 or need to create a new identity for ourselves. Perhaps because our identity is being taken away from us against our will, or because an unfortunate event, or it's just time to rediscover our true selves. Have you ever had a time in your life when everything's going really well than something unexpected happens and messes up your plans? In my case, this has happened twice in my life. My husband and I had been together since I was 19 years old. I was the homemaker, the organizer, the emotional cheerleader, and the breadwinner. I was totally and utterly committed. I loved being married, and was looking forward to being a mother. Then one night, my husband, my partner, were 14 years, calmly and quietly at night, that he didn't love me anymore, and he was leaving. I'd been in this pair my entire adult life, and within 12 hours, he was gone, and I was alone in the world. My past was apparently worthless. My future, as I thought I knew, was gone. What I thought I knew, I didn't. It was brutal. First time, my whole identity was challenged, and I had to figure out who I was and why that I wasn't alive. I drew myself into sports. Like, by getting into sports, I mean I really took a deep dive. I chose to swim, bike, and run some 20 hours a week. I became an Ironman triathlete. My favorite event involved swimming 2.4 miles, biking 112 miles, and running a marathon back to back. A few years ago, I was on a good roll. I was being coached by one of the best triathlon coaches in the world. I had my first race of the season coming up in just a week, and I was chatting every day with my crush who lived in another state. I had a spring in myself. I was fit, and I was strong. On a Friday afternoon, I was doing my last hard bike session before this race. Hill rips on a local mountain road. Up hard, cruise down, up down, up down. Rolling home on the last dime. The last thing I remember was seeing this car turn right in front of me, and I remember thinking, I'm going to hit that car? It was so close, I was powerless. I don't remember the impact of crashing into the side of the car. I don't remember flying over the roof of the car and crashing into the tarmac, for which I'm really grateful to my brain. In the ER, they tended to wounds on my face, my shoulder, my left leg. They had CAT scans and X-rays, and no one would mention my right leg, which hurt like crazy. And I was completely strapped on so I couldn't see my own body. After about two hours, a surgeon came and broke the bad news that I had broken my right leg and my knee was pretty badly busted open. In a few hours, my world turned upside down. My crush texted them, excited to go this way to Europe the next day and wanted to chat. I apparently replied, I'm having kind of a bad day here, could we chat later? Everyone who's experienced this kind of sudden change had their entire identity threatened and survived, as most people do, will have done so in their own unique way. I'd like to share with you some things I've learned from these two times where my identity was threatened and how I redesigned my identity, reclaimed my face in the world. So others may see through their own view of your identity. When I was reinventing myself as an athlete in the aftermath of my broken marriage, many friends and family thought I just lost my mind. I joined a little triathlon club and my peers there advised that even if I could build up the physical strength to do a half-Hireman, which was my original goal, that that also required so much mental strength that I just wouldn't be fit for it, not in my state. Which was understandable given that I often turned up to swim practice and tears and it's really hard to swim when you're sobbing. So it was difficult for others to see me this grieving woman seemingly weak as someone fit to tackle grueling endurance races. And I'm mistaken. My grief fueled me. It enabled me to go deep and find where I could find joy and what I was prepared to suffer for. I find energy to cross some threshold of what I was physically and mentally capable of and pushing myself in the sport made me feel just totally alive. After the accident, mostly with strangers, I noticed that when you have a visual indicator that you're injured, people seem differently. You look like a victim, an invalid, someone in need of sympathy or judgment. You have to explain your situation to curious strangers. At an airport once, the man who was pushing my wheelchair asked if I had a job before I became disabled. The only ones who continued to treat me as an equal, even though I maybe didn't feel like it were my fellow athletes. And they shared their joys and pains with training and racing and we just asked how I was progressing with my rehab. One of my challenges was just climbing the stairs in my apartment, something so seemingly easy, so every day, but it was such a physical challenge that the hospital staff advised me just to crawl up and down the stairs. Instead, I had a physical therapist friend teach me how to do the standing up on my crutches. And then I started timing myself, of course. I remember one friend, Rachel, who's a world-class Ironman triathlete, having coffee with her one morning and her telling me about this crazy hard run session they done that morning, like ready to pass out, they were running so hard. And I told her about my latest effort on the stairs and laughed at what fuller opposites we were. And she said, no, we're not. It's basically the same. Deep down, my fellow athletes seemed to know and just accept that we were both challenging ourselves as best we could. Yes, it takes a community. I didn't do sport in my earlier life. I was a kid, we had doctors know together. I was sport through most of high school. And even when I started training, I didn't set out to become an athlete. I just fell in love with the process. Even once I've done several full distance Ironman races, I didn't feel like a real athlete. I find reassurance and acceptance of that identity through a sense of community, in particular with friendships with professional athletes. And sometimes they were the ones that really encouraged me and respected my efforts and welcomed me into this new world. I was once introduced to a group of professional athletes with heaviest-like approach, just slower. Once over, I spent a month training in France with a group of friends who were all professional athletes. On this one day, we were all going to do the same long bike ride. I set out a few hours early, I'd be slower. And this ride took me up and over to the French Alps. And it was, it re-end all day. I was cold and miserable. I had no way of thinking I might die of pneumonia or die of these trusty mitent descends in freezing fall. Like, just kept turning the pedals. I go back to the apartment some PRs, theater, to find my friends, sitting around a log fire. And one of them said, oh, God, we turned back after an hour. The weather's so bad. I apparently just muttered bastards on the back row. Changed into my running shoes and went straight back outside in the rain, did my run, finished the days, training hours for the plan. And I heard a letter that one of the prunes said to the rest, we need to keep you the fuck up. It was a huge boost having these people that I went up to not just accept me into their world, but to hear them say that maybe they could learn something from me, giving that sense of belonging, that sharing that common identity really helped. Not just shape, but let me enjoy that new identity as an athlete. But yeah, you don't need to be tough to get through your tough situation. We're not comfortable with other people's discomfort or even our own. We cross the road from the widow, unsure what to say, in the face of her grief. We don't like difficult experiences and we don't like pain or suffering. So our tendency is to resist those experiences, to push them away or pretend they're not happening. After my crash, a lot of people would say to me, oh, it could have been so much worse. And I even found myself consoling others who weren't sure what to say to me with, oh, it's okay, it could have been so much worse. And I knew when it's difficult for those around to handle as well. So I try and assure them that I love that I can have positive plans for my recovery, but sometimes I'm just really feeling this struggle right now. Facing injury or pain doesn't require a binary response. I can have room in my head for the good and the bad. I'm an independent person, especially so the last few years. After that crash, my injuries meant that I couldn't even see if I'd get in and out of the shower by myself for the first few weeks. Things like standing up to cook a meal were so exhausting that I barely have the energy to eat it. So I simply had to ask for help and be honest with myself and with my friends and what I did. I find there are three stages to getting better at this. Step one is removing all the fine from your answers. Step two is answering honestly when people ask, is there anything I can do to help? And step three is just asking for that help unprompted. And even though it's uncomfortable, I find it's really helpful to be able to acknowledge the pain of others, to be able to be vulnerable, and just say, yes, I would love your help. Also just to respond to yourself with curiosity, like during a marathon, you'd speak to yourself differently at different stages. Maybe at the start you have a lot of nervous energy and you didn't physiastically push yourself. You're ready, go get it. To the middle where you're really starting to struggle and you speak externally to yourself to stay on track, stay strong, don't walk. To the final stretch where you're exhausted and you're maybe gently coach yourself, you're nearly there, keep going. This is exactly the way I try to respond to myself just with empathy and curiosity. To respond to yourself with an energy that matches the current state. While I've been in rehab, I've struggled with the difference between what I used to be able to do and what I could do now. When I was given the go-ahead to walk after being on crutches for months, I find that I didn't know how. When your leg hasn't borne weight for several months, the muscles waste away, the tendons and the nerve enzymes and your foot, say, hasn't had contact with the ground. Your whole leg forgets how to go through the motion of walking and it sounds ridiculous that even your arms haven't been glued to the handles of crutches. Forget that they're meant to take part in this process as well. So here I am, this badass endurance athlete having a physical therapist teach me how one goes through the motions of walking. I had to learn to try and respond to myself with compassion and curiosity. And my reminder to do that has been to just say to myself, huh, that's interesting. So my leg doesn't remember how to walk. That's interesting. I ask myself, how can I respond to this? What is life expecting of me now in this moment? I've learned that it's useful to be a little pessimistic. I've heard some professional athletes write about injury as a mental challenge, a temporary setback, but what if it's not? What do you do if the setback is permanent? Permanent scars on my face and body, which is annoying, but tolerable? But what if I never gain free? What if I can never run again? What if I can't be an athlete? Early on, I closed my mind to these thoughts. When I was first told I had broken leg in the shock, I didn't really grasp the severity of the situation. I thought I maybe just have to be patient for this 12 week number that I was talking about and then I could hop back to it. I was looking up races some 14 weeks out. So, some nine months after the initial crash, when I was still in pain, still definitely unable to run, I learned that I needed surgery on my knee again, but they actually had to break my leg again to offer the best chance of a fix. So, facing a freshly broken leg and a fresh 12 weeks on crutches, I knew something of the difficulty I had. I knew the recovery doesn't follow a linear progression and that it could be demoralizing and that it would be slow. So, I started confronting those worst case scenarios that I would just simply never run again. I find that facing the worst case scenarios saps it as much of its power. It's like an antidote to the anxiety. It's also likely that when things do go wrong, which they will, they'll go less wrong than those worst case fears that you did face. I've moved between trying to push through, maybe slightly deluded by how temporary the setback is, to pondering the worst case scenario that the setback is permanent. I think the least sensible balance is to embrace the insecurity of just not knowing, but there are definitely frequent challenges to embracing that insecurity. How much should I push? How much is too much? How much should I be confident and how much should I doubt? So, the component parts of that identity, I've thought a lot about what the identity of an athlete means to me. If I break it up into component parts, racing is definitely my component. As I can't run, I can't race, but I can look at all my component parts and ask myself, can I do enough of these parts to still feel like an athlete? Can I give myself permission that being good enough is enough for another? At its core, I think being an athlete is like a commitment to pursuing what your body and mind is capable of. So I tell myself then, like, I'm still doing that. If I can still seek ways to pursue those core goals, then I can maintain the identity of an athlete and that sense of self. Like, I've been built on that, I am an endurance athlete after all. I don't know what professional athletes, when they're retiring for a reason, are often advised to reinvent themselves, to move away from thinking of themselves as an athlete, to something else, a businesswoman, a student, a parent. I'm afraid of going through that situation. Does not end, her having seen my experience has helped her realize that, actually, she doesn't need to take out advice. And yes, she has to adjust to new limits that is reinventing herself, but she doesn't have to discard that identity as an athlete, it's part of who she is. There is however a danger in over-identifying with one identity, or identity being able. In the tech world, we have an unhealthy trend to associate our identity with our work place, like this old post-keemie is a Githubber. I love my work, but I want to be defined by where I work. When I started out as a programmer, I was completely uncomfortable with the label programmer, because I trained as a fine artist, so clearly I wasn't a real programmer. For about 10 years, I avoided identifying myself as a programmer, even though I weren't code for a living. And I had just got comfortable with that label when a friend advised me, you should call yourself an engineer. Engineers get paid more than programmers, and pretty much for that moment, I was being okay calling myself an engineer. Making software is part of what I do with my life, but who I work for is not who I am. If we identify too closely with our job, what happens to that identity if the job changes? What would happen if you lost your job? Who are you then? So a moral of the story, perhaps it's healthier to have elastic identity, to be aware of all of the labels that make up this entity known as you, and what they mean to you right now. You should be prepared for the times when you might have to struggle to keep that identity, or the times you'll have to adapt it, or evolve it, or even let it go. I've learned that I'm not going to be either same athlete as I once was. I just don't know yet how that will be true. But I am committed to the process of finding out and trying to influence that outcome as best I can. The French have a wonderful phrase. They shout bon courage to cyclists climbing up mountains. The root of the word courage is core, the Latin for heart. And technically, we translate this phrase to mean good luck. But it means so much more than that. There's an empathy to it. We all suffer. Keep going, put your heart into it. You can't finish an ironing by putting your heart, body, and soul into it. And the same applies to anything difficult that we try to tackle in life. Sometimes putting your heart into it means hanging there to fight. Maybe sometimes it means to just curl up and have a good cry. I think it means being true and compassionate to whatever you need in that moment. You wouldn't identify with being an athlete, or a wife, or a mother if you felt half-hearted about it. Whatever identity is important to you throw your whole heart of intention into it. Know what it means to you to be an athlete, a wife, a husband, a mother, a father, a friend, a manager, a designer, or an engineer. Know too that you're simply human and when something happens out of your control, which it will, that the one thing you can control is how you respond. Bon courage. Thank you.