America Ferrera Is a Triathlete

America Ferrera is on the cover of July's Triathlete magazine. Here's what she had to say in the accompanying interview:

“This relationship of being disappointed in our bodies is a relationship that I started at a very young age, whether that’s because of the culture around me or the points of views that I was exposed to. I didn’t see a lot of examples — or nobody taught me to appreciate and love my body for what it’s capable of. It was always about what it wasn’t and couldn’t do, and what it could be.

I think recently in the past few years of my life I’ve started noticing a pattern of when something scares me, that’s an indication that I should do it. There were absolutely times where I doubted whether I could do it. When we started, I was not a swimmer at all and I remember one night at swim practice where I was just literally weeping in the pool. I just started crying because I had to swim 600 meters in a row, and for someone who started like, ‘I don’t even know if I can do a 50! How am I gonna do this?’ 

Why I think triathlons have changed my relationship to myself is because the whole sport is about going further than you think you can go, living at the threshold and pushing yourself to the place where you feel like, ‘I never thought I could be here and I certainly thought I couldn’t go further.’ It’s at that threshold that you have the opportunity to choose something new which could just be to be nice to yourself in that moment, to acknowledge yourself in that moment.

Our little bodies — the small little space that we inhabit for the entirety of our lives — everything we feel, everything we experience, everything we do is contained inside of our bodies. And to be challenged physically is to have to meet all of your experiences. That’s why, personally, working out has always been an emotional experience for me.”