By Alana Hadley

Hi, everyone! It’s been a while since I've written a blog, and my social media updates have been pretty inconsistent since the start of the year. So I figured it was time to explain what's going on with my running, if I am training for anything, and where I’m at physically, mentally, and emotionally.

I’m going to just come out and say I am currently dealing with anxiety in my running and losing confidence in myself. The stress of following my own passion for longer distances and having people constantly wish for me to fail made me doubt I was actually cut out to run marathons. I started losing my passion for my running, and training quickly became something I had to do rather than something that I wanted to do.

With this anxiety came panic attacks during hard workouts where I felt like I couldn't breathe, and all I could think was, “I can’t do this.” I eventually had enough stress, and during the last semester of school, I took off running for an eight-week period and only ran when I felt like it to try and figure out what was going on with me and get myself into a better mental state.

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Realizing my anxiety was caused by self-doubt and loss of confidence wasn’t easy to accept. But it finally came to a head this summer after many conversations with my parents. I was in denial for the longest time, and subconsciously knew the root cause of my anxiety, but did not want to admit it to myself or anyone else. I always responded in my default, “I don’t know,” when my parents would ask questions to try and help me. It was hard on them to keep seeing me falling down little by little until I pretty much hit rock bottom and just gave up on hard workouts for those eight weeks. Once summer started, it was time to take a step back and figure out what I wanted in my life.

Along with the setback in my running, I found myself in a tough financial situation when it came to paying for college, and ended up getting a full-time job at an Early Childhood Development Center near my house. I'm currently working 40 hour weeks to be able to pay for next year. Once I got my job, I quickly realized the position I had put myself in by refusing to admit to anyone what was going on with my running. It took a bunch of tears, but once I finally admitted to my parents that I really did want to be a professional marathon runner but didn’t feel like I was good enough to accomplish that, I felt as though a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders, and I felt so much lighter after that.

After that pivotal talk, my parents and I began to make a plan to turn my dreams back into goals, and figured out where I am and where I want to be. This summer is all about finding myself again, physically and mentally. I definitely got really out of shape during that eight-week period, and this summer is about gaining as much fitness as I can back before I start school again and try to figure out how to deal with my anxiety. We have broken the summer up into three segments, and instead of running races at the end of each segment, I am doing a half marathon time trial to see the improvement in my fitness and work on dealing with my anxiety before I run another race. Since that talk, I have completed my first of the three segments, and completed my first time trial last Sunday. I will admit I had a panic attack before the time trial—I honestly didn’t want to even start it, and kept thinking I wasn’t ready for it and I wouldn’t be able to follow the race plan my dad had given me. I was actually shaking the last half an hour before I started. I was able to talk myself out of it and remind myself that this time trial was a fitness marker to see where I was. I also had to remind myself my dad would never give me a race plan that he didn’t believe in 100 percent. Since my self-confidence was still shot, I ran that time trial based on the confidence I had in my dad, and I ended up coming out on top—in the one-minute target zone my dad gave me, I hit it right in the middle. I got the feeling of accomplishment back—the feeling you have after a race you're proud of; a feeling I hadn’t enjoyed in such a long time. It helped make the fire of my passion burn a little brighter. After this summer of training and my time trials, I plan on completing a fall marathon to get myself back to where I want to be. I’m not sure which marathon it’ll be or any other races I will do this fall, but I know I want to get back into racing.

I am nowhere near having my self-confidence all the way back, and my anxiety isn't close to being completely gone, but I am on the path of recovery and working hard to get my fitness and mental aspects back to where they were when I qualified for the Olympic Trials as a 16 year-old. Anxiety doesn’t go away in the blink of an eye—it takes a lot of time, effort, and support, as well as arguing with myself and convincing myself that I CAN do this and that I AM good enough. The important part is I've come to accept I do have anxiety and that I had lost all confidence in myself and in my running. I’m building myself back up and I have all the support of my family and friends behind me helping me on this hard journey.

By reevaluating everything, I have also come to realize—with the help of my parents of course ;)—that all of my supporters have been in the dark when it comes to what has been happening in my running. When you keep hearing the negativity of the loud minority, it can be difficult to focus on the positivity of others who do support and believe in you. That is something I want to work on fixing, so I have created a social media plan that I will try to implement this summer as well. In the coming weekends, I hope to reconfigure my website/blog and really start utilizing all my accounts, including Twitter, my Facebook Athlete Page, Instagram, LinkedIn, and AthleteBiz. 

I really want to thank all of you for all the support you have been giving me no matter what—words can’t describe how much I appreciate it. I will work on keeping everyone in the loop and learning to not shut everyone out when I struggle with my running. Have an amazing summer; it’s flying by. :)

This blog was originally published on Hadley's blog Growing Up Fast