The end, the beginning

My last post was full of race jitters, and I must admit I’m properly addicted to them now.
Excercise surely helped me tremendously with managing my depression, but achieving goals in races also created an enormous sense of accomplishment.
Just to recap last year. I rode on my bike for a first time in a group of people and placed seventh in my category. Then in the fall I ran 10km in 64 minutes, me who in May couldn’t run 200m without running out of breath. Not to forget that thanks to strictly monitoring my diet and training I lost 14 pounds. I haven’t been in this kind of shape since ever in my adult life.
As my forties approach I do feel the need to work towards goals. My goal for this year is to include Sara and encourage her to set her goals and work hard to get them. She has such an amazing potential, if we can just harness it.
Two weeks ago we spent the weekend at the parent’s house and as usual we all went swimming in the morning. Sara wanted to jump from the one meter diving board. She used to do it when she was three years old, much to amazement and entertainment of the pool goers :). Now she is afraid of the hight, her brain is suddenly starting to process consequences and she is much more cautious. She voiced her concerns several times and my advice was not to think too much, remember that she did it before and nothing bad had happened and take a deep breath and just go for it. She climbed onto the diving board four times just to climb back down utterly upset and defeated, beating herself up for not being able to do it. But she went back again to try and to fail and punish herself some more. We realized that she will not leave the pool until we either drag her from there secreaming that she wants to try one more time or we need to help her do it.
She climbed up the board, stood at the end of it and me and J both got into the pool to help her out. We were shouting encouragement, advice, but nothing seemed to work. I knew time was running out, that she might just walk off again to go through the motion of failure yet again. I’m not a psychologist or an amazing parent with inert intuition of the needs of my offspring, but somehow my last attempt hit the target dead on. I started to joke that she needs to jump because I can’t stay afloat much longer, I was laughing, pretending to drown, gargling the pool water. She responded with jokes about waiting a bit longer to see if I can make it or not. At this point many people have gathered around the board. After this light hearted intermission I pulled out the last gun, a bribe. I offered an ice cream if she jumps… she took a deep breath and jumped emerging from the water with the biggest grin possible looking at the elated crowd cheering. She jumped several more time bathing in the attention of people and the wonderful feeling when you know you just “ kicked your fear’s butt” as she calls it. Later in the day we debriefed this teachable moment, stressing that it wasn’t the ice cream that was the real reward, the feeling of winning the inner battle was ever so sweeter than any amount of sweets can ever be.
So for next year there are several races lined up, new challenges set up for our bodies and the continuous challenge of parenting one heck of emotionally complicated, overly competitive, driven to the brink of madness, yet profoundly amazing and unique kid.