This is also part of sports.

As I sat down at school to write this post while waiting for a class to start, one of the last classes of my whole college studies, I am feeling sad. Restless. Suffocated. And it feels hard to breathe. Always when I come up with a good topic to write a blog the text just bursts into my mind and I can see it progress before it even hits the paper. I am hoping this post will help ease how I feel. It might seem dramatic but let it give you an insight what might go on in my head, and possibly in each athletes head when they have the same thoughts as I.

To be honest to myself. For the first time in a while I am considering of quitting my sports career with speed skating. As it might not sound so bad I feel terrible. Suddenly seeing how deeply being an athlete makes me... me. And how all that could be gone. Do I disappear at the same time? Just stop existing as a person, if I stop existing as an athlete? It is a scary picture. Do I really not have anything else in my life rather than sports? Is it really that I do not have it in me to reach the dreams that I have worked for eights years... eleven months of each year. Sacrifice after another, friendships, opportunities like I wrote in my last post almost two months back. All those thousands of training hours. All that, for nothing? Definitely not as there are people that I have met through sports. Experiences that would have never come to me if I would not have been an athlete. In a way it is the journey, not the destination, but know seeing that I might never reach my destination feels like dying when trying to climb a mountain.

I have made mistakes during my sports career. And it seems that I am just about a witness another one. I feel like falling into a black hole. I have nothing else that would characterize my personality as strongly as being a sportsman. I have nothing else in my life but sports, despite going to college but I do not have any friends from here cause I have always been training and not spending time with people from my school. In Helsinki I am living in a shared apartment with two other students. Lately I have hated it more than anything. Sharing your life, not having much privacy. It pretty much is like being on a training camp all the time. The only space you have is your own bed, in a room, where there is hardly space to turn around because the whole fucking room is stuffed with all the sports gear that you own. Constantly trying to make sure you do not disturb other people with your life. It is not living.  Last night I was not even able to sleep at my apartment after I felt like someone squeezing the air out of me when I came back in the evening. I have no girlfriend. Last time I was with these thoughts way back before I took the chance to move down to Helsinki and continue speed skating with a new coach I had by my side probably one of the most remarkable persons I have ever met. And probably will ever meet. But that person is gone now. Gone with her own dreams. I know my friends will read this, and you will be there by my side when I cry for help like this. But during the last few months, I have felt like being alone with all my thoughts in my head.

Each summer I work my ass off and choose not to hang out at the beach on a good weather but go training when other people have fun. And then during the Winter months I spend all that money on skating trying to spare all the money I can so I can make trip abroad to train in good training conditions and become better, and during the last few years come up with...nothing in terms of results and achievements. During the last four years I have used approximately 30000$ on speed skating, most of it earned by my own hard work and sweat. The Finnish association has had almost no part in that. Then one thinks on top of managing school on time with other people that I should be successful at sports. But because of sports I will not graduate with my class mates at the same time. I had to give in during the last six months. So lately I have been thinking is this really worth it if it only makes me sad. I only have one life to live, right here and now.

So I feel I am facing this challenge all alone. And the walls are crumbling by my side. I do not know how much of these feelings can be connected to last summer. If I actually had a some sort of breakdown because of being pushed over the limit. Still, I am scared for myself...

I will update more when I get some more time off from training. Right now even thinking about going for another summer of pain makes me sick.

Regards,
Jarmo

ps. as every man is eventually alone with their challenges, every man wins those challenges by themselves and grows stronger from those experiences.

I wanted attach this one chapter from the Bible at the end, for even if you do not believe in God. These texts still present a way, men should follow more in their lives in my opinion.

1 Corinthians 1

13 If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

I certainly hope I have not lost that love.