The Feelz…

Last week we had a 40 min EMOM. Min 1 was 1-length bear crawl. Min 2 was 20 pushups; min 3 was a shuttle run, min 4 was 30s of ME toes to bar and min 5 was 15 box jumps to a 20″ box.

Looking at this WOD on Wodify, I knew it was going to be a tough one. I’m still nursing a calf injury and toes to bar is more like me flailing my legs wildly getting them nowhere near to touching the bar all the while making my hands very sore. Box jumps are no better when the calf muscles are not happy, and running…well…it’s one of my least favorite things to do and injuries are simply not helping there, but I showed up and thought that I would at least do what I could. I do like bear crawl, so at least 8 of the rounds would be okay!

Before we started, our coach said that anyone who had toes to bar had to work on stringing them together, try not to do one and drop etc. Those that didn’t, really had to try to get those knees to their chest and those that were close should work toward their first one. This left a LOT of us spending 8 rounds really trying to get one, practicing our swinging and really working on getting our legs up as far as we could. Hey, I can do that! I can swing my legs around in a vain attempt to touch the bar. (Now…I firmly believe that my not-inconsiderable jelly rolls are not really helping this particular move).

I believe we were in our 5th round and one of the other coaches was prepping things for the Boot Camp class and happened to be watching. After trying really hard and not getting anywhere near the bar, she came up to me and said, “Oh you are so close!” This woman doesn’t have an insincere bone in her body and it would never occur to her to say something that wasn’t true. However, I can visually see how far my feet are from the bar and to my mind there is approximately a one foot distance between my toes and the bar, and that is probably being generous. So I shook my head and replied, “I’m really not all that close”, and moved on to the next movement (box jumps – of which I was getting 10 of the 15). I do my jumps and here comes the coach for our class. She stops me and says, “You are allowed to give yourself credit for what you CAN do”. I must have looked very downtrodden at this (or some other emotion that I cannot begin to process), because she put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Seriously. It’s okay.”  I nearly burst into tears, but contained myself and moved on to my bear crawl and completed the workout to the best of my ability.

So this was last Thursday and I’ve been basically incapable of processing this 3 second transaction all weekend. All these people talk about Crossfit giving one confidence and I feel the opposite. It has shown me all the things that I cannot do. I’m not graceful, coordinated, fast, or agile. (I am strong as hell; if there are things I CAN do, it involves power). So it’s really tough for me to feel confident in anything because I’m regularly last in the class, scale a good portion of moves all the time, rarely Rx anything, and struggle with so many things. So how am I supposed to celebrate the things I can do when I cannot do so many things? How do I give myself credit for how far I’ve come, when it feels as if I’m STILL barely out of the starting gate?

To top this off, I spent this past Saturday at a local competition watching and taking pictures of a lot of our members competing, many of whom were competing for the first time. They were so nervous and I spend the day yelling, encouraging, telling them to get out of their heads and reminding them that although we all spend a good portion of our time hanging out with crossfitters, most of the world thinks we are nuts and they were there, putting themselves out there and pushing hard when most people were not doing that. At one point, one of the ladies was getting very frustrated with her movements and turned to her teammate and said, “I will try this” (referring to the weight on the bar for a squat snatch). I yelled to her a Yoda quote, “Do, or do not. There is no try.” And one of the coaches, who was also there as support starting poking me. I turned and she said, “When will you listen to your own advice? You are the most negative, positive person around.”

Needless to say, all of this has me very reflective and I’m still not 100% sure how to process all these things.

I will end by reminding myself that this is MY journey and at least I was able to back squat 260 pounds 3 times today, so there is that!