I thought college rowing was really hard. Workouts were physically and mentally demanding. Individual workouts pushed me to my perceived limits. Balancing my practice schedule and my school schedule, plus my homework load and attempt at a social life seemed like the hardest thing I could do. 

Then I graduated and needed to navigate some real world stuff. I didn’t have any confidence in my ability to choose insurance policies or make job decisions. It wasn’t physical hardship. The lessons learned from rowing didn’t seem to apply. 

When it came to joining a club rowing team or signing up for running races or other challenges in the realm of athletics, I knew I could do it because I was super confident in this one area of my life. In my non-athletic life, I bumbled through, couldn’t figure out a career path, and second-guessed myself at every turn. Somehow, I made enough mistakes to start learning from them, and then I became a mom and gained massive life perspective from that. I realized I really had done a lot of things to be confident about, and I put it together that I could use my own life experience however I wanted.

The point is, my rowing experience is helping me here. Being an athlete and having the mindset that I can set incremental goals and take things a step at a time, knowing that I can do hard things, and using a little bit of mental detachment learned while enduring intense workouts has set me up to handle this like nothing else in my life. 

Part of my identity has been tied to being tough and able to handle things. That absolutely came from rowing. But talking to myself about being tough meant that I felt tough when I needed it. The first week in the hospital, I definitely needed to be tough. I also don’t remember a whole lot about those days, so there may have been a bit of disassociation going on. But I needed to be tough when he was on steroids and so completely not himself and implacable. And I needed to be tough when we found out there was residual disease, and his consolidation chemo would be much harder. It didn’t mean I couldn’t cry at night or vent on the phone. I just needed to get through the days. 

And I ran. Run. Will continue to run. I’ll talk about that more next time.