The first was in 2011, when I was fifty-three and I was on a detail assignment at the U.S. Department of State as a senior watch officer (SWO) in the Department’s Operations Center.
SWOs have full command over the Department’s official communications between principal officers and foreign government leaders. The workspace feels like a cockpit, but without the windows. SWOs flip a switch to activate a blue light when they need to step off the floor and use the bathroom. This is where SWOs live, sometimes for fourteen hours straight without a break. The shifts were one thing, but it often took two hours to read in and as long again to brief out. SWOs work overnight shifts, early morning shifts, and late afternoon shifts that end around midnight. I was tragically sleep-deprived and lacked the stamina to do the job.
I failed miserably and after two months curtailed from the assignment.
By the time I’d accepted the SWO assignment, which was prestigious, competitive, and critically important to the day-to-day workings of the U.S. government, I’d already enjoyed a full career, first as a public diplomacy writer and editor in the Bureau of Public Affairs, and later as a consular officer in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, assisting U.S. citizens overseas in emergencies. I was a coordinator on the Department’s fast-paced task forces, often working overnight shifts, and was a chief point of contact, available 24/7, for the families of the hikers who were arrested and detained in Iran from 2009 to 2011.
So not cutting it as a SWO was a blow to my confidence that I’ve never completely shaken off.
Who knows whether I would have made a great SWO if I’d been in better physical shape, but even though my bureau welcomed me back with open arms, and my colleagues at the Operations Center assured me that good people curtail from assignments all the time, I spent the next two years questioning my ability to accomplish anything whatsoever.
In truth, it wasn’t so much that I could not keep up physically that haunted me. It was my inability to bounce back. For me, the SWO problem had become all about the setback, and, in truth, it lingers.
My second failure was in September 2015, nearly a year and half after beginning my fitness journey, when I did not finish my first triathlon, the Bethany Beach Triathlon. I had made it through the ocean swim (nearly drowned) and finished the bike section (nearly got lost), but was disqualified before the run because of the race’s strict time limits.
I was devastated. I felt I had let everyone down who’d supported me and trained me. Earlier the previous day, as I was loading my bike onto my Honda CRV outside my house before driving to the beach, a FedEx driver stopped on my street and jumped out of his truck.
“Can I help?” he asked.
“No, thank you,” I replied as I turned to him.
“I got this.”
That afternoon, as I drove to the beach, I was filled with excitement and dread all at the same time—just as I had been the day I walked into the Operations Center.
Now, as I lifted the bike onto the rack on the back of the CRV as we got ready to head home from the beach, I wondered why I thought I could complete a triathlon.
I know.
Really?
Putting failing as an SWO and failing to finish a race in the same category of failure?
So, here’s the thing.
After a first-rate hamburger at the Dogfish Head Brewpub in Rehoboth and l e n g t h y conversations with my family about what I had done well during the race and what I needed to improve, within hours of emerging from that horrific ocean swim, I began the process of failing forward.
Of bouncing back.
Before turning in for bed that night, I wrote about what I had learned from the experience and submitted the piece to the Huffington Post Healthy Living editors for consideration. Earlier that month I had begun to publish my freelance wellness articles in the Washington Post, but I had followed Arianna Huffington’s journey and was a fan of the Huffington Post’s myriad and diverse contributors. By morning, as I was getting ready for work and turning my attention back to training for my first marathon in December 2015, I had received an invitation from the Huffington Post editors to join its team of wellness bloggers.
I sat at my kitchen island having coffee and closed my laptop.
“Wow,” I must have said aloud, because my dog jumped up.
I was the editor in chief of The Miscellany News at Vassar, and I had spent the first two decades of my professional life doing some form of writing and editing, always planning a career as a journalist. Yet when I joined Consular Affairs, wondering whether I’d ever have the competitive edge or grit to make it in journalism, I did not think twice about putting aside my writing to learn something new.
It wasn’t until March 2014 when I used my weight loss blog to hold myself accountable that I began to flex my writing muscles and discovered I had a passion for wellness subjects. If writing is about having something to say, here I was, after years away from a keyboard, with a lot on my mind.
Here’s what’s on my mind.
As I encounter challenges as I age and continually reinvent myself, I can’t afford to let setbacks take me down. For me, running is hard, but every time I do it, for any length of time and for any distance, I simply feel better about myself.
Learning how to push myself, how to find my edge, how to stumble and recover—this is my foundation for becoming ageless, for being resilient. For bouncing back.
I’m not suggesting we have to run a marathon or be a triathlete, but we do need to become grounded in a meaningful exercise habit in order for exercise to matter. Every time I run I push myself physically, but mostly it’s the mental effort that adds up. Each time, after each run, I am a little more empowered, a little more resilient. By discovering my edge, I’m in a better place to face the inevitable disappointments and obstacles with a comeback attitude.
Like I did when I was younger. When I was just a kid.
And not just after a run or a race.
In life.
***
When I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area in my early forties before joining the State Department, without a whole lot of drama going on in my life, I put on more than twenty pounds. I had never before been overweight and did not see the weight gain coming. My doctor ordered tests, but she knew what I knew—that at some time in a woman’s forties, her metabolism changes.
“You’re gaining weight because you’re burning fewer calories than you’re consuming.”
Other words came to my mind.
Is this as good as it gets?
I was working as a freelance book editor, and since most of my clients were on the East Coast, I started my day at five in the morning but finished by two in the afternoon.
After the appointment with my doctor, I used my afternoons to rollerblade on a path overlooking San Francisco Bay in Foster City, met friends for hikes on Windy Hill or the Stanford Dish, and joined Weight Watchers. Within a few months I dropped more than twenty pounds.
We moved back to Washington, D.C., in 2005, when I started working at the Department of State as a writer and editor. I lost track of how long it took me to put that weight back on, but by the time my husband Bob and I were in London with a group of theatergoers from the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in February 2014, my mind-body connection was less than harmonious.
We were walking everywhere, seeing interesting shows with interesting people, and talking about theater.
But I felt like crap. I was huffing and puffing as I trudged through London’s streets in the rain, and I was exhausted nearly all day. I was irritable and easily annoyed by anything outside my control,