By Melanie Roach
For the Courier-Herald

I thoroughly enjoyed being glued to my flat screen television watching Team U.S.A. complete another incredible showing at the Olympic Games. I’ve also developed a greater appreciation for my DVR which made late night and middle of the night broadcasts possible to watch.

As this year’s games concluded it reminded me of what it was like returning from the biggest athletic event in the world four years ago.

My thoughts can be best described by parts of the final chapter of my book “Lift! Enjoying the Journey of Life,” which will be released fall 2012.

THE FIRST FEW WEEKS AFTER RETURNING HOME from the Beijing Olympics were weird. Almost surreal. I remember walking around my house in a daze, not quite sure what to do with myself.

For the last three years, my daily life had kept a tight, disciplined regimen, and each morning, I’d wake up with a very specific set of goals I knew I’d need to accomplish in order to inch me closer to making the Olympics. Now that the Games were completed, I no longer was bound by such a detailed agenda and I was free to do whatever I wanted. And I was at a loss!

Think about this for a minute: experts say it takes 21 days of a repeated, regulated action to form a habit. Well, for the last 1,095 plus days, I had repeated a systematic schedule and I had formed way more than a habit; I had dug a well-established rut as deep as the Grand Canyon.

From 2005 until the end of the 2008 Games, my life had revolved around fulfilling the Olympic Dream. Every day was filled with a stringent workout, carefully measured meals, a massage, a nap, core work, an ice-bath, and a strict bedtime.

Now that the Olympics were over, I could eat whenever I wanted, go to bed whenever I wanted, and work out whenever I wanted. The pursuit was over. Just like that.

At first I handled the transition well. That year was an election year for Dan; as a result, just weeks after Beijing, we were heavily occupied with campaigning.

In addition, Roach Gymnastics was waiting for me to step back into leadership and management. And most importantly, my family had me back, had my full attention, and had my time. These components helped a great deal, but after a few months, when all of these realms of my life settled back into ‘normal,’ I was still left sensing a void.

I felt lost, and I really began to struggle internally. It seemed as if I had no specific goal to wake up to each morning, and I felt as if my purpose had become undefined. To make matters worse, I had quit lifting cold turkey, hadn’t picked up a weight since I’d returned home from the Olympics.

While I wouldn’t call it full-on depression, I definitely was in a funk.

Many, if not all, Olympic athletes deal with this letdown, and for some, it can evolve into serious depression. It’s particularly difficult for the athletes who are single, who don’t own businesses or who don’t have significant activities outside their sport, because once they return home, they have nothing major upon which to turn their focus.

But this kind of post-success slump doesn’t merely affect Olympians; it can cast a shadow over any person who has held an intense single-purposed goal for a period of time, who has worked hard, and who has invested his or her life into seeing that goal come to pass: A business person after a huge deal; A parent raising a crew of children and now they’re all in school, or even more intense, the last one has just left for college; An actor at the end of a huge production; A person who just beat a long battle with cancer; A person who has just retired from a long successful career.

The gratitude I feel for the rare chance to compete at the Olympic Games is difficult to put into words. Although it took a some time to adjust back to “normal life” I can now look back at the experience with such joy, gratitude and pride that I had the pleasure of representing my country on the world’s biggest stage.

Melanie Roach finished sixth in the 177-pound division of the 2008 Summer Olympics. Her combined lifts set an American record. She owns Roach Gymnastics in Sumner.