I'm the type of skater that needs to stay upbeat and relaxed, open, because if I stay quiet, I get in my head, and then I start to think too much and start to doubt.
I'm a show pony, and I don't get to skate with girls doing triple Axels every single day. I skate with little babies who are working on their single Axels while trying not to hit them on the ice.
A lot of people who watch figure skaters want us to look like pretty princesses. I want people to see the athlete, and I want to look like a woman among girls.
In Jamaica High School in New York, my coach was Larry Ellis, and he said I could probably make the Olympic team. He gave me something to shoot for.
Even though I enjoy that head-to-head competition part, one of the things that drove me to long track was if I won or if I lost I want to know it's all on my shoulders and it didn't have anything to do with anybody else.
I live with fellow speed skaters and National Team members Heather Richardson, Sugar Todd and Mitch Whitmore, and Sugar lives up to her name. She spoils our household with baked goods, and not just at Christmastime.
It always has been a goal of mine to compete in the Olympics. Right after I graduated from college, I moved out to Salt Lake City with my mind focused on making the 2014 team.
For decathletes, our event goes all throughout the day so you're trying to go up and down and up and down emotionally and physically and you know mentally you're just on a roller coaster.
In a world where people are hungry for quick fixes and sound bites, for instant gratification, there's no patience for the long, slow rebuilding process: implementing after-school programs, hiring more community workers to act as mentors, adding more...
You know, I think He honestly does care about how we play on the field, more than anything more than win or lose our hearts on the field.
So much of how we act and what we do is based on humility or pride - that's everything. And when you can humble yourself, you know, we are more like Christ when we can humble ourselves.
I believe in my God-given athletic ability and the coaches that have been blessed around me. I believe I can do the job as a quarterback in the NFL.
I'll give my heart and soul whenever I step on that field and even when I'm on the sidelines. And at the end of the day, that's really all you can ask of someone.
Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings.
In the long years to come, not only will the people of this island but of the world, wherever the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, look back to what we've done, and they will say 'do not despair, do not yield...march straightforward.
I have only known two men's souls in my life, one the devil, the other the the bird's wings which picked me up and carried me back to the freedom of being.
A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.
It was soldier's went marching over the rocks, and still they came in watery flocks, because it was spring and the birds had to come, No doubt that soldier's had to be marching, and that the drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling
How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.
If you had asked me when I was 28 and in my wedding dress if I ever thought I would end up in my forties flipping my husband the bird over potato chips, I'd say you were crazy.
The NBA's a Fortune 500 company. That's how you look at it. And all the other Fortune 500 companies out there in the world, you don't see their CEOs and COOs going to work with white tees and baggy clothes and stuff like that. So I have to take that ...
