'Special Forces' is grueling. How Christy Carlson Romano persevered (thanks to Kim Possible and 'Cadet Kelly').

Christy Carlson Romano is known for playing Ren Stevens in Even Stevens and commanding officer Jennifer Stone in Cadet Kelly, but it’s her role as the teenage hero Kim Possible that the Disney Channel alum was drawing on while competing in Season 3 of Fox’s Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test. The reality show puts celebrities through rigorous training exercises inspired by the selection process for real Special Forces units.

“I remember seeing that first season [of Special Forces] and going, ‘I would never do that show, ever,’” Romano, now a podcaster and content creator, tells Yahoo Life. Once she was asked to join the cast, however, her old alter ego kicked in.

“Part of what Kim Possible gave me in terms of inspiration to do this was this delusional idea that you can do anything,” says Romano. “There have been other times in my life where she's kind of put that pathos into my head, and I've tried to follow it and live up to that sort of legacy of girl power.”

The actress, now a 40-year-old mom of two, had only three and a half weeks to train for the five-week challenge. She jumped out of a helicopter into open waters, unlocked a safe in a gas-filled room and even faced her fear of small spaces by being buried alive all before her exit from the show Wednesday. Here’s what she learned along the way.

Make time for yourself

With limited time to prepare for the show, Romano dove right into at-home training. She realized that as a mother of two daughters, who are 7 and 5 years old, it had been a long time since she put herself first.

“I've never been focused about myself,” she says. “It's always about them, like, ‘What are they eating?’”

Her grueling new regimen, however, meant paying more attention to what she was eating. Romano committed herself to a high-protein diet and found supplements to complement her training. She also carved out time for workouts amid her responsibilities as a parent.

“I was working out three times a day — or as many times as I could — and just, like, living in the gym. But then also taking my kids to school,” she says. “So I was fully, fully invested in the process.”

She’s willing to push herself to her physical limits

Romano doesn’t think of herself as an athlete, aside from dancing as a kid and completing a boot camp before filming Cadet Kelly. Luckily, her husband, Brendan Rooney, a Marine veteran, knows firsthand what military training looks like. He helped Romano get started — but it was up to her to see her workouts through.

“There would be nights when he would run with me up mountains with a weighted backpack on,” she says. “I would try my best to keep going, when suddenly he would decide he was finished. He'd be like, ‘Hey, I'm done, I'm gonna go to bed.’ And I would run more on the treadmill.”

The show’s production team steered Romano in the right direction, telling her what goals she should be focused on during her workouts. “[I’d] get more and more meaningful every day towards getting stronger,” she says. “I did what I could, honestly. When I look back, there's not any more training that I could have done with the time that they gave me.”

Mental strength matters

Aside from running up mountains or swimming in her pool, Romano says that building mental strength was “the most important” component both of her training and of getting through the show.

“Special Forces people are extremely locked in and intelligent, highly, highly skilled people. So you need to showcase your mental ability, not just your leadership skills or your physical resilience,” she says.

The separation that she experienced from her children challenged that. “I did miss Mother's Day [while filming] so I was definitely missing my kids,” she says. “But at the same time, they knew that Mommy had been working towards something for all those weeks, and I wanted to make sure that I was fully present to honor the sacrifice that was being made.”

Her husband’s insistence that she make it through the whole five weeks of filming without quitting helped. “My husband was like, ‘You can't come home, I will not accept you coming home.’ And I was like, ‘OK, all right, I'm not coming home,’” says Romano. “I just had that delusional belief in myself. … I was never going to quit.”

Recovery is also important

While she challenged herself both before and during the show’s filming, Romano admits she’s been in recovery mode since.

“I told myself I'm not going back to work out unless I want to,” she says. “So I think that I'll go back to working out when I'm good and ready, but I'm not gonna push myself.”

Unlike her training for the show, she says her focus will be on “finding the fun in athleticism again.”

She’s in her ‘now’ era

Romano took some time out of the spotlight after her Disney Channel days, but made a comeback with the content she was creating for YouTube and TikTok during the pandemic. She attracted a surge of followers in 2021, when she began opening up about the realities of being a child actress and the relationships she had with her former co-stars. Now, just a few years later, she feels ready to close that chapter and begin a new one.

“It is the ‘now’ era. It is the ‘What have we learned?’ era and 'How are we using it to grow fast?'” she says. “I am 40, and to me, I never even thought about what I wanted to do at 40, because I had accomplished so much at a young age and so you stop having goals, really.”

Her experience as a young star may not be relatable to most people, but she believes that her current adult journey is. “You can get misled from what your personal goals can actually be, and you have to find your way back to what they are,” she says. “Going on the show has given me a little bit of perspective on what my future goals are going to be.”

She has nothing to prove to anyone other than herself

Romano was prepared for a competition show, but she quickly learned that the only person she was up against was herself. While she initially aimed to make her husband proud, it was defying her own expectations that proved the most rewarding.

“I learned that I can do hard things and that I can believe in myself past just being an actress, being a public person,” she says. “It’s a very personal journey to have confidence in oneself that has nothing to do with other people's acceptance. On this journey, I was able to kind of just be with myself and my own limitations. So I proved to myself that I have this inner strength and that it's up to me to believe in myself.”