Insecurity on the Ultimate Field

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever outgrow the insecurity I had as an overweight girl.  People who know me know how far I've come and I know how far I've come.  There are days that I'm painfully aware of how far I have yet to go but having goals and milestones in place help me brake that down into smaller, more manageable steps.  Most recently, over the summer I had several glaring moments of insecurity when I was around people who DIDN'T know the changes I've made this last year.

Over the summer I played Ultimate Frisbee with the Indy Summer League.  I've played frisbee for many years just casually, but this was the first time I played in an organized league.  Through the whole summer, and especially the first few weeks, I learned that there's A LOT of organization and structure to the game beyond just staying open and catching the disc.  I felt like a fish out of the water for a good first two-thirds of the summer.

Added to my lack of knowledge about the structure of the game, was the fact that I was, by far, the biggest, and least athletic person on the field.  If you know nothing about Ultimate, it's very similar to soccer, football, and basketball and it involves running and sprinting around a field, chasing a frisbee, for usually about 2 hours.  It's a game of speed, and precision, and most people that play are EXTREMELY fit.

No one in the league had ever met me before the first game.  They didn't know that I had lost a lot of weight in the months prior to joining.  They didn't know how much I had grown and changed, or how far outside my comfort zone I was.  All they saw was an obese girl who didn't know anything about the game and couldn't keep up with even the slowest player on the other team.

Very soon into the first game, my team saw that I wasn't your typical overweight girl trying sports for the first time in her life, and as the season went on, they saw how hard I tried and how much I pushed myself on the field.  I feel like I gained a lot of their respect, and in the process I made a lot of new friends that I look forward to seeing this winter in the winter league, and next summer as well..

Don't be afraid to take risks.  Know that if you're a bigger person, when you go to the gym and you feel like you stick out like a sore thumb, just know there are two types of people at the gym.  The first kind don't notice anyone but themselves and how good or bad they are doing.  They don't really care about what other people around them are doing and are totally focused on their own workout.  The other kind see you and know how uncomfortable you feel, and are cheering you on in their head.  Once in a while they may come up and give you a high-five!