than trying to do something about it. As far as I could tell, my legs were fully functional, so why had I believed for so many years that I couldn't do something about becoming a runner? In January, I challenged myself to run a 1/2 marathon in June.  At the time, I could not even run for 15 minutes without catching my breath.  But low and behold, I followed a training schedule. I started slow, I worked my way up. I researched and read and studied everything I could about runners. Six months after I set that goal I can now proudly tell you I completed my goal. I ran a 1/2 marathon after spending a lifetime thinking I couldn't run. The only thing getting in my way of running was MY FEAR of not being good enough. MY FEAR of not being the best. You don't have to be the best at everything you do. You do not have to be able to do everything. But, if fear is keeping you from following your passions then you need to challenge yourself to FIGHT THE FEAR. 

You are not born as the person you are meant to be. You must work through the obstacles of life to fight for the person you can be. Often it's true that the harder the obstacle, the greater the triumph. You can train yourself to overcome the obstacles of life by challenging yourself in fitness. For me, once I learned to run, all of a sudden moving cross country to follow my dream feels much less daunting. At first 13.1 miles seemed impossible. But each week of training the miles increased and they even got easier! The day of the race the only remnants of my past fears were the butterflies in my stomach. But there was not one second of those 13.1 miles that I thought I would not finish, I knew I could do it as long as I kept putting one foot in front of the other. My head is still held high as I take on my next challenge. I will follow my dream to Hollywood and if the intimidation ever tries to get the best of me I will just keep moving one foot in front of the other.