The start of my journey to self discovery

Hi,

If you don’t already know, my name is Chaundra.

I am a Canadian and am currently completing my Masters of Communication degree at Bond University in the Gold Coast, in Queensland Australia.

A skeleton of Background info:

I grew up as an obese child. I wasn’t big boned, or naturally thick, I was for lack of a better phrase, fat. Contradicting this impending body shape, I was a figure skater. I was neither good, nor bad (story of my life) but was simply mediocre. However, I always had big dreams, especially ones that were disproportionate to my level of talent.

Anyways…

In grade 7 I started rowing at a summer camp, and I didn’t love it, but I also didn’t hate it, and similar to figure skating I was mediocre. I ended up returning to camp the following year, which then lead to me joining the high school team.

Growing up obese leaves you with very little confidence. It was like I had developed a reverse halo effect. I believed because I didn’t look like society said I should that I wasn’t enough. This feeling has yet to go away. Though this perspective may seem like a negative, it has shaped the person that I am today.

Throughout high school I was obsessed with being better. With losing weight. With being popular. With being pretty.

I became obsessive with rowing, but maybe in the wrong way. I was never good, but I worked hard, I never stopped. But what I was doing I might now call junk miles. I was still figure skating at the time, and participating in other after school activities such as yearbook and student’s council. On top of this, and then rowing practice which occurred six days a week, I became obsessed with the elliptical machine we had at our house. I used the machine for exactly one hour, every single day. If I didn’t use it, I could feel myself getting bigger. Additionally, I did 10 nonstop minutes of crunches, every night before I went to sleep. Obsessive. Not that any of this worked. But I wanted it. I wanted to be great at something, and I wanted to be great at rowing. This never happened. I never lost the weight, and I still haven’t. My self esteem hasn’t gotten any better, and if anything it may be worse. Conversely, the obsessiveness continued to grow.

Upon graduating high school, I enrolled at the University of Western Ontario, because in my opinion, they had the best rowing program. I had no career prospects and I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I picked a school based on my what now seems to be potentially delusional dreams. I don’t think I have ever worked as hard for something as I did at Western. I never took time off, I was always chasing that dream, but for some reason I was increasingly becoming more unhappy.

You see, the system there is designed for the naturally talented, it weeds out those that don’t meet their height or weight requirements, which was me in a nutshell. But I never stopped, I kept chasing that dream, regardless of the lack of support that I felt, or the constant negativity. I remember there were times where the program was set for 13-15 hours of training per week, and I was training 20+ on my own. No one told me to do it, and no one was holding my hand or guiding me, it was just mediocre me, trying to be the best.

Eventually, I ended up injuring my back, quite badly in fact. Still I took no time off. I could barely walk, but I did whatever I could. This meant that I spent a lot of time on the spin bikes at the gym, because I hadn’t ridden a bike since I was around 12, and I also started swimming, something I hadn’t done since grade 4. Spending so much time on the spin bikes begins to becoming numbing, so I started watching movies and whatever I could find on YouTube. Then one day, I was sitting at a cafe at school, just about to head over the gym, for my second bike session of the day, when I saw a post on Facebook. It was labeld the most inspiring 10 minutes you will ever watch, and it happend to be the last 10 minutes of the NBC recap of the Kona Ironman World Championships from 2011.

Now I had heard the words Ironman, but I never really knew what it was, but this video captivated me, and I had to watch the rest. So that day on the bike I watched the full NBC recap, and from that day on I was hooked. I had to be an Ironman.

But I was still in school, and eventually my back got better, so I jumped back into my obsessively unhealthy rowing routine. It was in this time, that UWO broke me. Like fully broke me. But I couldn’t stop. I was miserable, but the grind continued on as it always had.

Finally, I was about to graduate, and I had been accepted into a field course, where I would go to Madagascar for two months with the Anthropology department. I knew that to me, this meant if I went it would most likely be the end of my rowing career, because if I chose to stay I would row that summer, and then be stuck. I then went to talk to our coach Volker about the summer program. He essentially told me that I (a five year veteran on the team) was not allowed to a part of the summer program because I would not be returning to school in the fall. Even though, each summer severa

l rowers were in the same situation as I were a part of the club. But it was this type of non-support that I had felt for five years. Though this was a harsh reality for me to face, it forced me to quit. And I perhaps have never been so grateful.

I went to Madagascar that summer, and had a life changing and humbling experience. When I returned I found that I had been accepted to Bond University which is in Australia. I hummed and hawed about the decision, and ultimately, my mom convinced me to go, saying that I would later regret not taking the experience. I decided that if I was going to Australia, why not do an Ironman along the way. Since I had been obsessed with them for two years, it was time for me to follow through.

I went to sign up, but then decided that signing up for the full with no triathlon experience wouldn’t be the greatest idea. Especially because I knew it would take a full time commitment to training and I wasn’t sure what the commitment with my studies would be like, as it was a new school and completely different system. So instead I signed up for a 70.3 (half ironman), and that’s where my real journey begins.