We all face scary things now and then. Sometimes, it’s just silly stuff, like a fake mummy, but fear can also be real. The question is: What do we do in the face of fear?
In high school, I pole vaulted, and I got scared during my senior year. I broke a few poles in just a couple weeks.
I broke one pole just practicing my plant, when you hit the far tip of the pole in a metal box buried in the ground. In the gym, I jogged toward a corner, gently planted my pole where the walls a floor come together, leaned into it a little and the bent pole snapped. The part still in my hands shot back like a pendulum and cracked me in the jaw, sending me sliding backward across the gym floor.
Not long after that, I broke a pole jumping outside. When a pole breaks, you usually do a backflip and–hopefully–land in the pit. It’s disorienting more than anything. Two fast breaks, though, broke down my confidence.
To pole vault, you can’t think about a pole breaking as you charge down the runway toward your plant. If you slow down at all, bad things can happen.
Not long after breaking two poles, I let the fear win on one vault, and I slowed down. As soon as I planted my pole, it felt wrong. Without the normal drive, I shot toward the right. I hit an upright–one of the metal poles that holds up the crossbar–and got my legs tangled in it at 12 feet or so off the ground, and not over the landing pit. Luckily, I held onto my pole, the upright broke and I just rode the pole back to the ground, completely unhurt … but more scared than ever.
The next week, I broke another pole. After that–three broken poles in a few weeks and one really bad and very edgy jump–I dreaded vaulting again.
But deep down, I loved pole vaulting. On a good day, it feels like flying. You shoot into the sky like a rocket, hang in the air for an instant and then plummet into a soft landing pit. It’s a rush, a great ride. It’s incredible!
After years of vaulting, I couldn’t let the fear win. So one day after breaking the third pole, I stood at the end of the runway in front of a hometown crowd. Using a new pole, one that I’d only tried a couple times, it all felt very sketchy.
“Push it away,” I whispered to myself as I closed my eyes for a few seconds. “Push it far away.”
When I opened my eyes, I could only see the end of the runway and nothing between it and me. I didn’t hear anything, except my inner voice saying, “Fast, fast, fast.”
So I pushed to do just one thing: Run fast. I planted my pole at full speed. That new pole bent deeply and then catapulted me high into the air.
From then on, I realized that fear can never win if we face if down and keep pushing it away.
–WORDS OF THE WEEK–
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear–not absence of fear.”
~Mark Twain
