Peak performers in all industries share a commitment to the spiritual journey of excellence. A person who epitomizes this is Kelly Gonzalez, and that is why I'm so excited to have her on today's episode of BiOptimizers' Awesome Health show. Kelly is an amazing person who has achieved so much at an early age. She's been a Miss Olympia competitor, she holds a Master's in Exercise Science and she can do things with her body that will blow your mind! Kelly is here to share her perspective on on health, healing, high performance and much more on episode 7 of BiOptimizers' Awesome Health podcast. More About Awesome Health with Kelly Gonzalez Because Kelly can trace so much of her success back to her fitness roots, I wanted to know how she got into this world in the first place. She answered by sharing her childhood, which was filled with nature, taking care of the animals her family owned, and her wild imagination! She had no other kids nearby so she made up games for herself, and she also watched her mom's fitness videos. From all of the animal care and the fitness videos, Kelly was in excellent shape. She specifically recalls a push up contest at school when she did the most: 40! All the boys made fun of her - even though she had beaten them all - and she felt ashamed and embarrassed. Until her gym teacher told her to never feel ashamed for being strong. She later found the sport of Lacrosse, and trained on her own because there were no other kids nearby to train with. Through dogged pursuit and perseverance, Kelly made the team and was a terrific player. In fact, she went on to play Division 1 at Johns Hopkins University, a goal she had set for herself. It was the first time she had fully created something for herself in her life, and it was the start of many life-changing experiences she would have. Learning To Follow Her Passions By her junior year of college, she came to a few significant realizations: she had to plan for life after lacrosse and she had to find a new career path because she didn't want to be a doctor. She had been pre-med up until that point but she saw doctors only worked with sick people, and she wanted to help people avoid getting sick in the first place. She wanted to save people the pain of illness through the promotion of health and prevention. She also began doing distance running at the time. She had always had a dream of running a marathon so after some lifeguard training runs in the sand, she started running on concrete and was able to easily run a half-marathon. Because she didn't know how to train for a marathon she started running for time. When it came time to sign up for the marathon, she registered with the Boston Marathon's qualifying pace group! She felt so good during the marathon she outpaced her group and ran it in 3 hours and 36 minutes, coming four minutes under the necessary qualifying time of 3:40. Her senior year she devoted herself to training for the Boston Marathon. She took her usual committed approach: she organized her schedule to support her training, and she moved to Anapolis and lived in her aunt's garage so she could run and train with a group from the nearby Naval Academy. It was another situation where the passion came and she did whatever she could to follow it and embrace it. After reaching her goal of running in the Boston Marathon, she began developing some physical issues from running so she became more involved in lifeguard competitions. She did really well, won regionals and was invited to compete at nationals with the US Lifesaving Association (Team USLA). Again, she organized her life to support this goal. She worked with her college to finish all of her first semester courses by Thanksgiving, she held fundraisers and made it happen. She spent a month in Australia and competed. When she was there she was invited to come back to Australia as an international competitor, and she went for it. After graduating college, she bought a one-way ticket to Australia. W