Showing up: Athlete if I want to be.
#60M2IM Day 4/100.
Ruby had a soccer game last night.
I sat in my Costco soccer mom folding chair on the sidelines with the other parents, freezing my ass off and wishing (like I do every April when it feels like it’s been winter for all of my life) that I lived somewhere closer to the equator.
And I watched my girl do her thing.
Man, I love watching her play. She throws everything into it and she has so much fun.
Once upon a time I was an athlete. Not a fat lady who wishes she was an athlete. I was an athlete, athlete. A swim-four-hours-a-day athlete. A cross-country-team athlete.
An athlete like Ruby is an athlete.
I miss it. God, I miss it so much. I miss having a team. I miss having a coach yell at me from the sidelines. I miss scheduled practices and feeling the ping in my quads at the end of a hard workout and how good a shower feels when you left everything on the field. I miss competition.
Ruby pulled off a perfect header in last night’s game. It was her first ever and it was spectacular. It went right where she wanted it to and set up a goal. She turned around and looked for me, on her way to set up for the next play, and I knew what she was feeling in that moment.
I miss that feeling. The one where you’ve done something with your body that you didn’t know you were capable of.
My friend Tracy, who is a writer and a pilot, told me last week about how sometimes life is like a compass. The longer you’re off course, the further away you get from where you’re supposed to be.
I started off course when my dad went to prison during my sophomore year of high school. I quit swimming. By the time I got back to it a year later I’d gained 40 pounds, started my period, grew boobs overnight, and lost so much of my fitness that when I got in the pool again I didn’t even recognize myself anymore.
I gave up. Not slowly, either. I went to that one practice and never went back. We didn’t really have the money for me to swim anymore, anyway. And I needed to get a job. And just the warm up that day almost killed me.
And like a wedge of a pie, I moved further and further away from the athletic path I was on. Until now I’m 45 years old, I’ve had to have most of my stomach removed so that I can sleep without a mask on my face, and I’m not an athlete at all anymore.
Except maybe I am?
Maybe I can be, anyway. Maybe it’s more about sticking out your chin and deciding, than it is about split times and medals.
Maybe it’s showing up that matters.
In case you want to start from the start.
Day: 1. 2. 3.
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Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She lives in Reno with her husband, three superstar kids, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter @shauntagrimes, is the author of Viral Nation and Rebel Nation, and is the original Ninja Writer.
