Trial and error

Growing up finding that sport…

I swam my first swimming race when I was 9 years old. Nearly 12 years ago now I was up on that diving block wait for the ‘take your marks… (beep)’. I can’t imagine I was swimming that fast, and it probably also was only just a single 25m length, but at the time it was a big deal. The night before, my Dad fed me a big bowl of pasta, made sure I was in bed at 8pm, and provided me with the pre-race motivational speech. The nerves the morning of my one length race were incredibly high, I felt sick to my stomach, but as soon as I got into that water I knew exactly what to do.

Fast forward a few years I’m now 12. Still competitively swimming but also just starting high school. Making new friends, 5 lessons a day, trying out new sports, starting to find what it is I enjoy in and out of the classroom – it’s an overwhelming and busy time. Looking back at it now I really wish I stressed less being young starting high school, but at the time I guess that’s just how we all feel when walking into a new environment. PE was always my favourite hour of the week in school, probably because I just enjoy doing anything I’m good at (not so much the things I’m bad at). I did a bit of cross country in my early years of high school, some athletics too. I realised I was actually quite decent at a lot of sports and started to take up more and more. Hockey was a big one when I hit around 13/14. I played for my high school’s ‘A’ team, and captained a few matches too. I enjoyed being part of a team, competing with others, and playing a sport with girls who had the same common ground as me. Although, I was still competitively swimming throughout this time, passing through county, regional, and national level. It however got to a point where I was taking on too much (classic me), and I couldn’t balance swimming and hockey.

I had to make the choice. It got to a point where swimming at 4am on a Saturday morning and heading straight to a 90-minute hockey match just wasn’t sustainable. I quit hockey. I remember my hockey coach, Mrs Finch, being quite upset with me, but she knew how important swimming was to me. So hockey had to go, and I continued swimming 10 times a week, competing most weekends. I missed playing matches with others, and only doing an individual sport racing only for myself but it was all made worth it when I could see all the training pay off and started winning medals. I always enjoyed the competing more than the training, and would still say I do now. I love the adrenaline, the build-up, and the seeing the results you get from all the hard work you put in.

A bit older now, about 16, people started to go out to parties, and my want to compete and train so hard was overlooked by my fear of missing out, and my want to socialise and spend time with my friends. I felt like I was missing out when my friends would go to a party on a Friday night and I’d have to stay in because I had a race on the Saturday. My swim training started to fall back because of it and a number of other reasons. I think just after 7 years in the same sport, swimming up and down the same pool, having that same chlorine smell in my hair, was just getting a bit too repetitive at 16. I just started to grow out of it generally and long story short, I just started to find it boring. I still looked forward to the competitions and that adrenaline high, but I just wasn’t willing to put in the hours anymore. At the time I found it so hard to come to the realisation that I was wanting to quit and go find something new. I thought that swimming was something I ‘had’ to do, as it had just been part of my life and routine for so long. This explains why it took me literally 2 years to quit haha.

I started to find an interest in the gym. CrossFit in particular. My swimming coach at the time also coached CrossFit alongside, and when she started to see my passion for swimming fall, she introduced me to CrossFit. I loved it. I loved that there was always something new you could learn and do, you could never get bored! So I started taking it up competitively and haven’t known much different since. Fast forward nearly 6 years, we’re still here now competing at international CrossFit competitions along some of the top athletes in Europe.

All is well and good until you start posting videos of you lifting weights and doing the weird ‘fake CrossFit pull ups’ on your Instagram in high school however. People were literally like ‘what are you doing?’ People made fun of what I was doing, especially the boys. They didn’t like that I was lifting weights and doing something so unfamiliar that no one else was doing. People in high school had just never come across CrossFit before and I guess they just didn’t know how to react.

As I started growing into the sport, and actually physically growing and getting older, I continued to get a bit of backlash here and there. Comments from people saying that I was ‘too muscular’ or that ‘I look like a man’. Like oof, they hurt a little. These comments I still get up to this day at 20 years old. Just like any other CrossFit girl. Body image towards the back end of high school, sixth form, going into to my first year university especially, was just such a big thing. The negative comments I got were so hard and still are really hard to ignore, because sometimes I agree, sometimes I really do wish I wasn’t as muscular. Sometimes I wish I could just fit into a dress and it look like it does on others girls, without my arms looking too big, or my traps sticking out. But I know there’s no way around it if I want to lift heavy, be strong, and be a top athlete in the CrossFit world. So I try my hardest to ignore comments and start appreciating what my strong body can do. At the end of the day, it’s my sport, my passion, and I’ll never stop doing what I enjoy for the satisfaction of others.

It took a lot of trial and error throughout my years growing up but you know… I did find my sport. For years I thought it was swimming but I found a great passion for CrossFit and I reckon I’ll be in this game for a while! It took some time, I had to try out new things, some sacrifices were made, there was a lot of ‘uming’ and ‘ahing’, but we got there in the end. After 12 years in the competitive sport world, here I am doing the one thing that I love and am willing to work hard for, juggling it with so many other things in life (I’ll be writing another blog about this in particular), but making it work!

Emily Steel x