From Fear to Faith

2 Timothy 1:7 . . . For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline.

Colossians 3:1-4 . . . Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

Far Beyond Gold: Running from Fear to Faith

By Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone

Introduction

If you have decided to read this book, I’m guessing you know at least one fact about me. I’m “the fast girl,” the one who can circle a 400-meter track more quickly than most, even when there are ten barriers I have to jump over. As long as I can remember, that fact has been the biggest part of who I am. I’ve always thought of myself as the girl whose feet can take her from point A to point B before everyone else. Over the years, it’s how I’ve been identified by friends, teachers, and coaches. “That’s Sydney; she’s fast. Real fast.”

I used to see myself almost exclusively that way. Nothing about me mattered, or frankly made much sense, if I wasn’t winning a race. I had to live up to my identity as a winner. That, I thought, was the reason I was on this earth.

This book is about a lot of things. It’s about my career on the track. It’s about my personal life off it. It’s about my greatest achievements and my worst failures. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at how I train and what it has taken to perform at the highest level on the biggest stage. But at the heart of this book is a simple question: Who is Sydney?

Finding the right answer hasn’t always been easy for me. It’s involved years of inner turmoil. Loads of fear. And a whole lot of questions and uncertainty. I’m guessing you can relate to those struggles. All of us want to know who we are, why we are here, and what’s going to make us happy and fulfilled. We want to have a purpose, a strong sense of identity, and clarity about how we are supposed to spend our days. Perhaps most importantly, we crave someone to love and care for, as well as to be loved and cared for, while we are here.

Of course, the answer to “Who am I?” seem to change. When we are younger, we’re kids - a son or a daughter. When we get older, we might become a spouse, then perhaps a parent, then a grandparent. At school, we are the athlete, the popular kid, the class clown, the honors student, or the outcast. At work, we are the intern. Then the entry-level worker. Then the manager. Then maybe the boss.

I think most of us - maybe all of us - struggle to reconcile these different identities. I know I did. For years, I was one way on the track and another off it. I was one person in front of the cameras and in the press room and a different one in private.

Through a long journey, I’ve learned that my different identities, especially my identity on the track, are part of a single reality about me. This reality is not how well I’ve performed during my career. My main identity is that I’m a daughter of God. I belong to Him.

For a long time, I didn’t think much about honoring and serving Him. I grew up going to church and always believed in God to some extent, but in my everyday life, I still wanted to control everything. And I looked to other people for my value and peace. What resulted was constant anxiety. Debilitating fear. And, at times, depression.

By God’s grace, these emotions do not consume me today. Yes, I still battle them. But they no longer have the control over my life they once did. This book will explain why. I want to share my story with you, from fearful teenage years, through a series of life-changing events in 2020, and into my life of faith and hope since then. Along the way, I’ll take you behind the scenes of my life on the track and away from the track - my family, my marriage, my struggles, fears, hopes, dreams, and faith.

Why am I sharing all this with you? I want my story to encourage anyone who struggles with fear and anxiety. If God can turn me from fear to faith, I know He can do the same for you. Along the way, I’m going to show you how I came to recognize my fears and how you can spot the same anxiety in your life, then respond by going to the One who can set you free. I pray my story will point you in His direction and show you that no matter who you are or what you do, God is calling you to trust Him, to let go of the struggle to define yourself or live up to other people’s expectations. He wants you, no matter who you are, to find your identity in Him and His Son, Jesus Christ.

If you’re not a Christian or don’t believe in God, I’m glad you’re here. If you stick with me through these pages, you’ll hear a lot about why I love track, why I’m grateful for my career, and what you can do to train, prepare, or work out stronger and smarter no matter where you are or where you’re from. And if you give me the privilege of telling you my story, all I ask is that you consider where you get your sense of identity. Are you free of fear? Are you strong enough on your own? How could a relationship with God bring you peace, love, hope, and joy?

The story you’re about to read is about a particular time of my life, from 2016, when I was a terrified sixteen-year-old at the Olympic trials in Eugene, Oregon, through the World Championships in 2022. During that six-year period, I experienced the lowest of lows and the highest of highs. I met my husband, got married, and accomplished a lot of my childhood dreams. Most importantly, I became a Christian. Those six years depict my life’s encounter with profound grace. Freedom. Hope for the future. I pray all these things become true for you, too, as you join me on this journey.

Chapter 1

I almost didn’t run the most important race of my life.

July 8, 2016. It was day three of the US Track and Field Olympic Team trials in Eugene, Oregon. One hour before the 400-meter hurdle quarterfinals were scheduled to begin. The first and, I figured, the only heat I’d run, I completely lost my nerve. There are actual professionals out here, I thought. There’s no way I can hang with them.

Every other woman in the trials had been training for this moment for years, and it showed. They had world-class coaching, big-time sponsors, strict diets, and meticulous workout regimens. I had none of these things. What I did have was a whole lot of teenage angst . . . and my lucky Minions blanket. I was only sixteen years old, a nervous, timid high school junior from Dunellen, New Jersey, a quiet suburb thirty miles southwest of Manhattan. It was a great place to grow up, but not exactly home to a lot of Olympic athletes. I didn’t know of anyone from my hometown or school who had been where my shoes then stood. Yet there I was, matched up against some of the fastest women on the planet. If I somehow made it through the first two rounds, then finished among the top three in the finals, I’d qualify for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and become the youngest member of the US Olympic track-and-field team since 1972. No pressure.

My parents, siblings, and I were staying at an Airbnb and hour from Eugene, so the first time I laid eyes on the packed stadium was eighty minutes before my first race began. I had a swirling pit in my stomach the entire drive to Eugene. Just a few hours earlier, I had woken up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, battling anxiety. That morning, I had to force myself to eat breakfast. Thanks to the nerves, I cleared maybe a third of my plate. The lack of sleep, appetite, and energy was normal for me before big races. What wasn’t normal that time - and what turned my manageable nerves into uncontrollable trepidation - was the crowd. It was easily the largest I had ever competed in front of. More than ten thousand fans gathered at Hayward Field on the campus of the University of Oregon. I was used to a smattering of faces in the crowd - parents, teammates, coaches, and maybe a few scouts - but this was a sea of people.

As intimidating as the crowd was, it wasn’t the ultimate reasons I wanted to be anywhere other than Hayward Field that Friday afternoon. The reason I almost bailed that day was the other competitors. All around me I saw women who were bigger, stronger, more experienced, and, I assumed, faster than I was. They clearly had a strategy as they warmed up. I did not. I would run a bit from one side of the warm-up to the other and stretch without rhyme or reason. I remember looking around one too many times and making eye contact with some of them. It was terrifying. They had equipment - so much equipment. All I had was a little backpack with some extra shoes and clothes. I had never felt so unprepared, so undeserving, and so uncertain of what I was supposed to do. As the race approached, I started by hyperventilating, which brought on tears and let to a full-on panic attack. I slipped away from my Union Catholic High School coaches Mike McCabe and Luis Cartegena and called my dad. I didn’t want anyone to hear this conversation.

“Can I please pull out of this race?” I begged my father, feeling half my age. “I don’t want to run,” I told him, tears streaming down my face. “I promise I’ll try again in four years.”

“You’re already there, Syd,” my dad said in a calm, soothing voice. “Just make it through this round, and we’ll talk about it. Everyone is here to see you run. Get the experience. It’s the first round of three; there’s no pressure on you.

When I ended the call, I knew there was no getting out of the race. So I found the nearest bathroom and threw up. Then I trekked back to the warm-up area and mechanically went through the rest of my stretches, desiring one thing: for this race to be over.

With the race a few minutes away, I tried to tell myself, “God’s got you.” It was a phrase I often muttered to myself before competing. Did He really have me in this moment, though? I wasn’t sure how to know for certain. At this point in my life, my relationship with God had consisted only of childhood Bible stories, the “Jesus Loves Me” song, and basic knowledge that God is good. So in a time when I truly needed Him to guide me, I wasn’t sure if He was even there. All I could do was hope that the invisible God I had been raised to fear would be there for me in a time such as this.

My mom later told me that she and my dad didn’t know if I would even come out of the warm-up area until I appeared a few minutes before the race began. I emerged with a serious expression on my face. That’s when something familiar took over. It’s something that has been with me my entire life, since my first race, a 100-meter dash when I was six years old. Each time I take my position at the starting line, my body grows taut with anticipation, and every distracted thought, scattered plan, and overwhelming fear fades away. All that remains is a will, a desire, and a desperate need to win. I hate losing. Always have. Always will. That’s the one part of sixteen-year-old Sydney the fear could not touch.

The 400-meter hurdles isn’t the shortest race in track and field, but it feels like the longest. It’s widely considered one of the most grueling events in the sport, often referred to as “the man killer.” Because of the hurdles, you have to master the technique required to clear the barrier every fourteen or fifteen steps without losing balance or velocity. And the length is just long enough to demand extraordinary endurance while being short enough to require superior speed. If you want to win, you can’t hold back or conserve energy. No other events requires that combination of technique, endurance, and speed.

At the starting line, I noticed a familiar face among the professionals lined up beside me: Kori Carter. She’d won the 400-meter hurdle NCAA national championship just a few years earlier. The following year, 2017, she’d won the 400-meter hurdle World Championship in London. I’d never faced against someone so accomplished. She was the most talented runner in our heat, so I figured if I could hang with her, I would be able to survive this race. As the gun went off, there was only one thought repeating in my mind: Keep up with Kori.

Before I knew it, we were pushing down the backstretch, 200 meters to go. Somehow, I not only managed to keep Kori in sight, but I nosed ahead of her down the final stretch. As the crowd roared and I cleared the last two hurdles, I was no longer feeling any of my prerace anxiety or insecurity about whether I belonged. The need to win had taken over entirely. I call it the instinct. Something kicks in automatically when it’s me versus anything. I crossed the line just ahead of Kori and the other six competitors. I’d won the heat.

You’d think beating all the athletes I’d been intimidated by one minute earlier would cure my fear. You’d think I’d now be confident I was going to breeze through the next heat and then qualify for Rio in the final. That may have been the case for the pundits. It wasn’t the case for me. As soon as the race was over, the irrational denial returned.

That night, I couldn’t help but smile when I saw my dad. I’d survived the one race he told me to run before I could come back to the table to negotiate the remainder of our deal. I wasn’t surprised when he started explaining how easy I made the race look and that it was a privilege to be there competing and winning at such a young age. And I couldn’t argue. So we were on to round two.

My Biggest Lessons (Excerpt from the Conclusion)

I’ve thought alot about the best advice I can give. The advice I wish I’d had and heeded when I was younger. And what’s that?

The number one piece of advice is simple: life is better with Jesus. I truly believe that. For so long I’d tried to run my life without Him. I’d tried to control my destiny, find happiness on my own. It didn’t work. I was anxious, depressed, frustrated, and lonely before Christ. I know not everyone shares my beliefs. I got that. But no matter who you are or what background you come from, that’s my encouragement to you. Life is better with Jesus. He promises peace and rest to all who trust Him. He promises forgiveness to all who repent, believe that He died on the cross for their sins, and trust in Him for eternal life. Knowing that, I’m much better able to handle the trials and anxieties that inevitably are part of life. If I have a bad day, whether on the track or not, I can know that it’s temporary, that one day my trials will be no more because of what Jesus did for me on the cross.

My second piece of advice, especially for those stepping into adulthood, is this: don’t run from trials and difficult circumstances. I spent most of my early life doing that. I ran from the Olympics in 2016. I ran from the high school drama and the challenges I faced in college. I even tried to escape from the crushing losses in 2019 back into a relationship that was terrible for me. So much can be learned from pruning seasons. They teach us endurance. They cultivate patience. Ultimately, they require dependence on the one who can lead us through - Christ.

My third and final piece of wisdom would be simply this: you don’t need to be afraid if you have Jesus. For so many years, fear ruled me. I didn’t have true hope. I thought there was no escaping the anxiety and fear. I assumed that‘s how life was always going to be because I thought it was my job, my responsibility, to get rid of my fear. I had no clue how to do that. Then Christ saved me. He taught me that my identity is in Him, not in my achievements, relationships, words, or physical features. He taught me how to love others, pursue running with all my strength, and respond with grace and kindness, win or lose. Fear is a product of misplaced priorities. It comes from valuing the wrong thing too much. But when you value Jesus above all else, He takes your fear and replaces it with faith.

The whole purpose and central motivation of my life, as the Westminster Catechism says, “is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.” It’s not about what medals I win or how history will remember my career. It’s far beyond gold. It’s about glorifying God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, through whom the Spirit works to bring redemption to those lost in sin.