Fitness should not feel forced, fitness should be for life, you should always put yourself first

Terra Jackson

Terra is a hybrid athlete, top 20 in Hyrox and Deka record holder. In her own words she’s a person that helps others, whom people can talk to (I’m a witness of this 🙂) and gets excited when people do things that they don’t believe themselves to be capable. She loves to support her friends and community while being her best self.

What I learned from Terra?

Discover the balance in racing/training:

• Sports should make you feel excited
• Give yourself time to desire a competition. Mental burn can hit as hard as physical burn. Sometimes you need to push back
• When finding a balance, learn to listen to yourself. For example, for some lack of sleep, appetite or motivation, weight loss, or nausea are signs of over training.
• Ask yourself, “How can I enjoy sports and see progress?”
• If you don’t want to train most of your sessions, you are doing too much. Re-evaluate what you are doing and how to make training more exciting.
• If you are not willing to put your best effort on you sport, re-evaluate who you are and what you are doing.

Facing injuries:

• In sports, an injury can make you go through grief stages. You start denying, then you feel sad after you see that you could do anything and now you don’t. Specially if big events are coming. Then comes acceptance with a clear vision: a race doesn’t define your life. You don’t want to put yourself on a worse position.
• A long term view on recovering from injuries is that you don’t want to start a season with the pressure of knowing that something is wrong, specially in a sport with a high frequency of races.
• Sport isn’t really important but it is something that you are privileged to do, health is more important.
• You can learn to work through an injury by being smart. If you are continuously getting worse it needs to be addressed. Balance discomfort and health and fuel well your body.

Finding the ally in the mind rather than the enemy:

On Terra’s own experience:

Anxiety over a race used to keep her from sleep or eat. A good result was happy for 5 minutes. A bad result had a negative impact for months. Then asked herself:

“What happens if you lose? Are you racing again? yes”

She concluded that she’s always driven to improve herself, people will remember what a great friend she was rather than if she won or lost. As athletes we have a small window of competition time. Is not worth being anxious all the time.

This reframing helped her to settle as her authentic self in how she trains and is. After this, the world saw her best performances ever.