Over the past few weeks, I’ve been having a tough time in my workouts. If I’m not feeling right physically, I’m mentally checked out. If I’m mentally in the zone, physically I’ve been exhausted.
It’s been pretty frustrating and really made me start to question if CrossFit was for me. This never used to happen to me at Equinox and it worried me that I was having a hard time getting motivated and doing my best.
It sounds stupid, but the competition of CrossFit is a great thing and really tough thing. I love doing workouts alongside my fellow gymmers, silently and vocally cheering each other on through our collective pain. However, it has been really hard on me mentally to realize that there are people in our gym that I’m just never going to beat for time, weight, distance, etc. At my old gym, as long as the weight was scaled accordingly, I was pretty confident that I would finish in the top two for pretty much anything. At my current gym, the things I’m good at, other guys are better at. The things I’m bad at, well, they’re not bad at them.
Over the past three months, that has been the biggest adjustment for me - not winning the workouts. It’s not the intensity, the form, the lifts, or the learning, but the mental aspect of “losing” to people day after day. And while I know deep down that not finishing first doesn’t mean losing, it has been hard to convince myself that’s true.
After a tough couple weeks, I decided to do the right thing and not skip one of our heavy workouts. It was a:
1-1-1-1-1-1-1 Clean and Jerk (max)
This was a movement that I’ve really only done twice - once in our intro class and once during a workout, where I shamefully maxed out at 105#, simply because I wasn’t confident in my ability to do the movement.
Even though I haven’t been there mentally recently, I feel like my form has been getting better and my understanding of how to make my cleans stronger has really started to click. After our warmup, I ended up maxing my Clean and Jerk at 159#!
Considering I weigh in below 130# frequently these days, I not only raised my Clean PR by 24#, I raised my Clean and Jerk PR by 54# in just three months, getting to a weight that is about 30# heavier than my body weight.
I also missed on four straight attempts at 164#, but I left the gym knowing I could do it. That’s the confidence that I’ve been missing over the past couple weeks and it was the reminder that I needed to get motivated again.
PRs are the best.
