On Saturday, I was in midtown for a Cycle for Survival ride. (If you’ve got the chance to be a part of one, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It was SO inspiring.) I heard some incredible speeches that day — including one from Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast Nastia Liukin.
She told this great story. She said that when she was a kid, she’d come home after a bad day and try to quit gymnastics, but her mom wouldn’t let her. “You can quit,” her mom would say, “but you can’t quit until after you’ve had a good day.” (Both of her parents were gymnasts, so they may have known a thing or two about tough days at the gym.)
So she’d go back to the gym day after day, until she finally had a good day. And on that good day, she’d come home, and her mom would see the smile on her face. ”OK,” her mom would ask her. “Do you still want to quit now?”
Of course, Liukin wouldn’t — and she went on to become one of the most decorated Olympians in U.S. gymnastics history.
I listened to that story and nodded along the whole time. You’ve probably experienced it, too: Things are never as quite bad as they seem on your worst days, and never quite as good as they feel on your best days. But sometimes, when you’re in a lull, you find little ways to dig yourself out and get back to a better place. It’s easy to want to give up when things are bad. It’s much harder to be resilient enough to keep pushing through with the work you need to do.
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That very shaky GIF was the view from my bike at last week’s Cycle ride.