Meditation Every Damn Day
Draft Legal Nationals 2017: Turns out I’d been training for this.
Right after Worlds in Rotterdam, we took the camper down to Sarasota so I could do my first draft legal race. The day before race day, the triathlon was turned into a duathlon—my first duathlon.
The idea of running fast without biking first seemed barbaric to me so I hoped we’d all agree to a nice warmup pace for the first run. Apparently that’s not how you play duathlon. We were balls to the wall from the start and in and out of T1 with high heart rates.
I was riding with a pack right out of transition, when a quarter of the way through the first loop I heard, “On your right, Kelsey.” I looked to my right and saw maybe 12 inches of pavement between me and a wooden post on the side of the road. I had just enough time to say, “oh sh!t” and the next thing I knew, I’d hit the pavement hard. (I later learned my handlebars got tangled with those of the woman who tried to pass me on the inside.)
My taco-ed wheel was on one side of the road and my bike was on the other. I gathered myself and my stuff and moved off the course. Instead of my first duathlon or draft legal race, this would be my first DNF.
As I stood there with blood pouring out of my elbow, hip and knee, I was present. I was centered. I was.
I didn’t notice this on my own. My friend @hutchisonjen told me she had never seen someone so centered after crashing in a race. And that’s when I realized that I’d been training for this.
I started a meditation practice in 2014, but it was inconsistent. I trained with a meditation teacher in 2015, but was still wobbly on my commitment to my practice. It wasn’t until we started our first camper adventure in January 2016 that meditation became a daily non-negotiable. I meditated at least once a day. Every. Damn. Day.
I could see little differences in my daily life. I felt more aware, and I felt like I flowed with my ADHD instead of fighting it. But it wasn’t until Jen’s comment that I realized I had been training for this moment—bleeding on the side of the road with my bike in pieces and DNFing a race I’d been excited about—that I really understood the value of all that practice.