For the first Athletic Bookworms pick, we read Where there’s a Will by endurance cyclist Emily Chappell. It’s fantastically written and just a great read for anyone who loves cycling. Here, I just want to drop a few of my thoughts in and share the interviews that Emily so nicely did for the podcast and for the book club specifically… scroll down to grab those!
(You can also grab November’s book pick + info right here.)
A few lines that got me thinking:
ABOUT BODY IMAGE: “‘I thought she’d be wiry and waif-like,’ remarked a friend, in an online interview he published around that time, ‘but she looks sturdy, stocky and strong’ – which my unhappy mind translated as ‘much fatter than I expected’. I couldn’t help but think I was failing to live up to my own reputation.”
I loved this, and it’s a topic Emily has been more and more vocal about on her social media lately. We know that every body is a cycling body, and we’ve seen even in the pro field that the idea that cyclists have to be 2% body fat start to finally go away… but the stigma around not being super slim in cycling remains, especially as you shop for kit! It was super refreshing to have this addressed, and to read about a woman who’s absolutely crushing it in cycling by any metric who doesn’t fit perfectly into that box.
ABOUT THE MEANING OF COMPETITION: “Perhaps it was that we both knew we’d be competitive anyway, no matter who we were chasing, and it was comforting to share the road with someone who felt the same way, who knew that, no matter how sincerely either of us might strain to overtake the other, the real race would always be against ourselves.”
I think we’re going to do a whole roundtable episode on the ideas around competition and comparison, but this was one of my favorite moments in the book: The realization that you can compete with someone else in a race, sure, but at the bottom of it, at the end of it all, you’re just competing with yourself. I have the tendency to (weirdly) not love competition, especially when competing with people I know, which is why I tend to choose more anonymous/big races rather than local events, for better or worse. It’s an interesting idea to parse through!
ABOUT FINISHING ANYTHING: “A lot of their stories followed a formula as clear as any thriller or romance novel, and after I’d read two or three, the homecoming scene rang as false as the happily-ever-after. Their writers, I told myself, were saying what they felt was expected of them – what they themselves had expected: that this was the greatest moment of their life, that they were happy, that everything had built towards this. I wondered if they were even able to admit to themselves”
As a writer, I loved this comparison of finishing a huge event and finishing a book. As someone who just signed up for a huge Big Scary Goal, this is an important thing that I keep thinking about… I keep reminding myself that finishing a 100-miler isn’t really the goal, the training leading up to it is, and what it will mean for what I’m able to do next is what matters. I think it’s easy to get stuck in the ‘after I finish this, life will be XYZ’ line of thinking (I do it ALL the time), so I’m trying to use this line as a reminder that there is no finish line that you get to pass where everything falls into place. Life isn’t a novel—or if it is, if you’re at the end of it, that’s… well, I guess that’s death? Basically, don’t think of a race finish as the end to your story, it’s at most just the close of a chapter.
We also chatted with Emily on the podcast, and you can grab it here…
- Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/3eK9nI1Rmr7o9WvUcwCR2b
- Listen on Apple Podcast – https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/consummate-athlete-podcast/id1100471297
- Download the Episode + Links for Different Podcast Players
AND you can also watch or listen to an interview with our author Emily Chappell on writing her memoir right here: https://youtu.be/p7RK7bteDeQ
