Effort and Choice
Effort and Choice
The Open is here, and in a few weeks it will all be over. PRs will be had, injuries will occur, hands will tear, and people will scream in both excitement and frustration. Some days you will feel like you have won because you beat the goal you set for that WOD. Other days you may have failed in your own eyes so badly that looking back you wished you had just quit halfway through, or even worse wish you hadn’t even stepped through the door. However, you showed up. You put in the work. Whether it turned out good or bad in your opinion, you still walked through the door. You finished. You made the conscious decision to try, and that is where the beauty lies. Effort and choice. Those are two things that only you can take from yourself.
We create this environment of competition in Crossfit – RX weights and movements, rounds you must complete, and time caps in which to finish. And no matter how competitive you think you are or are not, you shift mentally every time the coach yells 3, 2, 1. We want that top leaderboard score, or even better to ring that PR Bell every time we leave for the day. But these are unrealistic expectations of ourselves — that’s ego. More often than not we overly criticize ourselves for our failures because they seem to come more frequently than our successes. Instead we need to shift our thinking. Maybe that session didn’t go exactly how you planned, but guess what? You showed up. You got after it. And you fought to be better today than you were yesterday. Don’t rob yourself of the fact that you made the choice to walk through that door and you took a step toward betterment.
With the heightened sense of competition and self expectations that come every year with the Open remember that one workout or one movement does not define you or your successes. Set goals and accept that they are a journey — some take a few days, some a few months, and some may elude us forever. Some days we win. And some days the barbell, rig and/or pavement wins. So, in the spirit of the Open, get excited, get competitive, get emotional when you hit a PR and when you miss a lift. But, don’t let 5 workouts or even 1 workout define who you are, because no matter the outcome you ended another day having decided that today you would show up, you wouldn’t quit, and you would end it closer to those goals than when the day started.
Zack