Unfortunately it was a series of heavy lifts. I am super competitive with the lifts. I don't try to keep up with anyone when we run, but if it's dead lifts, watch out. Well Cheryl was in my group. Cheryl is my height, half my weight, and it's all muscle. I did my best to keep up with her and in the process truly hurt myself. I wasn't able to workout for the rest of the week. Brilliant.
Well, that was 2 weeks ago. In the interim, I've been going regularly, doing the WODs, and trying to have a good attitude. Of course, I only lost 2 lbs. in those 2 weeks, and that's not good enough for me. Then yesterday, a miracle occurred. "Karen" came up in the rotation. Karen is 150 wall balls for time. Brutal, but a workout that I had done before. It was the first opportunity to actually measure myself against an earlier version of myself. I was ecstatic.
10 weeks ago, my very first workout on my very first day with CrossFit, I did Karen. I think I wrote about it here. It took me 19 minutes and I was blubbering through it. I was so angry and sad that I had let my body get so out of shape. Yesterday, I did Karen again. My time was 10 minutes! In 10 weeks I had shaved off 47%! Holy shit! That's unbelievable! Suddenly, being fat doesn't matter. I can do 150 wall balls in 10 minutes. My skinny-ass sister could not do that.
I am strong. I am getting stronger. I will reach my appearance goals eventually, but they are not so important to me today. I am getting fit. I am changing my body. I don't need to be patient for results, I just need to change what I am measuring. Monday, I ran a 5k. The last one was in January. I improved my time by 2 minutes. That's real progress that I can see and feel.
Jen, you're doing great. Now is the time where you'll start seeing big improvements over your past times. And that's all that matters - we're not there to compete against each other. If I was trying to compete with Cheryl or Kendall or Kelsi or 20 other women there, I would have stopped going 6 months ago. We all know where we individually came from and where we want to go. Just focus on you. You're doing great.
ReplyDeleteI am seriously inspired by you. Keep going.
ReplyDeleteIsn't it great to know that weirdos can come out of the woodwork and spam your blog posts?
ReplyDeleteI realize I hardly know you, but I feel like we're kindred spirits. I felt the same way you did early on, and like you, I'm trying to just squash those feelings and stop comparing myself to other people.
I knew I was in pretty crappy shape when I started, but I'm big and strong, right? Then I watch someone like Ben toss around weights I can't hope to lift anytime soon and it's a little humbling. But I got over that pretty quickly and just started worrying about myself and not how everyone else is doing.
And like you, I felt pretty awesome with myself because I knocked a pretty hefty chunk off of my Karen time. But apparently it wasn't as good as SOME PEOPLE so I didn't get an awesome t-shirt.
So we will both continue to rock Crossfit, and someday we will be as awesome as Cheryl and Ben. And if not, we can always just run over them with our cars.