At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I am Karen Martinez Perez, Longitude fellow from Rice University, and today I will be presenting a sound byte by Rosey Edeh, a three-time Olympian and CTV Morning Live Anchor in Canada. She will be speaking to us about optimism, and how her competitive spirit has helped shaped this mindset for her, on and off the track.

I grew up in a household with my immigrant parents working hard. And then it was just my mom. So then it was eventually a single parent home. And she was working real hard. But as a kid, my mom always said, “You guys, just after school, you’ve got to find something to do. I don’t need you in the house just hanging around. So just find some after school activity.” I immediately gravitated to track. Because with track, you don’t really try out, you know what I mean, you just kind of show up. And if you keep showing up and just manage to get through the training, you will find some event. They’ll put you in something. Really, track is for everybody.

So I started running track in high school. I mean, even before that, we had this thing in Canada where they do this physical fitness activity over the span of like a few months. And if you reach all the goals, there’s like a 50-meter dash. If you run it between this time, and then if you do a number of push ups and sit ups, and so on and so forth, they keep score. And then at the end of this whole program, if you score in like the gold, then you get this badge and it’s like an Award of Excellence. Of course, I aimed for Award of Excellence, not gold, silver, bronze, but like above that. So that’s how I started off with sport and athletics, getting that award every year. And I excelled at it.

For me, whatever the race is, I have this burning desire to compete. Like I think, “That’s the most important thing.” When you find, you know, high performance athletes, it’s like that drive to be competitive, to compete, to be out there on the field to lay it all out there. It’s not really something I can tell you, “This is how I learned how to be competitive.” You know, for as long as I can remember, I was just competitive.

Growing up in this competitive world of sport, going into university, and having to perform, was just nothing new to me, that kind of pressure. It’s there. You know it’s there. Sometimes it gets a bit uncomfortable because you’ve got like a couple of assignments due plus you have regionals. But again, it’s almost like you’re just being groomed for it as you grow up in that world of sport and competition, and winning and losing. It’s not like I won every race either, right? It was just competition. It wasn’t as if I was head and shoulders above everybody else. But every track meet was game day. It’s like “Let’s go. Let’s make this happen.” It’s exciting. I couldn’t imagine going through life without those kinds of butterflies that you get before a competition. It’s just me, that’s a part of who I am. That consistent kind of pressure that I felt to perform and to compete shaped me into the individual that I am now. So when I am on live television, I take moments of challenge, and it’s not an, “Oh, no, this is terrible moment.” It’s an, “Oh, yeah. Okay, time to go into this mode,” which is to save the show, which is, you know, comes from the competitive side in me, that Olympic side where it’s, you put in all the work. You know you have what you need to compete and to compete well because you put in the work, so there’s no need to panic. It’s just, go out there and compete. Go out there and race. That’s it.

Karen Martinez Perez, Longitude fellow, Rice University: