Confidence and The Mental Edge

Last week, my head wasn't in the game. I was losing confidence and spiraling. Old words "You're not an athlete" spoken to me years ago kept repeating in my mind as I struggled through my posing practice. It was the middle of the night and I got into a hyper focus of practicing my routine over and over again. Videoing, then watching, then videoing, then watching. Such a short routine, but such a difficult thing for me to perfect.

Seven weeks out from my first competition and I was starting to doubt the legitimacies of my abilities. I felt old, wrinkled, and uncoordinated. I was fearful I was going to get on stage and make a fool out of myself. I was holding on to old beliefs that I was not an athlete, and therefore, did not belong in a competitive spotlight. The Rebecca that says "age is just a number" and "we can do hard things" and "it's never too late to try something new" had simply disappeared from view.

My posing coach Annie recognized right away that I was blindly walking towards a deep, dark, cavernous hole that contained no ladder nor other way out if fallen into. She kindly reached out to check in and help me nip my spiral in the bud before it was too late.

I was in a trance-like, automaton state not even realizing the emotions I was feeling from past traumas associated with my lack of athleticism as a youth and young adult. Growing up in inner city Chicago and then Manhattan, I didn't have the usual exposure to youth sports that are typical with suburban children. By the time we moved to Tucson and I started high school, my peers were way ahead of me in their athletic skill sets. I joined a volleyball team my freshman year of high school for a short time but it was clear early on that I had not been spending years volleying like my fellow teammates.

Aside from playing racquetball with my dad and his friends during high school, then in pick up games at my college recreation center, my participation in athletics was limited. It wasn't until after my children were born and in school that I decided to take on the challenge of running a half marathon, which kickstarted my adult athletic career.

With the start of some serious negative self-talk last week, I had forgotten that I have been in this space before wondering if I would be able to perform only to come out the other side having achieved the very goals that once seemed unsurmountable.

I'm still a newbie in the bodybuilding world. The first bodybuilding show I'll ever attend will be one in which I am competing. But I have been a newbie in sport before. And, if my life extends long enough, God willing, I'll be a newbie again.

This week I'm in a much better head space. I'm remembering the Rebecca who was not blessed with tremendous genetic ability yet fought her way to a Boston Marathon qualification and completion. I'm harnessing the energy of the Rebecca that learned how to ride horses in her 40s and went on to compete in 50 and 75 mile endurance horse races with top ten placings.

This week it dawned on me that I have a track record of ending decades of my life with huge athletic goals. My first marathon was in my transition from age 29 to 30. Horses were my goal for age 39 to 40. And now as I'm rounding out my 4th decade of life, I'll be competing on stage in an itsy bitty teeny weenie velvet red bejeweled bikini.

It's different. The sport of bodybuilding. It's not about who crosses a finish line first. It's not just about speed and grit. There is grit and dedication and focus and perseverance to get to competition day. But it's also about poise, presentation, finess, and confidence. It's about being meticulous in all aspects of living, not just in the gym. It's about the many hours of hard work being packaged up and put under a spotlight for individual and comparative analysis. It's about being willing on my own terms with the support and guidance of my coach to work towards meeting a specific set of physical criterion predetermined by others.

To do this requires intense, long term physical and nutritional training and execution. To do this well also requires long term mental training. Included in this are things like sleep, sunlight, and some form of mental training like meditation or visualization. If the mental and psychological side of this sport is not attended to, the physical and nutritional requirements are liable to be negatively impacted. Fatigue, illness, injury are just a few things that can stop progress in its tracks if one does not pay close attention to their body and their mind. Self-doubt and lack of confidence can play a massive role in recovery during training and prep and wreak havoc on posing practice and performance on stage. 

The majority of our work has been done to get my body to be ready for stage. My weight is holding steady and we are at the point of tweaking and fine tuning. But just like with posing, the mental side of this sport is often underestimated by new and maybe even seasoned competitors. I momentarily forgot this last week. With a reminder from Annie to jolt me out of my downward motion, I now remember this critical component. 

I have fallen into a routine with my plan. After working with Coach Chantel for almost a year, I have learned how to (mostly) execute on her plans for me. She feels I'm ready for this competition and I have placed my absolute trust into her. Because of her coaching and guidance, I have gotten so much better at setting my meals ahead of time and sticking really close to them to hit my macro targets. I'm so much better at water intake, which honestly, if you know me, has always been a huge struggle. My remaining six weeks will be focused on getting my head in the game and making this the best possible experience for me through mental training and visualization.

In the book, The Mental Edge - Maximize Your Sports Potential with the Mind-Body Connection, author Kenneth Baum states the following:

"Over the years, I've discovered that every change in your mental or emotional state is accompanied by a corresponding shift in your physical state. So a key part of the Mental Edge is learning to minimize your mind's distracting and counterproductive messages and signals to your body."

I've proven to MYSELF before that I am an athlete. And I will prove it to myself again. I've put in the work. I've done my weekly check ins every single week for almost a year. I belong on stage for me. Yes, I'll be competing against others, but this competition will also serve as a thank you to my body for bringing the best of myself that I can bring in this moment. And to honor THIS body for the tremendous amount of work it has been able to endure.

Competition day will be a day of celebration - no matter what the results! As long as I remember this, I'll be able to shut off the noise around me.

Here's to six more weeks before Comp Day!

To Dye or Not to Dye - Is Hair Really the Issue?

I dropped to a new low weight today since summer of 2022 of 113.2 lbs. It won’t be long before I’m at the lowest weight I have ever been since my food restriction phase in high school. Those were some of the darkest days of my life besides the first couple of years after my divorce…

The hardest part of having ADHD to me is this notion that I HAVE to set multiple massive goals for myself and constantly be running. The intense amount of pressure I place on myself to always be striving is as innate a part of me as cravings for food, sleep, sex, or connection.

Part of it stems from the sheer excitement I get at the thought of working towards a big goal. I get an idea (or several ideas) and they just HAVE to get done. They become an all encompassing target. If something stands in my way, it ends up like a house within a tornado being uprooted and thrown to the side. I become a tornado fixated on one goal.

I feel I HAVE to be like this. Because if I am not, the alternative is going back to that little girl who used to sit in front of computer games or on the couch in front of the TV for hours and hours and hours whilst being oblivious to all that was going on around me.

I need novel, competitive, challenging things in my life to engage my mind and keep me moving. If I cannot find novelty, competition or challenge in an activity, then I’m rendered back to the couch in a state of catatonia.

All my life I have struggled with moderation. I’m either on or I’m off. I’m in or I’m out. I'm drinking every night or I'm abstaining from alcohol altogether. I'm either tracking every single calorie I eat or I'm tracking nothing. I’m really happy and communicative and joyful or I’m a sobbing ball of dough in my bed.

An interesting thing I have learned about ADHD this past year is that those of us with it tend to do extremely well in life when we are juggling multiple balls at the same time. We thrive in the space of vibrancy and activity. So many times, others have told me to scale things back and make room for fewer passions. The problem is as soon as I create space for emptiness, it is immediately filled again. My brain does not know how to leave a space empty. Or if I do this, I become sad and downtrodden. I am at my best if I am working towards more that one goal at a time.

The problem is there is a limit to how many balls one can manage in the air at the same time. Energy levels are not infinite. How does one find the right balance when juggling so much at once? How many balls are just the right number before they all come crashing down?

Life is ever-changing. The pathway to our goals ebbs and flows as we work towards them. Just when we think we have the right balance, something may enter outside of our control to alter that balance.

This is the space in which I find myself now.

I have so many goals in front of me that I want to all be achieved (or at least working towards) at the same time. The following is an abbreviated, yes abbreviated, list of my current goals:

• Prepare for bikini bodybuilding competition in April 
• Train my primary horse to compete in 50 mile endurance rides 
• Train my other horses to go at least 25 mile distances or long trail rides 
• Learn Spanish with consistent Duolingo practice 
• Maintain a financial budget and work towards debt expulsion and larger savings 
• Find a home for everything within my home and discard remaining items 
• Read 24 books in 2024 (actually way more because I’m in 2 book clubs and currently have 7 items checked out of the library plus 4 more that I just bought on Amazon) 
• Get back to learning how to play the piano better. (Remember the keyboard I bought several months ago?)
• Organize my entire history of photos and create photo books of every year from the time my children were born til now. (I signed up and paid for a Photo Project course and Membership to teach me skills to do this.) 
• Somehow find a way to maintain relationships with my spouse, family and friends in the midst of all of this 
• Design, fund, and build our patio and porch 
• Fund and coordinate painting the outside of our home and property buildings 
• Design, fund, and landscape our property 
• Learn how to drive Trevor’s truck pulling my LQ without destroying anything or hurting anyone in the process 
• Write a book 
• Keep a blog 
• Start a podcast 
• Keep my job
• Figure out how to best celebrate my upcoming 50th birthday

This list is not complete.

A friend told me yesterday that I’m really hard on myself. Oh, is that ever an understatement. It is something I have worked on my whole entire life.

What people don’t see much of are my down times. The times when I’m irritable and don’t know how to get moving. The times when I want to quit and just say what the hell or WHO the hell am I doing this all for? The times when I want to burrow myself in a hole and hope the world forgets that I exist.

I’ve bounced back much quicker from these lows this past year. As I have learned about myself and the impact having ADHD has on my perception of things, I have been able to reframe many of my thoughts. I have learned that not everyone has these same thoughts or perspectives. (That was honestly a shocker.) That my thoughts are just thoughts and they do not reflect my worth or who I am as a person. I have learned that my thoughts or perspective are often very skewed.

Today, I’m really struggling. I have lost 11% of my body weight in less than 3 months. By the time I reach my goal for my bodybuilding competition, I’ll end losing about 15% of my body weight.

Honestly, the food restriction hasn’t been as hard as I thought. Don't get me wrong. It's not easy by any means. It's just not the hardest part of all of this. It is, however, harder on Trevor than I imagined it would be. Sometimes he likes to show his love by preparing food for me. Not being able to do so, since I need to weigh out every morsel that goes into my mouth, seems to be harder on him than it has been on me.

Though I am starting to have more cravings for certain foods I enjoy, I had those cravings before starting my bulk followed by prep processes. The hardest part of prep is that while I have more time now due to less time spent preparing and eating food, I have considerably less energy. My sleep is always a challenge working night shift, but it’s even more disrupted now.

There are minimal criteria things I need to get done in a day including working, lifting, cardio, eating, and sleeping. And when there is no energy or motivation to get even those things done or if I don’t get proper sleep and rest, all my other things become much harder to do.

I have learned that my mood is greatly impacted both by less sleep and less time spent in the sunshine. The combination of my energy being lower along with the colder weather this week has kept me from riding my horses the way I had planned to on my off days. It’s seriously amazing how time spent outdoors with my horses lifts my mood.

I also have felt significantly colder since losing body fat. I often find myself chilled to the bone despite having multiple layers of clothing on. I didn’t anticipate this. I should have. But I didn’t.

I knew I would have challenges entering the sport of bikini bodybuilding. I knew it would be very expensive. I knew the sport encouraged women to conform to a certain look when competing. I knew that not doing so would likely hinder their placing. I knew that this included things that have nothing to do with the performance level of building muscle and dieting down to reveal and showcase that muscle. I knew that many (if not most) women competing in NPC bodybuilding take steroids.

I have chosen to fit the mold with my plans to wear the heels, the jewelry, the makeup, the hair extensions, the blinged out suit on competition day. I have chosen to spend the money to do all these things and travel to another state and pay for the airfare, the host hotel, the expensive entry fees and show date tickets for my sister and husband to attend. I’ve succumbed to the fact that this is a misogynistic sport that rewards the top male bodybuilders with significant amounts more money than their top female counterparts. I am aware that I will never recoup the money that I spend on this goal and that I need to be ok with just doing it for myself.

I internally debated all of these things before making the leap to commit to this goal and decided to push forward with it anyway. My sister asked me early on why I wouldn’t want to save all my money and just train and diet down on my own and then have a photoshoot and go on a vacation once I reached my goal look.

The problem is I’m not a person that can do that. Definitely not right now and maybe not ever. I need to have a big goal with lots of accountability along the way to reach it. It needs to be novel, competitive, and challenging in order to capture my attention enough to do it. I talked to her about my struggles yesterday and rhetorically asked her why am I like this? Why can’t I just do like she suggested and spend my time and money going on fun weekend trips with her or with Trevor?

She said that I like to do hard things. She’s not wrong except for we should probably change the words from “I like to” to “I feel compelled to”. Compelled is much more accurate of a phrase.

The place where I find myself now though is one in which I have come to a crossroads. It’s funny that when the discussion came up with friends and family about steroids, I was able to draw a line in the sands and say no to that piece. I’m committed to seeing what I can do with my body naturally.

But when discussion came up this week about ignoring the fact that I am aging by hiding my gray hair - either by dyeing it or by wearing a wig to cover it up, my heels found themselves digging into the proverbial sand. Several years ago, I bleached my hair blonde because my hair constantly looked like a skunk with my gray roots growing faster than I could keep up with the cost and time of salon appointments. I thought if I bleached my hair, it would blend better with the grays.

Well bleaching dark brown hair to blonde and not keeping up with maintenance still looks like crap. The cool silver of my grays still looked terrible against the yellow of my blonde. But now I also had to contend with the dryness, brittleness, and breakage associated with having bleach blonde hair.

In 2020, with covid shutting down many salons, I finally made the decision to let my hair go gray. I worked with my hairdresser after the salons reopened to make the transition to gray. I’m here to tell you that there are several ways to make this transition, but none of them are easy or quick decisions to make. One could just shave their head and let the grays grow in which is super quick and physically easy. But that was too hard of an emotional decision to make for me and was off the table.

So instead, my hairdresser spent months highlighting parts then low lighting parts and toning my hair each time to blend the grays on top with the natural browns of the bottom of my hair. As a result, each time I get my hair freshly toned, I surprisingly received many compliments from people on it. And now with it being messed with less often, it has grown to lengths I have never seen it grow to before! My hair was always so destroyed from perms (I grew up in the 80s after all) and from color that the question was always how much of it to chop off to not look like crap. Now the goal is how long can I get it while still not being annoyed by long hair.

I guess the idea of not embracing the concept of an aging woman still performing at a high enough level to get on stage to showcase her work is the limit for me. My biggest personal goals since my diagnosis of ADHD in February 2023 are ones involving self-discovery and self-acceptance. And what I want to share with others both in person, on social media, and in my blogs are my challenges and how I personally am working to overcome them. I love hearing about the challenges people, particularly women, have and how they work to overcome them. It's what I want to base my someday, maybe podcast on. I want to live in this social connection space of shared inspiration and growth.

I wonder what message it sends to cover up my gray hair, which will make me look like someone else. Someone who is not Rebecca. Rebecca can lift weights and still look like herself. Rebecca can bulk up and diet down and still look like herself. Rebecca can put on makeup and still look (mostly) like herself. (I suppose this one is debatable but with the stage lighting I don’t think I would look like myself without makeup either.)

What is it about my hair that throws things out of balance for me and makes me question all that I am doing? Why is THIS of all the lines to cross the one that has stopped me in my tracks? Is it timing? Is it because the discussion came up during a time when I made a big drop in food and weight and also had less sleep? Is my perception and perspective skewed as a result? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Am I just being dramatic over nothing? Why dig my heels in so deep?

But also I think, what happened to my rebel self that has the chutzpah to say I don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks or whether or not I win. I’m paying the money regardless and no one really truly cares in the end, right?

Why do I suddenly care that this decision will likely impact the judges’ perception and ranking of me? Why is hair so important? Or is hair just a focal point metaphor for something much larger?

Am I really more worried about how this is all will impact my relationship with food? My relationships with loved ones? My relationship with myself? Am I going to lose the essence of ME that I've worked so hard to find? Or is it something else entirely?

I don't know the answer. All I know is that I finally got 12 hours of sleep last night to slightly make up for a massive sleep deficit. And I need to go about my day while I sit on all of this for a bit.