Small Goals

This week I did my first ring muscle up. I made that a goal a long time ago, prior to Dan's deployment. I haven't worked on it much, but I decided to give it a try this week... I'm quite pleased.

Aside from the muscle-up, the past few weeks have been extremely emotionally trying for me. I am not an openly emotional person, so to admit that and to feel it so strongly really tells me something about how I am feeling. I've moved to a new place, started a new job, found a new box, left my friends, and taken on this new chapter alone. However, the motivator that keeps running back into my head when things seem amiss is my desire to stay focused and push forward. Laser focused...and pushing with the force of trying to get a damn prowler to slide across the concrete.

What do I want? What do I need to get that? To be honest, I have flip-flopped between feeling focused and on track, and lost and confused. This translates directly into how I view my mental health in regards to my training, but it is all amplified right now by the change in my life. But training, as a result, has become the one thing that I can rely on and focus on.

Training is full of ups and downs. I went through a period of time where I had the same 1RM's for 5 weeks. FIVE weeks. It even got to the point where I was sucking it on every workout, and was discouraged and tried convincing myself that taking time off was the only solution. Sure, a rest day (or two) here and there were acceptable, but I'm talking 2-3 weeks of rest that I was desperately fighting off. But... being alone DOES have its perks... and one of those is the desire to not be alone....thus my regular drive to the box. The one thing I learned during this period of time was that I don't need to judge myself day-to-day based on a long-term goal. I need to set the goal, the action plan, and the small marks along the way to mark my progress. If I had done that when ridiculing myself for not maxing one week to the next, I would have noticed that I wasn't using a band for pull ups on any WOD anymore, and that I had bumped up my KBS weight on WODs from 26# to 35#. However, I was too blind to celebrate that and became discouraged.

Set goals, and understand that there will be set backs. If there is one thing that has become crystal clear to me in the past few weeks, it is that the road to the achievement of any goal is not a smooth, fast, or easy road. For me, at times, it has become difficult to see that road at all. I can't even enumerate how many times this week I have wanted to say "I can't" or "this is too hard." Truthfully, I completely feel that way in those moments. Having to talk myself into wanting the things I've started chasing after is extremely disheartening. But taking a few steps back, looking at the big picture... this WILL NOT be easy, this WILL NOT be fun all of the time, this WILL NOT have immediate rewards, and this WILL inevitably make me break. But the breaking points will be bumps along the road, and the journey will take time. That is why in life, and in training, setting small goals, taking small steps forward, and rejoicing the triumphs of that journey (not just the completion) is completely critical to the experience itself.

So today, amdist the loneliness, confusion, and sadness that I have felt perpetually with all of these changes, I have decided to celebrate, even if it was just a Muscle Up.

Beginnings

I have been doing CrossFit since October 17, 2012.

In the past 7 months, I have learned a lot about my body, how it reacts, how it changes, how it doesn't change, and what I want it to do. CrossFit has been a great solution for me at his junction in my life. I am a former long course triathlete who tore her meniscus rounding third and heading for home in a beer league softball game in 2011. After a surgery, multiple months of PT, and new diagnosis, my non-dissolvable sutcher has started to make its way out of my remaning meniscus, causing erosion and swelling in my joint. I am destined for a knee replacement before I turn 40. And so, I have bid farewell to my long rides from Atlanta to Alabama and back on my bike, my countless hours pounding hot Georgia pavement in mid-July in my size 6.5 Mizunos, reduced my training time by 75% and improved the way I feel, operate, train, and look.

CrossFit has changed my mind, my opinions, and my approach to traditional training routines. I will never tout it as the solution to everything. I do not believe that, nor do I preach it. In fact, every time I get on my bike to ride for 90 minutes, my legs burn and I'm completely smoked (and I find myself singing Alicia Keyes "Girl On Fire" song and changing the words to "my legs are on fire..."). My friends call me a "closet CrossFitter" because I don't talk about it a whole lot with people who don't do it, but it is changing me, and I want to talk about it with people who want to hear about it. I think the most important thing is that people find an exercise routine that works for them: whether it is raquetball, zumba, yoga, flag football, or excessively long bike rides. An active life is all I care about for anyone, but for me, my current solution is CrossFit. I want to share my journey.

When I started, I did it because I needed to commit to exercise again. In July 2012, I crashed my time trial bike at 24mph into a retaining wall and broke my collarbone. I was unable to do anything for 2 months, and once I was cleared again, I ran into more knee issues and got discouraged. My husband insisted I do ANYTHING, and then reminded me that CrossFit existed. I am notoriously a cheap ass, and my husband mentioned that if I had to pay for something, then I'd likely commit to it for fear of losing my money. He was right.

The first day, I walked into CrossFit East Cobb and was scared to death. A month earlier, I couldn't lift my arm above my head, and since, my muscle atrophy was so bad that watching some of those girls lift over a hundred pounds and do pull ups intimidated me to no end. However, the number one thing that I kept reminding myself was that I wanted to change, and to change, I have to start doing something differently. Plus, this wasn't a competition with those girls, this was a competition with myself. Lindsay vs. Lindsay. Day 1 was discouraging, so I decided that I would start tracking how much I was lifting so that I could see progress.

Here are my first week's numbers:
Dead Lift: 95#
Back Squat: 85#
Bench Press: 65#
Power Clean: 55#
Shoulder Press: 45#
Squat Snatch: 25#
Pull ups: 0
Dips: 0

I can remember wanting to throw up. I can also remember looking at some of the other girls and thinking "wow I want to be like them." Secretly competitive, I was constantly shown that I had a long way to go, and I finally decided that was perfectly ok. But, the question started to become "where exactly am I going with this?"

This brings me to another point that I am sure I will begin to talk about as I continue to blog. What are my goals? At first, my goal was to do a pull up. I can cross that off the list. Done. I can do seven dead hang pull ups now. Then it was to be able to do kipping pull ups. Done. Then it was to do an Rx workout. Done. A few times over, in fact. I've set small goals for myself along the way. Admittedly I get so discouraged when I don't hit those goals, but I keep aiming for them. I will write more later on the whole topic of goal setting and why it is important. I am not one to set a goal and take no action - and I think it's important to share with others how to reach goals, not just set them. Stay tuned.

The final thing I'd like to talk about is comeraderie. My husband is in the Army and tells me I will never understand the bond and the brotherhood. Whereas I do believe that, I think the closest thing I've experienced is cheering hard and being supported by my friends at my gym. I met two great girls at my gym, Andrea and Sarah, who would ALWAYS cheer for me, push me, encourage me, and give me a nice shove across the shoulder and say "awesome job, that sucked!" I recently left my gym because I moved four hours away. I didn't have it in me to tell anyone but one person that it was my last day in the box. When I finished the WOD, I had to just leave. I couldn't turn around. I am not one to cry, but there was a huge lump in my throat. I had to get in my car and just drive off... I felt like I had just left my family behind.

I'm sure I will write a lot about each of these things as I continue to blog about my fitness journey. But signing off here, I want to do a comparative to my first week's numbers for you - as proof that it does take time, but it DOES happen - and clearly I still have a long way to go.

Dead Lift: 200#
Back Squat: 135#
Bench Press: 95#
Power Clean: 105#
Shoulder Press: 70#
Squat Snatch: 75#
Pull ups: 7
Dips: 11