The Magical Transformation--my little Testimony

I used to be a very pessimistic person who didn’t really accomplish much. Typically I saw goals as too far to reach and quit what I was doing, before I even gave myself a chance to see that maybe it was possible. I even got to a point where I saw finishing something as impossible.

I don’t have the slightest clue when my view on life began to change. I believe, however, it was when I saw Johnny Weir at the 2006 winter Olympics, and then at the 2006 Worlds. What I saw was a great skater with fire and passion. He had appreciation on so many different levels for his sport. It wasn’t really a sport to him. He skated as though it were more of a performing art than it was a competitive art.

At that time I had been swimming two days a week on a swim team for about four months. It was my first swim team, and my first sport. I hadn’t been very athletic at all since I had dropped ballet for theatre in 2002. And you can imagine how I started to look once puberty hit and I grew taller, and grew hips. Don’t get me wrong; I did small things like mile-long bike rides ever-so-often when I felt like it, and swam six or eight laps at my pool every few days in the summer.

I loved swimming, and had always wanted to join a team. But I was afraid to. I guess I was mostly afraid of trying out. That is, trying out and being told that I was terrible at my strokes, or that I was too slow. I realize now that, by fearing the outcome of something like trying out for a team, I automatically limit what I actually can do. If I have a fear of not being fast enough, I slowed down.

It was late November, 2005, when I decided to let go of inhibitions, go to the pool and try out. Why? Well, I was angry and bored. Two weeks before I had just completed the production of a Christmas play with my drama group then, HeartBandit Productions. So post-play time was aggravating, and I had just gone through a rather devastating heartbreak the day before. During my tryout I was the only one there, and my anger plus my desire for anything to take my mind off everything drove me to swim faster and better. Within five minutes I had made the team.

Four months later, I had competed in one meet and placed second in the 50 free. But something wasn’t right. I would go to practice and swim the bare minimum. I slowly stopped enjoying long sets or challenging sprint reps. I started only caring about getting better. Better than myself, better than other girls on the team. My only driving force was competitiveness.

Watching Johnny Weir, I saw that, even though he hardly placed in top six in both the Olympics and World Championships, he had a love for skating. His driving force was way beyond competition. Sure, he wanted to win and was extremely bummed when he didn’t. But that didn’t take away his passion for his sport.

I wanted that. I wanted to love everything about swimming. Suddenly I wanted to get into other things too. I started getting up earlier and doing things on TV. I would do half-hour yoga programs and half-hour pilates programs. There were plenty of mornings when I just didn’t want to get up. But I would tell myself that, as sleepy as I was, I loved it. This was going to up my physical activity, enhance my swimming and I was going to love it. Just doing it would bring me joy. Because Johnny Weir loved it through all the hard times, why couldn’t I? After all, at the time, my only hardship was getting up an hour earlier than I used to.

Gradually my desire to want to like exercise faded into a desire to exercise. I’m not saying that every morning I jumped out of bed and started doing jumping jacks with a gigantic grin on my face that screamed “too much coffee”. Far from it, actually. But I began to enjoy my exercise time by myself, and with my swim team.

This never turned into an obsession with exercise (aside from a few days when I really did have too much coffee), but it did develop into, some time in July or August, a passion for athletics. A desire to strengthen, tone, to get faster. Most of all, a passion for swimming, which is really what I wanted most of all. And now I see it’s not only what I wanted, it’s what I needed.

A love for sports, athletics and fitness is something I want to share with everyone, especially highschool students. Whether one is overweight, chunky in areas, underweight or just fine (defined by your opinion of yourself and not Vogue magazine--nothing against it, just making a generalization) I want them to be healthy and fit in one way or another. And I want them to not only love the benefits they reap from being fit and healthy, I want them to love the process. It gave me a meaning in life, a meaning in my sport and, let’s face it, a better body.

I am going to try to blog at least three days a week. I’ll share personal experiences with you in my own journeys (such as a running program I started this week, which you will probably hear about a lot), share tips with you and give you a little insight into the life of a Jessica. I’m only 16 and do not have a certificate of any kind as a trainer, but I have learned a lot about many different health and fitness-related topics over the years and especially over the summer. With that in mind, feel free to comment about my entries and ask questions. I will give you the answers to the ones I know for sure I can answer myself, and the others I will recommend someone or something that can.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this. Soon I hope to have a website going with even more information.

Have fun with life. Go do something fun, preferably active (sitting down and reading about how to do it can help your mind to prepare you to do it, but sitting here forever playing online poker afterwards is not). Just kidding around.

I’ll write later, seeya!