From Couch Potato to Endurance Athlete (eBook)

CHAPTER 1

My Entrée Into Sports

I wasn’t always a triathlete. As a matter of fact, I didn’t do anything athletic until about 10 years ago, when I realized I was getting older and fatter.

The beach and ocean were in our backyard, as I grew up in Long Beach, New York. When I was young, I went to the beach with my parents, but I was never allowed in the water past my knees. “The ocean will swallow you up,” my mother would tell me. So, I was always afraid. Even when I went with my high school friends to the beach, I would never go in past my hips. I was just too scared of the rip current.

When I was a kid, my dad taught me to ride a bike. My earliest memory was of him running alongside the bike and then letting it go. My mother was always a nervous person. She didn’t like any of us doing any type of physical activity, including cycling. She was afraid we’d get hurt.

I can still hear her saying, “Don’t go out too fast or too hard.”

When I was eight, my mom took a job at Camp Wildwood. She worked at the canteen; my sister, Lori—although underage—worked as a waitress; and my brother, Ed, went to camp there. I attended Camp Mikan-Recro, a set of sister–brother camps with my friend, Philip. Philip’s mother and my mother were best friends, and his mother helped get my mother a job at Camp Wildwood.

At the wee hours of the morning, “Reveille” would play, and the girls from Mikan and the boys from Recro would jump out of bed, put on our bathing suits, and head over to the freezing lake, where we were forced to jump in. That was one of my earliest recollections of being in the water, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. They tried to teach us how to swim, but I wouldn’t put my face in the water. So, I didn’t learn.

Growing up in Long Beach, the second and third graders would get bused to the recreation center once a week to learn to swim. Again, I didn’t want any part of learning to swim. I wanted to splash around with my friends. And that’s how that went.

In 1980, when I was in high school, I cut gym as much as possible. I thought gym was a big waste of time and hung out in the smoking lounge with the rest of my friends. Anyone could smoke back then, and smoking lounges were popular in many high schools.

If I participated in PE, I was picked last, and that always made me feel horrible. I don’t know why it did. I mean, I couldn’t catch a ball, so why would I be picked first?

One day, when I was still in high school, a group of friends and I went for a bike ride. We planned to cross over the Atlantic Beach Bridge, a small bridge a few miles from my home. My mother didn’t want me to go. “But all my friends are going,” I told her. She finally gave in but was not happy.

As we were riding past the West End of Long Beach through Atlantic Beach, my friend, who is now my husband, Brian, passed me, and I hit his back wheel. Both of our bikes flipped, and I was knocked unconscious. I was taken to Long Beach Memorial Hospital and told I had a concussion. When my mom got there, she said, “I told you so!”

My bike riding days were over for a while.

****

My parents were terrible cooks. Every night for dinner, we were served burnt steak, dried-out chicken, or noodles, cheese, and butter. One time, my dad caught a fish from the bay at the end of my block. He took it, put it in one of my mother’s “good” pots, and boiled it up for dinner. I couldn’t and wouldn’t eat it. I ran up to my room and put the covers over my head.

Back then, I weighed ninety-eight pounds and ate bologna and ketchup every day with a grape Hi-C followed by a Devil Dog. Processed foods were the in thing, and no one spoke about how unhealthy they were for your body.

That’s the way I lived my life—barely eating, or eating junk, with little to no exercise.

****

My childhood wasn’t a happy one. At the time, no one really talked about child abuse, yet my parents practiced it on me both mentally and physically every day.

My parents married young and had all three of us young, and I don’t think they were ready. My mother ruled the house, and she was very controlling. She was overweight, insecure, and I believe, looking back, probably bipolar. She always thought other people were better than we were. We were never good enough. I was never good enough.

My mother had a lot of love, but she showed it only sometimes. Later in life, she openly showed it to her grandchildren, but she didn’t show it to me during my childhood. There were days when she was amazing and I loved to talk with her, and then there were other days when she screamed at me for no reason, telling me I was an “idiot” or “stupid.” I never knew which person was going to come out that day.

My mother would put me in front of the mirror and tell me I was ugly. When I was recently talking with my brother about this, he recalled that she’d compare me to a troll, saying that the troll was prettier than me.

Although I never really saw my dad when I was growing up, because he worked three jobs, my mother knew how to get my dad going. If any of us did something she didn’t like, she’d rattle my dad and tell him to get the belt. That belt was used often, and it affected all of us in different ways.

My dad was totally devoted to my mother. She was his life.

I don’t know why, but for some reason, he found it very difficult to share his affection with us kids. I wanted it so bad. And yet, there were times when he would come up to my room as I was going to bed, and he would tell me he was going to take me on all these exotic trips. I believed him. I wanted him to take me away from the horror I was living, and I prayed that one day he would. Unfortunately, the trips never happened.

Growing up, I also never had any privacy. My mother didn’t believe in doors or locks. For the longest time, the five of us lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the first floor of our home. Eventually, the upstairs tenants moved out, and we took over the entire house.

When we moved upstairs, my bedroom doors were immediately taken off. The only one who had any privacy was my sister. She lived in the front room with two doors. My mother insisted that she needed her space because she was older. Lori was the black sheep in the family. Yet, she got all the attention from my mother. I resented Lori for it.

One time, I got into a fight with my mother. I ran upstairs to my bedroom with no doors and remember talking on the phone with my boyfriend, telling him what happened. My dad came upstairs and took the phone out of my ear and started beating me with the phone. My boyfriend was still on the line!

****

I never had any encouragement at home or in school. I remember my Long Beach High School English teacher telling me I would never amount to anything. And my parents didn’t want me to go to college. They wanted me to get a job as a secretary and retire at 55. Exercise was also never a part of that picture.

My entire childhood, I was led to believe that I wasn’t smart enough, pretty enough, or worthy enough. I was told that the bad things that happened to me didn’t really happen. They were a figment of my imagination. My mom would always say that the disturbing things I experienced weren’t real; they were just a “bad dream.”

I still attempted to find out what I was good at, even though I never received the encouragement to do so. I tried lots of things while I was growing up, like playing the flute in the marching band or taking art classes. Nothing stuck. I felt like I did a lot of things but wasn’t good at anything. I was depressed and had frequent thoughts of suicide. I felt utterly alone, unwanted, and a complete failure. No one seemed to care to tell me differently.

****

I journaled consistently throughout my life. That was my secret place where I could share whatever I wanted without being judged. I loved to write and share my experiences in my notebook.

So, when blogging surfaced back in the early 2000s, I jumped in full force. I’ve been blogging ever since. Recently, my husband made a joke to my son that “Mom writes about everything she experiences.” Haha—it’s true!

****

When I left my parents’ house, my biggest motivation was that I didn’t want to live my life like them. I didn’t want to struggle for money. I didn’t want to feel like I was nobody. I wanted to be somebody.

Since my parents didn’t encourage me to go to college and I wanted to go, I spent most of my time working. I worked full time to pay for college and went to school at night. My life was mostly hard work and very little play. But when I did play, boy did I play hard!

I drank, smoked, and did everything in between. I wanted to escape the reality in which I was living. But when it was time for work, I was on time and focused.

After I graduated from college, I worked for several years at some of the top PR firms in the country and then decided to go back to school on the weekends for my master’s degree, while continuing to work grueling seventy-to-eighty-hour workweeks. I still didn’t feel good enough, even after I got my master’s degree. The voices of everyone from my childhood would sneak in and tell me I was worthless, no matter how much I achieved. No matter how hard I worked, it never felt good enough.

I remember, when I was a young girl, that my...