Friday Tri: Getting Over Yourself

I spent about 6 weeks being super
frustrated at Cross-Fit because I could only very rarely and with
great pain manage the “RX” set listed for women. The coaches
would come over while I was trying to lift something near the RX and
take my weights down and I would feel like they were telling me that
I wasn't “good enough.”

Then last week, I overheard a
conversation that one of the coaches was having with another of the
coaches. She said, “You know, after 2 years at Cross-Fit, I've
gotten over myself. Some days, I come in and I don't feel up to doing
the RX set, so I don't worry about it. I just do what I feel up to
doing, and that's enough.”

Somehow, this changed my world. If that
was what a coach was saying, then why wasn't I saying it? And I gave
myself permission not to do the RX when I couldn't. I don't know if
that changed how much weight I could actually lift, but it changed my
attitude about Cross-Fit (and myself) enormously, and I think that
was very important. Instead of walking in and feeling like
oh-boy-here's-another-workout-I-can't-complete, I walk in and tell
myself I'm going to do what feels good. I'm going to get better, but
I'm going to not be there yet, and that's OK.

On Wednesdays, we were doing “cleans”
for only the second time for me in the last two months at Cross-Fit
and one of the coaches came over and told me how much improved I was
over the last time (the first time in a workout). She was apparently
astonished at how good my form now was. My weight wasn't there, but I
have to start with form, so I was proud of myself.

I was reminded strongly of the first
several years I went to my writing group, so long ago, when I was a
wannabe. I wrote something new every month, or I revised extensively.
And every month, one of the other writers (Carol Lynch Williams) told
me how astonished she was at my improvement. I was listening, which
is actually fairly rare. Sometimes I lost something in translation,
but I was moving forward all the time, and that was what mattered.

It doesn't matter where you are now. It
matters what your attitude is about the future and how you're going
to be there. And how you treat yourself now.