About me

Hi my name is Mira, I am a Pentathlete, and this is how everything came about.

Since a very young age sport has always played an important role in my life. Encouraged through my parents I joined a swimming club and started training up to 4 times a week when i was in prep school. In the following years I became more interested in trying other sports apart from swimming and tried out athletics additionally to my other training. But at some point, at which I was already in secondary school I lost interest in swimming. The endless similar training sessions and long competitions at the weekends bored me and for some time i was really unhappy, not knowing what to do instead because I was sure i needed to do something in order to feel fulfilled and happy. I had experienced that in periods where i had been injured and was therefore unable to train, I hadn´t used the spare time for schoolwork or something useful but waisted my time because i did not have the pressure of the training which helped me to structure my day before and which had given me purpose in every day. Nevertheless swimming did not make me happy anymore and i started dreading every training.

This is when I discovered Modern Pentathlon a relatively unknown Olympic discipline. So if you just thought “what the hell is that” I can assure you you are not alone. Modern Pentathlon consists of the five disciplines swimming, running, shooting, fencing and riding and the whole competition ins usually done on one weekend. I was fascinated by the versatility of this sport and started training. Swimming was the easiest part as I was already better than most pentathletes but i had never ridden a horse and was far from riding a pacour with one, had never fenced or shot with a laser Pistol. But eventually i got into all the disciplines and discovered that i had a new passion. During the next years a trained to complete my first full pentathlon competition and finally I managed to get through all disciplines. At this point I was training every day of the week at least once and mostly on my own because my pentathlon training group was stationed too for away from me and i could only travel there by train on the weekends. Fortunately I had no trouble to get along with my School work additionally to all my training hours but never the less my average weeks were always very stressful.

In my 10th year at school I decided to go to a boarding school in England for three months in order to improve my language skills and experience something new. I went to a sports school who had an amazing Pentathlon coach and for the first time in my life i was able to train with other pentathletes in my age group on a daily basis. This was without dauth the best time in my life so far. I felt more included and accepted than ever before manly due to my friends who did the same sport and could understand why i had to go to all this training sessions and didn´t have much free time. Don´t get me wrong I had/have good friends at home as well but they could not understand me as well because they didn´t understand my passion to the full extend and my urge to do something every day that had something to do with sport. Not because they weren´t interested but also because I maybe wasn´t open enough about what I loved so much about my training or just due to the fact that I didn´t have that much time to spent away from my training. But at some point I had to return to Germany to get on with my normal school at home and to focus on my life there. It wasn´t easy returning to my “normal” life and I promised myself to go back to England if i would ever get another opportunity to do so.

My normal life went on as it had before but I was somehow not happy anymore with the endless training. By mere luck I did a competition in an sub-categorie of pentathlon that i had heard of in England but that was very unknown in Germany. It is called Triathle and is basically a modern Traithle, where the athletes Shoot laser pistol to get five green lights, then swim 50 meters in a lake and then run 800 meters. In the event all 3 disciplines a completed four times in a row which makes it a bit similar to Biathlon but in the summer and with swimming. To cut a long story short I discovered that I has more interest in this sport and decided to carry on with my pentathlon training but to focus in the competitions on Triathle. Two years later i had already taken part in two German championships and one European Championship in a team event where we came 2nd. In 2019 i flew with the German team to the Europeans again to Madeira and managed to come 2nd in the individual as well as in the team event. It was an amazing experience and I had a great time, especially because all my english friends were there to to compete.

You might be wondering why i am telling you all this but you might have noticed that i i told you about my life up to this point is mainly about the subject of sport. That is partly because this block is supposed to be about sport but also about my whole life as an athlete and therefore not only the good sides i have to tell. Because as you can see my life has always circled around training, competitions, perfectionism in recovery and training and so on and so forth. For a big part of my life i defined myself through the sport i did and measured my worth as a person on my archievments and how much training i had done through the week. I didn´t notice that my mental health was absolutely dependent on my athletical performance and training and went straight downhill if i didn`t or couldn´t train for whatever reason. That let to a point where i did not knew what to do anymore because i knowticed that had made myself dependent on training. I literally didn´t know what to do with myself if i wasn´t training and didn´t know how to enjoy life or take a break. Through this constant pressure I had abandoned my social life and relationships because i was only able to focus on myself. Perfectionism which had up to this point helped me to reach my goals, had turned into a bad thing. I started to stress a lot about my eating and training habits, trying to find the optimal recovery and worrying constantly if there was anything i could have done better. Basically i cared too much about the past and not enough about the present, to enjoy life and to have fun.Food became something to me which i had the absolute control over. I had always enjoyed cocking and making my own meals but i developed a problem with eating out or eating something unknown because I didn´t know what was in it and how healthy it was. Food wasn`t something to enjoy or celebrate anymore but a constant stress factor that consumed a lot of energy and time because I thought about it constantly every second. If I wasn´t able to train I always started warrying about the food I should consume on the day, definitely less than normally because I wasn´t training and no treats (which I would never consume anyway). For a long period of time I always new that my relationship with food wasn´t healthy anymore but I didn´tknow how to get out of it and I wasn´t even sure if I wanted to because i loved being in control. Over the next half year I trained a lot and lost a few kilos, not even intentionally but through restricting even more and doing a lot of running. But finally after the EM in Madeira and after reaching my dream physique I realised I wasn´t happier than before. I was maybe even less satisfied with my life in total because I realised that all I was doing is sportand that I couldn´t manage a sport free time without having massive mental issues . That shocked me a lot and I realised I had to change something very quickly if I wanted to life a happier, healthier life .

This is where this blog comes to play. This is my journey towards a happier, healthier life and towards my goal to become my more authentic and confident self. Growth as a goal in more than one aspect of my life as I have limited myself too much in the past.

Furthermore I want to share some things that are very important to me and that I think can be very crucial ,especially to athletes like me or people who just want to enjoy their sport.