My Journey to Becoming an Athlete

In this episode of Binge Eating Breakthrough, you'll hear my personal journey from a non-athlete to a competitive triathlete. 

Discover how I overcame fear, faced body image struggles head-on, and embraced the power of adventure and growth. 

Whether you're an aspiring athlete or seeking personal transformation, this candid exploration will inspire you to take your own unique path toward self-discovery. Tune in now for an inspiring conversation!

Want to know why you struggle with food and what to do next? Start watching The Food Freedom Mini Series today. 

Transcript

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Welcome to Binge Breakthrough, a podcast designed to help you finally break through the barriers that keep you stuck, feeling out of control around food. I'm Master Certified Coach Jane Poker, and I want you to know that no matter how long you've been struggling or what you've tried, food freedom is possible. And I'm here to check it out. After years of therapy, treatment, restrictive diet, and reading all the books, I will still stop in the audience cycle of restricting things until I was able to see it all from a new perspective of each other. Each week I will share the strategies, tools, and mindset that allowed me to overcome my decade-long battle with binge eating. Your journey to body trust starts now. Let's dive in. Hello, trusted listener. Welcome to Binge Breakthrough. I consider you a trusted listener because I trust that you are listening to this podcast for a reason. I trust that you are going to hear something today that is insightful, that is inspiring, that will help you on your own journey with your relationship with food. So today I want to talk about my own journey to becoming an athlete. I've actually had several people ask me about this. And I have some people who have thought that I must have always been athletic, or that maybe I got into triathlon and the things that I do because of my husband. Or maybe they think they could never do what I do. But none of those things is actually true. So I thought that today I would just share my journey with you. It's a little bit entertaining. And I will aim to share it in a way that you can take away something for yourself, for your own journey in life, whether that journey includes athletics or not. So I invite you to open up and to listen to this episode, to listen to what I'm about to share with you with a lens, with asking yourself the question: how can I take what I am hearing and apply it to myself? What takeaways, what can I learn from these stories, from this journey that I'm about to go on? What can I learn here and take it for myself? With everything, when we hear something, when we listen to something, it can feel productive, it can feel useful. But if you don't take what you hear and then bring it into your own life in some way, it just becomes something that passes time. Now, there is nothing wrong with just consuming information so that you will be entertained and to pass time, but I'm gonna guess that you press play because you want to get something for yourself. So I invite you to listen to this with a lens of how can I apply what I hear, what I'm inspired by, what I'm intrigued in, and bring it into my own life. All right, so here it goes. I really would not have, I would not consider myself as an athlete growing up, but I did love to be outside. I have always loved adventure, I've loved the outdoors and doing things with other people. So when I was growing up, I was on the swim team, and I I wasn't, I wouldn't say I was good, I would say I was a very average. Now I have a sister, and she was dubbed the athletic one. She was a very good swimmer, and when she was referred to as the athletic one, I interpreted for myself that I'm not athletic. So I never saw myself that way. I actually didn't learn how to ride a bike until middle school. I tried several times when I was younger, but I had a lot of fear. I think I was constantly trying to control things, all things, whether it was on the bike or off. And because I didn't feel like I had control and that uh attempt to find balance, I would not, I would not do it. I I could not let go to create to find that place where you can find balance on the bike. Now, once I finally did learn how to ride, I fell in love with it and I rode my bike all over the place. But I can remember being pretty young and being with a friend who rode her bike. She would ride her bike to the pool. We kind of lived in a similar neighborhood, and I can remember walking with her. She would ride her bike and I would just walk along because I was not yet able to ride a bike. And I think I could have, of course, I could have ridden earlier, but because I was trying to control things and because I was had so much fear, I really blocked myself from that ability to learn until I was much older. Now, the other thing, when I was younger, I loved summer camp. I loved everything about it. I went to this camp for years growing up, where we did all kinds of things outside. We rode horses, we did art, drama, dancing, music. Uh, we there was swimming, there was regular swimming, kind of like you would do uh in a swim team, but we also did synchronized swimming, which I thought was amazing. I really lived for summer camp. Everything about it I loved. Now I do acknowledge with this ability for myself to go to summer camp for these extended periods of time, there is a lot of privilege in my ability to go. And I am so grateful for the opportunities that I had there at camp. And looking back, I can see that summer camp was a time that I just felt very connected to myself, to nature, to the things I was doing outdoors and to the friends that I made there. I would count down the days to camp every year. It was a very impactful part of myself just growing up. When I was in middle school, I played a few sports, I played softball, I did, I think I ran track one season. And again, I was I enjoyed it. I was active, but I was very, I wouldn't say, again, I did not see myself as athletic, but I liked to do things. I liked to move. Then I fell in love with volleyball. So I played on the high school team, I played club team, we traveled to tournaments. I really loved that it was a team sport. I loved the games, I loved the people. And my first body image, my first real memories of issues were with my body image, was were related to volleyball. I went the summer before my junior year of high school, I went on this, um, it's kind of like a little mini piece core type of thing to Paraguay. And we were there for for two months. And in those two months, I gained 20 pounds. And in gaining 20 pounds pretty quickly, I ended up with a lot of stretch marks on my body, specifically on my hips. I had them also on my breasts, but they weren't, obviously, that wasn't visible to anybody else. But these stretch marks on my hips, in volleyball, we wore these things called bun huggers at the time. That's what they were called anyway. And essentially, it was like a pair of underwear. Essentially, if you imagine like um what you might think of as granny panties, we would wear with a um with a t-shirt. And so my hips were visible and you could see the red stretch marks on my hips and my thighs, my upper thighs. And uh, this is my very first memory of body image issues, of thinking my body needed to change. Uh, I went on a restrictive diet. I started counting calories, I started going to the gym and really just trying to trying to change myself. I really wanted to play volleyball in college, but I got injured the summer before college. And I went to college early. I went early to try out for the volleyball team and I didn't make it. I didn't make the team. I was so sad about this. I was so disappointed. I was so frustrated in myself, but I didn't know emotions at the time. I didn't know what to do with emotions. And as I was in college, I was at this new place. I was not doing the thing that I really was hoping to be able to do while I was there and playing volleyball. I was also trying to change my body and trying to lose weight. I was on this restrictive diet and I had my first binge that very first semester in college. It was a couple of months in to my first, my uh, my very first semester. And I, from that point, from the point of my very first binge, I felt broken and I was really trying to stop. But I continued to go to the gym. I continued to do various forms of cardio to try to stay active and also to burn calories. I was, I was trying to use exercise to lose weight, but I will say the one thing that I did not get into, and I really am so thankful for this, is I did not get into uh exercise as punishment or trying to make up for uh excess calories consumed in a binge with extra time in the gym. That is just an association I didn't make. And I looking back on it, I think it's because I always I loved movement and I still love movement. And so to me, I just it it never even crossed my mind that that turning movement or turning exercise into punishment, it just wasn't even really an option for me because I enjoyed it so much. So through college, I uh I had I had a bike and I would ride my bike to campus. It was much easier to do that than to try to drive and to find parking. Um, I did a little bit of swimming and a little bit of running, just mostly to stay active. Um, and then I met my husband. I met my husband the very last year of college, and we were active together. We did some 5Ks, we went to the gym together. Again, I never I was never really seeing myself as an athlete, but I always just saw myself as an active person, somebody who liked to be active, who felt better when I was active. And I'm sure I was counting calories. I can remember when I was counting calories in my food. I can remember uh counting the number of calories that I uh would burn or would estimate in exercise. But again, I wasn't trying to like overdo the exercise part to make up for excess food. I remember when my husband and I, we did our, we signed up for our very first uh five-mile run. So we had done some 5K's, which is 3.1 miles. And I remember one time we decided, you know what, let's do this run. It sounds really fun. We have some friends doing it. It's five miles. I have this distinct memory of just how long that run felt. I just thought it was never going to end. I had never run so far in my life, and it just felt eternal. And of course, now I look back on it. And a five-mile run is kind of a short run for me now. But it's so fascinating to look back and just see the progression, see how things have changed over time. So with a bike, I got my very first nice bike, a road bike, shortly after college, after I graduated from college. I wasn't really even looking for one, but my brother-in-law offered up a connection. He worked for a major brand and he had um offered up that he could get me one uh at a at a discount. And I thought, yeah, that sounds, that sounds great. So I get this new bike, and shortly after I get this bike, a girlfriend reached out to me and she told me she had been in an airport in Florida and she saw a flyer for this thing called the Heartland AIDS Ride. It was gonna be a fundraiser where you rode 550 miles in six days. It was gonna be from Minneapolis to Chicago in July, in the summer. This was in 2001. So she's like, hey, I just saw this thing, we should do it. And I said, Okay. I had no idea really what I had signed up for. We thought we were prepared going into it, but our longest ride leading up to this in preparing for this ride was one time we went out and rode 30 miles. Now, if you do the math, 550 miles in six days, that is close to 100 miles a day. And one time we rode 30 miles. We were not ready. For sure we were not ready. But what's so incredible for me to reflect back on this was our attitude. We just went into this event, we were like, let's do it, we'll have fun, we'll just see what we can do. Now, it was hard, it was hot, we had some crazy weather, we uh definitely felt the impact on our bodies as well as the part of our bodies that was on a saddle for six days in a row. But we were all in and we were up for the adventure. We had such an amazing time. Now, shortly after this, I was talking to a friend on a phone, on the phone, and she was she lived in another state. She was one of my dearest friends from middle school. She was telling me about this class that she was taking at a local college. It was a triathlon class. And at the end of the semester, they were gonna do a sprint triathlon. And as she was telling me this, I was like, that sounds amazing. I would love to do something like that. So I thought, huh, I wonder if there's anything like that around me. So I get online. Now think about this. This is early 2000s. This is probably 2000, maybe early 2002, late 2001. So you could use the internet, you could search for things on the internet, but it was nothing like we have today. But I found a local triathlon that was gonna take place in May of 2002. It was a sprint triathlon and it was actually a reverse try. So it started with a run. It was a three-mile run, a 12-mile bike, and then a 400-yard swim in a pool. So I signed up. I found a master swimming group and a running group, and I joined them both. So it comes time, it's time for my first triathlon. And I asked my husband to come and watch. He was not doing triathlon at the time, he was doing some other sports, some other things to stay active. So he came to watch me and go out. I do the run, and then I go to get on my bike. And I probably Todd had he sat himself in a place probably about a mile into the bike where he had brought a little portable chair. He's sitting on his chair. He has his book where he can just read when I'm not going by. He saw me go by on the run, and then I come by in this exact same place on the bike. And so I see him, and next thing I know, he's yelling out at me. And he says, Your helmet is on backwards. So I had put my helmet on backwards. Now, if you can picture a bike helmet, the back of a bike helmet, it's big, it's flat. It is that is the part that was right above my forehead. So I stop, I take off the helmet and I turn it around, put it on the the right way, and then I look over my shoulder. I'm looking for traffic. And there's a there's a police officer who's standing there and he has one hand out. And I'm thinking he's telling me to stop, you know, because maybe there's some cars coming or whatever. So I'm waiting, I'm waiting, I'm waiting. And he looks at me and he's like, not you, you go. I'm telling the cars to stop. And I was like, Oh, I didn't even realize that there would be people here to like help traffic, or I mean, I just I had no idea. So I get back on my bike and I keep going and I come in. And then this in this particular triathlon, in most cases, the swim comes first. But because this swim was in a pool, they have the swim at the end to kind of spread us out a little bit. So I get off the bike and I take off my helmet and I'm getting ready to go into the pool, and somebody yells at me that I have my socks on. So I stop and I take off my socks. So obviously, there's all kinds of little things that I did, little mistakes that I made, but I had such a great time. And at the end of that, I was like, I want to do it again. I was surrounded by so much encouragement and support. I wanted to improve to see what else I could do. So I signed up for the exact same race the next year. So it's getting to be pretty close. It's time to go. And I asked my husband, Are you gonna come watch? And he said, I wasn't planning on it. Like I went last year. And I so I asked him, I really, I was like, please, it would really mean a lot if you come. So he said, Okay, I'll come and watch. He did the same thing, brought his same chair, set himself up in the same place. This time he did not have to yell at me to tell me that my helmet was on or nobody else told me that my socks were on because I did fix those things uh in that time. But by the end of this race, my husband says, I could do this. Like I want to do this. And that was after two times coming to watch with him watching me do it and how excited I was about it. He decided he wanted to do it too. He knew this would probably mean him dropping some of the other things that he was doing, but he was ready to do that. So we did our first triathlon together in July of 2003. So just a couple months later, we did our first triathlon together. We had such a great time training together, racing together. We have uh from that very first race, we started doing some kind of internal competition, and we were hooked. We wanted to do more races, to go to different places, to see what else we could do, to start learning more about the sport and the different options and opportunities there were. So we surrounded ourselves with friends and a community of people. We increased our distances over time. And each time we were thinking, wouldn't it be cool if wouldn't it be cool if we could do an Olympic distance track on instead of a sprint distance? If we could do a half iron man, if we could do, we just kept thinking bigger and dreaming bigger. We did our first half iron man in St. Croix with a group of friends in 2005. So basically two years after we did our first triathlon together, we were doing a half iron man. I was not prepared. There was heat, there was humidity, pills, the nutrition, my nutrition in St. Croix was terrible. I will talk more about nutrition and just the role of food in my athletic journey. I'm gonna talk about that more next week. But as we kept doing this and as we kept just asking, like, what if, what else? Wouldn't this be amazing? Initially, we had no interest in doing an Iron Man. That just felt too long and really, quite honestly, unattainable. We had similar thoughts even about the marathon distance. I mean, I told you the story about running five miles. That just felt so five miles felt big. Marathon, 26.2 miles, and it just wasn't even on our radar. But then as we started doing more and seeing what else was possible, we would start to say if we ever did something like a marathon or an Iron Man, that we would want to travel, we would want to make it part of a fabulous trip and experience rather than doing a marathon in our backyard on the exact same trails that we run on the regular or, you know, on a course that would be really close to us. We would want it to be an experience. And so over time, our interest and our curiosity peaked. And we ran our first marathon in 2010. We ran the Big Sur Marathon, which was a point to point from Big Sur to Carmel along the Pacific Coast Highway. As you can imagine, it was incredible. You can see the ocean for I think it was like 24, 23, or 24 out of 26 miles. You can see the ocean. It was incredible. And then in 2012, we did our first Iron Man together. It was Iron Man Canada in Penticton, British Columbia. And it was almost an ideal experience. The story of that Iron Man alone could be its own podcast episode, but we both finished within two minutes of each other over a 12-hour day. And we were able to share the incredible finish line experience together. And for a while, that felt like enough. That first Iron Man just felt amazing. We went back to the half Iron Man distance and shorter. I love personally the half Iron Man distance. It just is, for me, it's like an amazing distance. The half Iron Man distance is a 1.2 mile swim, a 56-mile bike, and a 13.1 mile run. But even through this, we kept doing new races. We would do familiar races. We were always aiming to improve and to grow. Then we decided, let's do another one. Let's do another Iron Man. So we did that in Canada, and again in Canada, but this time we were in Whistler, British Columbia. What's really interesting for me to think about now is I've kind of been on this like half-life with my Iron Man races. So my first Iron Man was in 2012. And then it was six years to the next one, which was in 2018 in Whistler. And then three years later, I did Iron Man Quartalane, which was in a 107-degree heat wave. And at that race, I qualified for my first world championships in Hawaii, which would take place 18 months later, again, the Half-Life, 18 months later. And the reason it was so much later was the delays with the pandemic. Then my fifth Iron Man was Queer d'Alane. It was this past summer in June, which was nine months after the Hawaii World Championships last October. And this year in Queer d'Alane, I qualified again for the World Championships, which will take place in just a few short weeks, which will be four and a half months after my Iron Man. Now, if you're wondering, no, I will not be doing another Iron Man in 2.25 months. I'm ready to take a break from the distance, at least for next year. But I never thought any of this was possible for me. When I signed up for my first triathlon, I never thought about anything beyond that first sprint. I had no visions that I would still be doing this 20 years later, or visions of all of the amazing places that we would travel to, or the incredible people that we would meet. Now, in the coming episodes, I'm going to share more about my journey with food as it relates to my athletic pursuits and how that has changed and evolved over time. And I'm also going to tell you more about what it takes to change your vision of yourself and what you believe is possible for you. I never saw myself as an athlete, but I always knew that I loved the outdoors and I loved to be active. I still find myself comparing myself to others who I look up to, to people who I think I could never measure up to. But then when I notice that I'm doing that, I notice that I'm comparing and I can remind myself we are all on our own journey. There will always be someone faster than me, and there will always be someone slower. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what anyone else is doing. What matters is my own journey. Am I having fun? Am I learning and growing? Am I doing something that I want to do and that is in line with my values? Ultimately, I know that if I just move more, I feel better. I love pushing my body to see what I'm capable of. I love racing and training and the opportunities I've had within the sport. I love that my husband and I share this together. I love the times that we can go out and train together. I love the times I can go out and train on my own. I'm so interested to see where this athletic journey takes me. And I will trust my intuition to guide me to the next race, to the next adventure, and to my next level of growth. So for you, what interests you notice when you read something or you hear about something, if it excites you, or if you wonder, ooh, could that be possible for me? Notice where you think, I would love to do that. But maybe you quickly shut yourself down thinking that's not possible, or I could never do that. If you find yourself saying that, you won't want to miss the upcoming episode where I talk about this very thing. But I got into the sport of triathlon because my friend talked about it and I thought, that sounds amazing. I wonder if there's something like that around me. And I looked it up. That's how I started in this sport. So just notice for yourself what sounds interesting. Where for you do you think, oh, I would really enjoy that? Or maybe I would enjoy that. I wonder if I would enjoy that. Is there something that kind of lights you up, that excites you, where you feel open, expansive, maybe a little bit of a draw? Just notice that for yourself. All right, so that's my story. Next week, I'm gonna share the role that food has played in my journey as an athlete. And I am sure it will be enlightening for your own journey with food. I'll see you next week. Thank you for listening to Binge Breakthrough. You can find the show notes and any resources mentioned at binge breakthrough.com. If you like this episode, subscribe to have future episodes delivered to you each Wednesday. And remember, your five star rating and review will help others discover these life changing concepts. See you next week.