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Follow Cleveland Magazine on: Going for It

why do we enter the arena?

Why do we push ourselves to take on challenges others may consider crazy — when we could coast and be comfortable?

In this month’s issue, we name our 30 most interesting people, including the Olympian on our cover. Katie Nageotte didn’t win a state championship until her senior year of high school. Yet she persisted for a decade and, last summer, vaulted herself to gold. But it’s certainly not just sports where people stretch themselves. Sister Mary Eileen Boyle had already given her life to God, which many would consider enough of an accomplishment. But she kept going, creating Esperanza Threads, a nonprofit that trains people in need to work in Cleveland’s thriving garment industry. Kahrin Spear set off on a cross-country trip and came back with an album. Justin Reynolds confronts loss through the written word. Chardae Slater spent a month painting a mural — and then did it all again after it was vandalized. Do these people hear the voices that hold so many of us back? Who are you, Justin Bibb, to think you can be mayor of Cleveland at age 34? Who are you, Sam Duvall, to think you can start a major tennis tournament in downtown Cleveland without any courts? Who are you, Kelsey Shepard, to think you can make a living off of making macarons? While they may have had their doubts, they sure didn’t give in to them. Instead, they followed their passion and believed in themselves. There was no guarantee it would work, but they had to try. Here’s how Nageotte explains it: “I just always felt like I had more in me — and I wanted to see that through. When I’m all done, I want to know that I did the best that I could and I gave it absolutely everything I had.” We enter the arena — like Nageotte — to go for it.

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