With the help and support of my friend and colleague, Nick Kapustka, I’ve chosen to create a series of posts to share and chronicle a journey I’m on.
Okay, full disclosure, I struggle with self oriented, narcissistic people. I know there’s a egotistical part of each of us and I’m no exception to that. I don’t want to be arrogant but I want to share some things that I’m learning from how I’ve been training my physical body. With all that being said, I’m choosing to share, be vulnerable and talk about myself. For the next five weeks I’m going to run a series of connected blog posts sharing my experience surrounding this undertaking.
I’ve been training for the last thirty weeks to compete in the Crossfit Games Open. It’s been challenging on every level. Obviously physically but the parts I want to share here, are on the mental, emotional and even spiritual levels.
There has been compromise. There has had to be. I’ve taken time, which I believe is our most precious non renewable asset and allocated it to be spent in the gym. I’ve also discovered that I’ve had to spend more time on recovering too. It required deep commitment. And that commitment has been revisited often. There have been times that I’ve asked myself…Is all of this really worth it? Am I worth it? What about all that I’ve chosen to say “no” to? Am I missing out on really living? What do people think of me?
Subjectively, thirty weeks may not seem like a long time but it’s long enough. It’s not ten years or fifty years but it’s still thirty weeks and it has required effort. Tons.
For those of you that think things are always easy and smooth for me, keep reading.
I’ve asked myself many times why I’m doing it and taken the opportunity to get pretty clear about why. Here’s what I came up with; I wanted to test myself, I wanted to give my all to something, I wanted to come up against something that was difficult and I wanted to find again what it was like to transcend my limiting thoughts of what my best really was.
There have been many factors that I’ve had to organize and leverage in order to move towards this thing I’ve committed to; time, money, sleep, nutrition, socializing, the support of others-just ask Phoebe, tenacity, managing physical pain, emotional turmoil and other resources. I’m telling you this because like anything in life I sought to become aware of all the integers contributing to this and were a part of the change and I had to orient them so that I could enable myself to succeed. I had to acknowledge that I needed help. There’s been a team of people, on many fronts, that have assisted me. Thank you, Paul Buono.
Today was the first week of five weeks of the competition. I had doubt and felt scared that I could push myself and do what I’d never done before. There was tons of mental chatter about whether I really wanted to win, whether I really wanted to bother myself with progressing through these weekly experiences and attempt to achieve my goal of making it into the top 200 in the world to go to the next phase. Another thing on my radar was that if I win then others have to lose and if that happens they may not still like me and won’t want me around. And what mental chatter would be complete without the general thought of “Can I handle this?”.
My overall, final thought is that winning aka succeeding is to overcome something that was previously limiting. And limitations, mostly, have everything to do with me.