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.
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