Surrender.

It’s a beautiful word isn’t it? It even sounds beautiful to the ear. The soft s blends perfectly into the rolling of the r’s into the gentle der at the end. Unfortunately for me, the actual process of surrender is never as easy or as beautiful as saying the word.

My whole life is about surrender by the way. If I could just master surrender, oh how easy life would be. Surrender would be my slave. Control would flood every corner of my universe and feel oh so good. Hmmm. Yes the irony of controlling surrender isn’t lost on me. Perhaps that is why I have such a difficult time with surrender. I am simply driven to try to control every aspect about it versus simply abandoning myself in it.

The triathlon is making me realize that I need to surrender my body issues. I can not get away from my body in this big training process. Every freaking waking moment is taken up thinking about exploiting the good and refining the bad. I am having a near anxiety attack over the thought of exercising in a hoard of women with even worse… crowds watching. Good Lord… what have I done? I am worried about my skin. I am worried about my weight. I am worried about what to wear. I am worried about what people will be thinking about my skin, weight and what I am wearing. I am worried more about other people’s judgments then I am about actually performing the stupid thing. Shouldn’t I be worried about my endurance? My strength? My abilities? I mean I have not done anything athletic in my *life* and what am I worried about? I’m worried about if I can find a swimsuit with a long enough torso and how fat I will look plugging away on a 3 mile run.

It is obviously time for me to give up my suffering over this body for happiness. My body is going to serve me in the event right? Who cares about vanity? About over achieving? About what the hell you are going to wear? What would happen if I simply let all this crap go and not worried about it? What if I boxed it all up and simply pushed way far back in my mind and focused instead on the joy of having my body work FOR me for once? Would it come back to haunt me because I didn’t process it? Is there a process to surrender or is it simply like jumping off a cliff? Once you are in a free fall of surrender, the laws of nature – like gravity – simply take over.

I do not know how to get past my issues about what other people think of me doing exercise. I feel judged. I do recognize that maybe I am creating chaos around what I will look like because I am uncomfortable and that chaos can be a distraction for me to focus on. If I focus on that, then I don’t have to focus on the fact I have put myself into three hours of pure hell that will test my body in ways I can not even contemplate – and even worse – I’m doing something I can not possibly do “well” in. The over achiver rarely puts herself in a place where she can not over achieve right? And that feels very uncomfy. Or maybe it’s just I know that my body image is still so screwed up I can’t comprehend how others really see me.

Perhaps that is the big lesson I am supposed to learn in all this. That in the throngs of 3500 people (4000 entries for the Tri…and it was only open for 4 days and they say 500 will drop out before it even begins) no one is going to be watching the former morbidly obese girl and thinking anything more then “wow… she’s doing it”. No one is going to be passing judgment on my jiggly legs, my saggy arms, or what cute outfit I am not wearing because they do not make them in fat giraffe sizes. Honestly Kym… no one cares.

Maybe it’s time for me to surrender to all this. Because if I am spending all my time focusing on what “might be in the future” or analyzing why I am so screwed up from my past — I am not really enjoying the present am I?

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