These beanstalks died a week after this picture was taken. #fail

““Excellently observed,” answered Candide; “but let us cultivate our garden” – Voltaire

Gardening isn’t so different from triathlon training or relationships – in all three instances, you reap what you sow.

The thing is, I don’t have a green thumb, and I am not very nurturing. TLC will forever stand for the greatest girl band of all time in my mind, not “tender loving care”.

I’m selfish – and actually it’s the selfishness of my favorite character in literature that I identify most with. I used to fantasize that I was Mary from The Secret Garden until I was like, seriously, 13. There was something about bearing witness to dour, selfish Mary Lennox transform into a healer that still resonates with me. I’ll never forget the scene when she jumps up to the windows, throws open the heavy drapes and commands her invalid cousin Colin, (who hasn’t seen the sun in years) to essentially “get the fuck out of bed already”. Well, at least that’s what I would have said to him.

Lately, I’ve been more of a Colin than a Mary. The month of March has left me fraught with anxiety and anger as my Ironman training had been put on hold because of foot tendonitis. I also had to let go of a few people in my life that were sending me some serious toxic vibes. I’ve been meditating and practicing yoga to control these negative emotions, and although it helped, I was still feeling a little empty without my sport.

It is funny to me that I could let this get to me so much, especially because as a trainer my main job is to motivate people to move past their mental and physical obstacles. Luckily, I ran into a great woman at a coffee shop this week in Boulder who challenged me to listen to my intuition for one week. So I have been. And just I was wrapping up my work with clients on the web today, something inside of me said, “go clean up the courtyard.” Great, so my intuition instructs me to do manual labor. It’s a good thing that my intuition doesn’t get all bossy like this all the time, because hand calluses are not cute.

So I put on my Ray Bans and my Pandora house music station, and went to town like a hipster urban farmer.   But then something pretty astounding happened in between Felix da Housecat and DJ Icey: like Mary, I too felt my irritability melt away with each load of underbrush that I cleared away from the stifled violet patches and giant overgrown red azalia bush. With each load of branches that I carried away, I felt equally lighter.

That’s when I discovered that I was looking at my healing process all wrong – I was trying to fill myself up with positive energy without fully purging the negative energy. It’s like trying to plant seedlings in the underbrush. You need to clear away the old, dead stuff and start fresh before you can fill the space up with something beautiful.

So if you are an athlete who is suffering with a  mental obstacle that you suspect might be hindering your performance, I want you to remember to clear away the brush before you start to look for a solution.

1) Wow, you are crazy! (sips beer)

or

2) Wow, good for you.  I could never do that! (sips coffee)

People either think that triathletes are insane or demi-gods.  I suspect that this is because of the extreme time and effort that that we triathletes put into our sport.  The truth is that we are neither.  We are simply people with something to prove.  Whether it be for other people of ourselves, we need to publicly expose the limits or our bodies and the rawness of human emotion.

Before you put triathletes up on a pedestal, ask the triathletes that you know how they got into the sport.  I can guarantee you that the three most common answers will be:

1) that they were overweight and wanted to get healthy

2) that they were abusing drugs/alcohol and wanted to get healthy

3) that they were recovering from an overuse sports injury (most likely resulting from running), and wanted to get healthy.

Triathletes aren’t gods with toned, shaved legs.  We are regular people, just like you.  Check out these videos for some of the best moments of grit, determination, raw emotion ever captured in the history of triathlon:

Julie Moss crawls across the Ironman finish line in 1982

Father and son team Rick and Dick Hoyt defy the limits of the human body

Ironman Champion Normann Stadler has a total breakdown

It doesn’t get more human than that.