Waking Up as a Retired Female Athlete

It sucks, hu? Today is the hardest day you will have filled with the most emotions but also the most potential.

Believe it or not, you made it! Day one is the hardest day but also the first one where the doors have been opened to limitless possibilities for all the things to come.

Completing your career in athletics is hard, emotion-filled, and also inevitable. Competition at the higher levels of athletics consume time and moments that non-athletes lived out in a different way. While retirement from sport may seem impossible, the first and perhaps most important fact is this: you are not alone.

Throughout your career, you have been supported and encouraged by teammates, coaches, friends, parents, athletic trainers, support staff, and fans who will forever value the time and attention you placed on being the best.

While this transition may seem daunting, I would like to highlight some small concepts that you may not have recognized throughout your time in athletics.

1. Elite athletics is not a place where sustainable, holistic health is fostered.

2. The margin for failure in elite athletics is microscopically small.

3. The tools provided for you to thrive following your athletic career is often very minimal.

Mad? Mind blown? Confused? That is okay. Each of these ideas demonstrates the inability to create sustainable life-modeled habits and skills necessary to hit the ground running after retirement. The average athlete takes 3-5 years to regain life satisfaction scores following retirement. It is my greatest hope that this content helps you to shatter statistical norms…not for the sake of statistics, but because it is what you deserve for you.

The morning after your last game as an elite athlete, getting out of bed may be one of the hardest and most confusing things you do. When your feet hit the ground, you know that it is real. It feels like everything has changed when very little really has.

Your room still looks the same.

Your clothes are still yours.

You still have the same friends you had before.

Yet you stand in front of the mirror disillusioned by the person you see staring back. For years you have been “the athlete”. People would introduce you and immediately provide your talents on the field/court. You were known by what you did. You stand there and ask yourself…

Will people still see me as an athlete?

Do I still want them to see me as an athlete?

Can I still enjoy my sport without the title of an athlete on a team?

Will my old teammates still talk to me?

Am I enough even though I just lost the thing that made me, me?

Your doubts, your fears, your apprehensions to take a step away from the mirror are all too tangible. So you just stand there, staring and not knowing where to step next. That is okay.

It is okay to not know what is next.

It is okay to not know how to feel about it.

It is okay to be guarded and hesitant as you step forward anyways.

Wherever you are in this journey is good. Everyone needs a starting point to push off

from. This is yours.

I’d like to challenge you with a quote from Theodore Roosevelt. The quote comes from a somewhat famous speech he gave that is known as “The Man in the Arena” speech. Roosevelt says this:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strive valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

You are in the arena, fighting for the best you can provide yourself in this life. This starting line is simply that: a place to start. The race you run is a choice that puts you in the middle of discomfort, uneasy, and challenge day in and day out. But being in the arena is the only things that counts. It is the only way to even risk succeeding. In the process, you will fail. Getting back up? That is the thing that defines you, not what put you down in the first place.

Choose the arena.

Choose to dare greatly despite all obstacles.

Choose to push off the start line.

Reflection Questions:

Define dreaming. Hint: not the type when you are asleep, but the aspirational type.

What values do you hold closest to you in life and why?