Better Great Than Never (eBook)

Believing It's Possible Is Where Champions Begin

Lindsay Dare Shoop (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020 | 1. Auflage
388 Seiten
Lioncrest Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-5445-1419-2 (ISBN)

Infos

Think of any sport, and Lindsay Shoop played it growing up. She was a driven athlete, good student, and happy teenager. But when she went to college, everything changed. She quit basketball, gained weight, and skipped classes. Her drive was gone. After a sleepless night and a fateful turn of events, Lindsay made the decision to become her best self. She discovered rowing, and the sport became her outlet for transformation. In just one year she became an NCAA Division-I All-American; in four, she broke a world record and won her first World Championship. Within six years, Lindsay won Olympic gold. In Better Great Than Never, Lindsay shows you how to seize your full potential by removing self-imposed limitations. She demonstrates how to embrace every step, good and bad, to find greatness. For Lindsay, life isn't about winning. As long as you learn throughout your journey, you can never lose.

Textauszug

One

1. Two rules to live by.

Sunday, August 17, 2008. Shunyi District, Beijing, China. One minute before the start of the women’s eight 2,000-meter Olympic final.

Sitting there at the start line, my nerves momentarily resurged. They were the one final distraction to perforate my consciousness. The one final attempt at disrupting my focus. In our moment of ultimate challenge, worry tried to call my bluff one last time, tried to question how durable my determination had become.

I could not let myself ignore them. My nerves had welled up for a reason—because of how much I cared about what the nine of us were there to do. We were exactly where we had trained to be. At the pinnacle. The line that separated Olympic champions from everyone else.

In through my nose, I took a deep belly breath. My eyes gently blinked closed as my exhale passed my lips. My fingers loosened. My face, feet, and hands relaxed. My major muscles pulsated in attention, ready for their call to action. Meanwhile, my mind reassured me, You wanted this. We have come all this way. We are in this together. This is what it has all been for.

The tears. Blisters. Sweat. Frozen, cracked, and bloodied hands. The frustration. The anxiety. The long days. The weddings and births missed. The rush to work between training sessions to be able to afford groceries. Convincing myself that the cheapest thing on the menu actually is what I want and ordering water by default because it is free.

The snowy Friday nights with one hundred minutes left to pedal on the bike. Literally going nowhere but with nowhere else in the world I would rather be. Teammates by my side.

The sore…everything.

The breakthroughs. Those two words of encouragement when needed the most: “Good job.”

The laughs. The smiles. The joys. Embracing my being the goofy underdog for the mismatched outfits I chose, either because I awoke in the dark, or it was all I had.

Everything it took just to have the chance to sit in that seat, let alone at that line. The realization that everything that knocked me to the bottom had made me all the stronger. All the more prepared. All the more confident.

My subconscious reassured me a second time, You already made your choice, Shoop. Only one option remains. Go harder than you ever have in your entire life and hope that your teeth don’t fall out.

One more deep belly breath, and my jaw, neck, and shoulders loosened a little more. Every ounce of my being ready. Finally focused on only one thing: this moment.

I wore the density of my concentration as a cocoon of complete silence. A silence that made it seem as though I had lost my capacity to hear. As everything fell to nothingness, the only sounds I perceived were those that arose from within. Every beat of my heart intensified. Every pulse of my blood clarified. Every chill from every pore amplified. It was as if every one of my cells had awakened and aligned toward my one specific purpose.

Then, as I sat at the threshold of my elevated state of attention, poised with an intent honed over years of training and focusing on what we could become, the start sequence abruptly ruptured the silence. At a most arbitrary moment, the race announcer’s monotone voice appeared through my cocoon. And just like that, the thing we had taken all those steps toward was finally at hand.

The race official polled each team one by one over the loudspeakers. With every call, I grinned. The corner of my mouth turning slightly upward. With every country’s name, I breathed. The edges of my jaw gritting, then releasing. With every name that echoed, my thoughts were simple: Breathe. Yes, Shoop. Breathe. Until finally, they called us.

“United States of America” resounded low and slow over the flat, calm water at the start. I glared through my eyebrows. My heart fluttered up. I exhaled once more to relax my cheeks. I wiggled my fingers once more to relax my grip.

By the time the last of the six names was called, one for each of the six countries strong enough to make it to the Olympic final, I had nothing left to think. All that remained was the start signal.

In those final moments, my nostrils widened as my breaths deepened so the air could enter through my nose and exit through my every pore, signifying my nerves’ absolute alignment.

Then, after one seemingly eternal period of time (in reality, only a matter of moments), the announcer’s monotone voice droned through the loudspeakers one last time.

“Attention—”

The start command landed on my skin from across the lanes. As I absorbed it, my ears pulled rearward. Every hair on the back of my neck bristled. In less than half a blink, we took off.

“You must see it, then convince your body of what your mind can see.” Tom, the head coach of the US Women’s National Rowing Team, said to us while we sat huddled at the back of the musty old boat bay. “Then, as you prepare accordingly, let your preparation become your confidence.”

Even during a training trip several years before our Olympic final, Tom knew we needed to be confident in order to have even the slightest chance for Olympic gold. In fact, he knew we needed to be more than just confident. We needed to be confident enough to win to come away with a medal at all. So, in order to help us become just that, Tom taught us to trust our preparation because it would gradually build our confidence one day at a time.

Before taking our preparation another step further though, Tom explained one other thing: if we truly aimed for gold, we had to believe that gold was possible. For only once we thought it was possible would we fully embrace the very real and challenging work it would require. This would then strengthen our ability to prepare, which would then strengthen our confidence and fuel our effort through challenge and triumph alike.

That was our cycle. A gradually strengthening cycle of possibility, preparation, and confidence. A cycle that carried on every day, day after day, as we prepared more than ever and believed more than ever. Until the time came to face the ultimate test.

Now that I am on the other side of Olympic gold, I have a far greater understanding of how this cycle ultimately enabled my teammates and me to excel. That is, how our preparation, the ways we addressed our challenges, bridged the gap between possibility and reality. But since the extent of our belief in possibility impacted our preparation, so too did it impact the extent of our reality.

How do I know? I did not emerge from the womb equipped with some superhuman talent or confidence. My parents did not instantly uncover in me some innate ability that made me naturally driven. So no, I did not specialize in one sport—especially not one as rare as rowing—then head down a path toward the Olympics from a young age. Believe it or not, even once I finally made the Olympic team, I was neither the most genetically gifted nor the most experienced, so there must have been something more. Had there not been, I would never have made it as far as I did.

I was the lanky girl who grew up just outside a small college town smack in the middle of Virginia. Rowing was not a thing there when I was young. There were not many suitable bodies of water, which meant there were not any youth rowing teams in the area at the time. Even if rowing had been a thing, I doubt I would have been allowed to pursue it. It would not have been convenient, as it would have been time consuming and too far from where my family lived to make practice attendance plausible.

Considering that we lived ten miles south of town on a small farm (complete with a yard, creek, and a few farm animals), convenience would have been one issue. As for another, my parents worked a lot. My mom was a dental hygienist. My dad was an engineer. Both of their professions required they leave our house early and get home late. Things they were willing to do in order to provide my brother and me with more than what they had growing up.

My mom came from a blue-collar family. Her dad was the local plaster work expert. He died a week before I was born though, so I do not know much about him. I have heard stories that he yelled a lot. I have also heard stories that he was kind and gentle. Both could be true, but I have no way of knowing.

My mom’s mom, Granny Betty, as she is known to literally everyone, worked a lifetime as a secretary for my hometown’s public school system. She wore three-inch high heels every day despite the bunions they gave her. I bet if you ever caught her scooting around town without her heels, she would be wearing purple Keds in size eight and a half.

Together, my mom’s parents raised her and her younger sister (my Aunt Lisa) in the very town where I grew up. To my and my brother’s good fortune, most of my mom’s family lived nearby. That made the team effort of raising us a tad easier.

Because my dad was one of eight kids, he grew up living simply. He spent a good portion of his childhood in upstate New York, literally walking to school uphill, four miles, both ways. In the winter when the snow was deep, he took to wearing his older brother’s shoes. Not because they were all he had but because they kept him from sinking into the freshly fallen soft white powder. That is the kind of practical resourcefulness my dad passed down to my brother and me.

When my parents were in...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 17.11.2020
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Sport
• ISBN-10: 1-5445-1419-0 / 1544514190
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5445-1419-2 / 9781544514192