Life is about taking risks, that being said, I sometimes wonder, what made me leave a fairly cushy lifestyle to pursue a sport I had never heard of…
It has been three years since I took my first bobsled ride. Most days it is hard to believe that I’m no longer a rookie, that bobsledding is my full time job, and that the Olympics are just 13 months away. I still remember when I first heard about the sport and considered trying out for the team. Four years felt like an eternity. It felt like I had plenty of time to prepare, to get faster, stronger, to learn how to bobsled.
Me, Brittany Reinbolt
As I look in the rear view mirror of my former life, I am sitting in a small, modest but comfortable hotel room in igls, Austria, the location of the 2016 World Championships, getting ready for Race number seven of eight of the World Cup circuit. One of the most common misconceptions about Olympic sports is that they only happen at the Olympics. Each year we go through the same grueling selection process to qualify, a series of competitions: sprints, broad jumps, weight lifting, and team selection races to prove that we are the best athletes to represent Team USA in bobsled. Once the National Team is named, this group of athletes competes in 8 international races known as the World Cup and during a non-Olympic year a 4-heat World Championship race.
The finish dock of the bobsled track, Igls, Austria
For the first time in long time, I can say, I love what I do, I can’t say that every day is easy or fun, but there are few greater thrills in life than hurling yourself down an iced over water slide in a carbon fiber bathtub. For those just tuning in to my blog, my position on the National Bobsled Team, is brakeman. Once my pilot and I push and jump into to sled, I hold on for dear life in the back while she skillfully and hopefully quickly navigates the two of us down a mile of icy, often bumpy, sharp right and left turns. I then pull the brakes at the end.
While I love what I do, every once in a while, when I see yet another high school or college friend getting a promotion, changing jobs, getting engaged, married, having a baby, I think about my former life. I had a lot of nice things, my dream car, the perfect apartment, and I made a comfortable living. It is funny the things you miss about a more conventional lifestyle. I miss seemingly mundane tasks like, cleaning the kitchen, moving my furniture around to achieve just the right look and checking the mailbox. I miss making my bed in the morning before work. I miss coming home to a clean apartment only to mess it up again the second I get home by striping off my very uncomfortable but expensive suit and sitting on my couch; a couch that has now been in storage for three years because I refuse to let it go. I miss walking out my door and being greeted by the woman in the apartment across from me who was always on the balcony with a cigarette, a shot of something that I assume was alcohol and her cell phone talking to her family back in Ecuador. I miss my friends and family; my nephew and niece’s birthdays and milestones.
However, most days, what I am missing isn’t what floods my thoughts. I more often think back about the ease with which I gave them up, to dive head first into something I literally knew nothing about. I was bored and unmotivated at work and fairly overweight; not quite the recipe for success for an Olympic hopeful, yet here I am. I think a lot about how I got here because it definitely wasn’t conventional, the right thing or even the smart thing to do but it was exactly what I needed at the time. I needed to do something different, to step away from the way I thought life was supposed to be, board meetings, sales pitches and promotions.
Where I am today makes me think about the past and “my old life” because there was nothing that could have prepared me for the pure joy and sheer torture of pursing a dream. I’m both excited and terrified everyday, and not because bobsledding is scary, because I genuinely don’t know how this is all going to play out. Some days I feel unstoppable, and others I feel crazy for thinking that at 32 I have any business trying to go to the Olympics. Either way, I continue down this path, for the chance to achieve something great.