Bravey: Chasing Dreams, Befriending Pain, and Other Big Ideas

by Alexi Pappas

run like a bravey sleep like a baby dream like a crazy replace can’t with maybe It was the first time I used the word bravey, and it stuck. It became the label for a mini-movement, a self-identifier for those who are willing to chase their dreams even though it can be intimidating and scary.

But it wasn’t a party—it was a purging. They went through our house and stuffed everything that belonged to my mother in trash bags to be given away. These women were not just throwing my mother’s things away—they were trying to throw her away, to erase her. When I realized what was occurring, I became a thief. I secretly grabbed all that my little hands could carry, which only amounted to her fur coat, a pair of Gucci shoes, and one photo album. We also had to give away our two adorable pugs, Mugsy and Sushi, because they had been my mom’s dogs.

All dead people should know this: They’re going to matter, even if they think they won’t and even if they don’t want to. I understand now that toward the end, my mother was so sick that she didn’t want to be part of this world any longer. She thought she could fade away. But her absence meant as much to me as her presence would have. Maybe my mom thought that she was being kind to me by leaving—that because she was gone I wouldn’t have to deal with having a crazy mother. But by leaving the way she did, my mother actually burdened me with the task that would come to define my young adult life: to grow up without her.

craved as much as I craved that lasagna. I imagined she laid the pasta sheets down atop the tomato sauce in the same way that she tucked her kids into bed at night. Why focus on algebra, which has been around forever and isn’t going anywhere, when you can absorb something much more fleeting and rare like the sight of a mom making your dinner? I was prepped from very early in life to understand that some things last and some things do not. I always got seconds and thirds at Kati’s house and I even took home leftovers. All I wanted to do was absorb more of that lasagna and more of that mom.

Fitness is not an indicator of durability and sustainability; it is only an indicator of athletic ability at the present moment. Health, on the other hand, is a more holistic measure of the body’s functionality over time. Fitness does not take into account that you need to continue training tomorrow and next week. It is better to be a hundred percent healthy and eighty percent fit than a hundred percent fit and eighty percent healthy.

Food can be a sensitive subject for female distance runners, harkening back to the pressure that most girls face to stay thin even as their bodies are desperately trying to develop and mature. At Dartmouth, some girls on my team made a practice of limiting their portions by only eating from the palm-sized side-dish bowls in our cafeteria, never actual plates. When I became captain, I instituted a rule that you had to eat proper portions off a real plate. At UO, there was a teammate who ate all her meals with chopsticks, one grain of brown rice at a time. Every team at every school has cases like this (my friend at Brown reported that her coach had a “no booze, no boys, no bagels” policy), and I don’t know exactly what the right answer is for athletes who struggle with weight. It’s true that for each person, there is an optimal “race weight range”—but I believe that for female runners especially, coaches and athletes should take more factors than just weight into account. Longevity and durability should be part of the conversation as well. And it should be a conversation; we should not be silent about food.

It became clear that if I wanted to survive as a college runner, I needed to develop a technique to manage my fears about pain. I could no longer afford to spend the days leading up to workouts and races steeped in anxiety. Negative thinking drains energy, and I needed all the energy I had to keep up with my new teammates. Pain and I had to come to a new understanding.

I thought back to middle school when I got into a fight with this girl I really didn’t get along with. When our teacher finally intervened, she quarantined us in a room called “the pod” for an hour to figure things out, just us two eleven-year-olds. My adversary and I spent a good forty-five minutes in silence, glaring at each other from under our unibrows. But in the end we agreed that while we didn’t want or need to be friends, we could be civil for both our sakes. I resolved to be similarly civil with pain. Before my races and big workouts, I worked on consciously shifting my mental energy from dreading upcoming pain to simply recognizing that the pain would always show up no matter what, and even though I utterly despised it, I should try to greet it politely like a guest at a dinner party and be fully prepared to open the door when it does. Sometimes pain arrives slowly, like butter melting on toast. Or it can be quick, like butter hitting a very hot pan. Whichever variety of pain I’m getting, I know it is coming and I am prepared to handle it gracefully.

I also discovered using physical triggers, playable actions, as a tool to help my mind overcome the anxiety associated with the onset of pain. For example: “When the pain hits after the third mile, remember to shake your arms out and drop your shoulders.” Or even something as simple as: “When it hurts, force yourself to smile.” By converting a mental struggle into an actionable objective, internal battles felt less elusive and more grounded. It’s much easier to tell myself to move my arms than it is to tell myself to “feel better.”

There is a way that a coach and athlete love each other, which is a kind of love that’s not like any other. It revolves around a shared goal where each person plays a very specific and important role. An athlete and a coach complete each other. An athlete has to learn how to get the most out of herself and also how to draw support and wisdom from the reservoir that is her coach. And the coach must learn how to best support, teach, and protect the athlete, and also when to push the athlete to the edge of her ability.

I can only describe as a “new-summer-camp smile” plastered to my face—when you’re overwhelmed, excited, and scared all at once. It’s a disarming moment when you realize that you are not fully in control; you’re plopped into a new environment that you cannot change. For elite athletes, especially endurance athletes, control is extremely important. Our sleeping environment, meals, and even how we spend our downtime are all carefully calibrated and controlled. Now that I was in the Olympic Village, I had to smile politely and accept the fact that unless I wanted to confront an entire horde of strange coaches from Eastern Europe, there would be house music loudly playing in the lobby. It felt like a crossroads moment: Either I could try to hold tight to my idea of how things should be, or I could let go and embrace this new reality. That is the choice all Olympians must make: to try to sterilize the experience and treat it like any other competition, or to embrace it as something totally special and different.

As I ditched the heel-kicker and approached the final lap, running faster than I ever had, I realized that this wasn’t really about me versus her—meaning any individual girl in my race—nor was this about me versus the world at large. It was about me versus me, just like in middle school, running as fast as I can and then some. It was about enjoying the results of my hard work and all the help I got from the people I love. My mental fitness and physical fitness were completely in sync, peaking simultaneously. It felt like the steep climb that began when I was a freshman at Dartmouth, with the countless days of pain and commitment, had culminated all in this one moment of perfect harmony. “Me versus me” doesn’t do this feeling justice either—it’s not a versus. It’s me within me and me outside of me. I was running around the track while looking at a miniature diorama version of myself running around the track and this image repeated in my heart to infinity. It felt like my mind could tell my body to do anything and it would do it. Some people call this flow, but I call it bliss.

Admitting all of this to Dr. Arpaia, still a stranger to me, was hard but also easy. It can be easier to admit the embarrassing things to someone who doesn’t know you. He listened quietly, much like my dad might have, and calmly explained to me that I was sick. He told me I was experiencing an acute crisis—high-risk situational depression—which is when everything is going great and then suddenly, specific things occur in your life that make you feel like you’ve fallen off a cliff. This was the first time I’d been given a diagnosis that I understood. Oh my god. I was sick. I was sick. I was sick. I was mentally ill. It was temporary, but it was severe. It was the realest worst thing I could ever imagine. But at the same time it was so unbelievably refreshing to meet someone who understood exactly what was going on. He explained that mental illness is like when you fall and have a scrape on your knee—except instead of the cut being on your knee, it is on your brain. It takes time to heal. Your brain is a body part that can get injured like any other, and

First your actions change, then your thoughts, then finally your feelings, in that specific order. He told me to stop trying to convince myself to not be depressed—a depressed person can’t be convinced of anything. He told me to instead expect that I was going to feel very sad for a long time, and that the most important thing was to focus on my actions. Actions change your thoughts over time, and over even more time thoughts change your feelings. It’s sort of like when you are in a race and you might feel absolutely terrible in one moment, but that doesn’t mean you should stop. In a race I never rely solely on how I feel in a moment—because it will almost always be the case that I’m hurting,

Dr. Arpaia told me to conjure an image that was completely disassociated from my life and fixate my mind’s eye on that until sleep took me. My favorite thing to visualize was an image of myself curled up inside a walnut shell, completely cozy and protected from the outside world. Dr. Arpaia also gave me a notebook and he’d have me write down certain things over and over again, like when I had to write “Day by day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” one hundred times. Another day my assignment was to write “I have a body but I’m not my body, I have thoughts but I am not my thoughts, I have feelings but I am not my feelings.” And another day I had to write all the things I was mad at myself for and then forgive myself, like: “I forgive you for the contract,” or “I forgive you for being injured,” or “I forgive you for being mean to your dad,” and then finish it with “and I love you anyway.”

Dr. Arpaia explained that the brain’s purpose is self-preservation—but the problem is, the brain goes into overdrive and starts recognizing the personal law in places it shouldn’t. Even though I know that plain bowl of saffron white rice is perfectly safe, it makes me sick anyway. The brain behaves similarly with emotional trauma: When we create a personal law in response to trauma, the law can become hardwired into your brain so strongly that when you encounter even vaguely similar situations much later, your mind reacts with irrational intensity. I had a personal law that I had the same weakness as my mom, and I was interpreting my post-Olympic depression as proof that I was turning out like her.

Every morning I’d wake up at five-thirty to meet the Janes at some faraway pier and chase the Los Angeles sun up into the sky while I listened to them talk about their lives, telling me stories that were so different from what I’d normally hear from my college teammates. I never knew women like this before—I certainly hadn’t encountered women like this growing up. They looked how I imagined my older self might look. They were lean and strong, but they were also beautiful. More important, they saw themselves as beautiful. They emanated confidence and helped me understand that a lean, strong body was not repulsive; it was attractive. It doesn’t project unlikability, as I thought before; it projects discipline. Discipline, I learned, just means making choices in favor of your goals. It doesn’t mean you’re un-chill; it means you know what you want.

For example, my dad has this obsession with taking pictures, though he never seems to have any intention of actually doing anything with the photographs. He’s taken thousands of pictures over the years but I have yet to see a single photo album. His photography habit would make me so angry when I was growing up because we’d be in the middle of a nice conversation at dinner and he would stop and interrupt everything to take a picture instead of just enjoying the moment on its own.

I know I’m not the only one who feels sad in this way about a parent. Maybe the sadness begins the moment we are born, when we subconsciously become forever grateful to those people who made us possible. And so whenever we behave badly toward those people, even in little ways, like when I cut off a phone call with my dad too quickly, guilt rubs up against gratitude and gives birth to sadness.