Life and what I learned from Mountain Bike Racing

Jew in the City posted an awesome article on Aish about her journey "back" to Jewish practice. Her experience was one I could totally relate to, as I too had panic attacks on death and dying at the young age of 9. I don't remember who it was that had passed away, but the whole concept of dying freaked me out. One day, I would go to sleep and not wake up. Woh.

I started to wonder what the whole point of being born if we were just going to die. Although i couldn't convince my mom that my room would just get messy again so it was pointless to clean it.

As I got older I realized that there are some things we cannot control. So rather than worry about the end, i might as well make the present pretty darn awesome. So the journey in my thirties have been exactly about making my present the best it can be.

I didn't know how exactly, but I also realized Hashem played a role in there somewhere, and that He would take care of us, as long as we took care of ourselves.

When i race, i used to worry about the result - how i placed. That detail was something i couldn't control (like how long our lives would be). I couldn't predict who my competitors would be so how could i predict whether i would finish first or tenth? When my coach taught me to set my own goals and worry about my own performance, then things got a lot better. Racing became fun, because i wasn't worried about anyone else any more (well, unless they got in my way during the race). I worked on my own fitness and my own skills. I found joy in seeing MY result times improve, and just stopped comparing my result times to other people's times.

Allison blogged about comparison quite eloquently here

Here's another interesting thing...i used to work as a fitness trainer in a gym. My clients would worry about how thet looked in their clothes or how they moved. They worried about other people looking at them. Only as an employee of the gym, i had the inside scoop - everyone else worried about how they looked. So much so, no one was actually looking at each other. Not to mention, they were looking at the trainer more for free advice (kind of like that old investors commercial "when EF hutton talks, everyone listens". )