I went to my first Crossfit class in 2016. It was an eight-week intro course for women and from the first hour I was hooked. I joined a gym and started going at least five times a week, which I continued to do for the next 4 years. Many of my best friends are from Crossfit; one of them even became my husband (hi Bob!). I also saw a lot of growth over those four years as a “Crossfitter”. I became stronger, fitter, more energized, but I also became more social and developed more grit.
Still, I’ve always struggled to feel satisfied with my progress in the gym. During those four years my back squat weight increased, but never to the number I wanted it to be. I couldn’t string together pull-ups, let alone attempt a muscle up. My arms and legs grew more muscular but overall my body was still basically a breadstick, and I couldn’t seem to convince myself that I’d made any meaningful progress after years of dedicated work.
And so, when gyms reopened after being closed at the start of the pandemic, I decided not to go back to Crossfit. I was tired of the sore muscles and torn hands and scaled workouts and watching other people make more progress than I was. So I quit. I started running and doing yoga to stay active (and also spend a lot more time being inactive, but that’s probably best unpacked in a separate blog post…or with my therapist…).
This year I’ve gone back to Crossfit-style workouts and have been blown away… by how badly I suck.
I mean wow, I thought I was bad before? I was amazing before!
In 2019 I was frustrated that I couldn’t string together pull-ups, and now I can barely get my elbows to bend. In 2019 I was mad at myself for how slowly I completed Murph (which includes 2 miles of running, in addition to 100 pull-ups, 200 push ups, and 300 squats), and now if I run for a few minutes my heart starts to feel sort of explosion-y. Of course this has led me to shame spiral a bit because if you’ve met me or read any of this blog you know I’ve got some perfectionist/control freak tendencies (it’s ok, admitting it is the first step). I can’t believe that I’ve let so much of my fitness disappear, and it’s intimidating to think about how much work I’ll need to put in to get it back.
I think this is a universal problem not just in fitness but in life. I can’t tell you how many friends of mine have refused to take a Crossfit or yoga class with me because they aren’t “enough”; not in shape enough, not flexible enough, not thin enough. The entire time I was doing Crossfit I was comparing myself and my gains to everyone else’s and it blinded me to any progress I was actually making on my own, to the point that I eventually got so fed up with being “stuck” that I gave it up altogether. Only after backsliding for an entire year could I see clearly how much progress I had made in the four years prior, and how much I had lost by stopping. If I had been able to appropriately recognize and celebrate the small wins, I would have been so much better off than letting my self criticism cloud my ability to see the situation clearly.
My belief that I lack enough-ness has held me back in almost every area of my life. My writing folder is cluttered with abandoned drafts that I convinced myself were terrible. In fact, I wrote the first draft of this exact post several months ago, told myself it was shit, and only just now stumbled back across it and realized it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. By being hyper focused proving on my own growth I’m constantly sabotaging my own chances of success.
And yet, I’ve convinced myself time and time again that my overly critical brain is actually a strength and not a weakness because if I didn’t worry about doing great things I’d never get off my butt and do anything. This is a fallacy. If I stopped worrying about the outcome and instead enjoyed the process, I’d save countless hours fretting about my lack of progress, and would be able to get over my fear of producing poor work and actually get shit done in the moment, not months from now. Not only is this a super frustrating realization for someone who wants to have a successful life, but it’s also a super frustrating realization for someone who wants to have a happy life. I don’t want to always have to look back to understand that things weren’t as bad as they seemed at the time. I don’t want to live a good life in retrospect, I want to live it now, in the present moment.
In Shirzad Chamine’s book Positive Intelligence, he describes this problem as one of many mental saboteur’s that keep us from our potential. All of our negative emotions, Chamine argues, are self-sabotaging. That includes the emotions we think of as overtly negative, like being judgmental or controlling, but also the emotions that we’ve convinced ourselves are helpful, like worrying over something or attaching our self-worth to our achievements. We tell ourselves that without these emotions to drive us forward we’d become lazy, or somehow be worse off.
But I don’t want to live life through a pessimistic lens, believing that people are only capable of greatness if motivated by a fear of failure or a need to prove themselves. Instead, I’m choosing to believe that human beings are driven to learn and create by an innate sense of curiosity, collaboration, and empathy that I also possess and can harness instead of resorting to worry and anxiety.
So despite my huffing and puffing and the little gremlin in my brain telling me I’m no good, I’ve started running. I signed up for a 10k race in October and five days a week I open up my Couch-to-10k app on my phone and run for about 30 minutes. And despite my worry that this blog post is trite and therefore I must be a terrible writer who is silly to post things out loud where other people can read them, I’m sharing this article now instead of letting it languish on my laptop for another few weeks/months/years.
I’ve been told that in marathon running there is a common phrase, “pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” How true of our everyday lives as well, and what a necessary reminder that suffering only slows us down.