In SELF’s franchise The Meal I Eat After I’m Feeling…, we speak with cooks, celebs, athletes, and folks within the culinary area concerning the particular meals or meals they flip to amid sure feelings—and the way consuming their favorites performs an important position of their self-care.
As heptathlete Anna Corridor ready for the US Olympic Observe and Area Trials in late June, she couldn’t assist however surprise if her knee—she had undergone surgical procedure again in January—would maintain up. “The entire time I used to be like, ‘Can I do that?’” Corridor tells SELF.
She ended up answering that query by successful the ultimate occasion, the 800-meters, securing her first-place end general and a visit to the Paris Video games. However afterward, her overarching emotion wasn’t precisely thrilled or ecstatic, as you would possibly count on.
“I believe the largest phrase I can use proper now’s relieved,” Corridor says. “I simply lastly really feel like I can take a breath and loosen up.”
It’s been a twisty street to the Olympics for Corridor, a 23-year-old Colorado native who lives in Gainesville, Florida. Going into the Olympic Trials held in 2021 forward of the Tokyo Video games, Corridor was thought of a rising star within the heptathlon, a two-day athletic competitors that consists of seven completely different track-and-field occasions. However throughout the opener, she stumbled over a hurdle and broke a bone in her foot, placing her out of the operating. Since then, nevertheless, she’s labored to climb again to the highest, successful nationwide titles in 2022 and 2023 and taking house medals on the world championships each these years as nicely.
Satisfying as these victories have been, competing on the Olympics has been a lifelong ambition of Corridor’s since she was seven years previous, so she had her sights set on the Paris Video games after her Tokyo hopes have been dashed. Every part “has been main in the direction of this second,” she says. “So many massive life choices have been made with this in thoughts.”
That’s why, coming off her surgical procedure, “it was simply so nerve-racking and a lot strain, simply figuring out that my dream was proper there and it may not occur,” Corridor says. However crushing the Trials helped restore her confidence, permitting her to focus extra on the duty at hand: Maximizing her potential and turning into essentially the most formidable competitor she will be able to.
As you would possibly count on, the hours are lengthy—“My crew calls me 9-to-5 as a result of they’re like, ‘You’re on the market coaching from 9-to-5 day by day,” Corridor says—and the extraordinary prep inevitably requires sacrifice, particularly when she’s on the street. “I miss a lot household time,” she says, together with massive moments like weddings and bachelorette events. (Not her sisters’, although.)
However a sure meals can soothe the FOMO (or, in Corridor’s case, the precise MO). When Corridor, a self-described homebody, is feeling particularly lonely or homesick, home made pizza can assist fill the void, making her nostalgic for some “actually good reminiscences,” she says. Specifically, the meal makes her consider her days on the College of Georgia, when she and her older sister Julia began making pizza collectively on the finish of each week as a option to rejoice powering by way of one other spherical of courses and practices. Since then, the pizza has grow to be a staple for each siblings: Even at the moment, they’ll whip it up collectively over FaceTime.
