Inner Demons

 

Meet the evil voice in my head.  He's cute right?  In a weird way...  kind of looks like a cow, but possessed and no hair and a Clint Eastwood "too much scowling = locked jaw" face.  Sadly, but truly, I'm fighting with him right now.  On a daily basis.  I know we all have our inner demons.  The voices in our head that beat us up when we're already down.

Confession time.  I was a teenage pageant girl - I'd say beauty queen but I did the scholarship programs :P.  To become a pageant girl, you start dieting when you are 8.  True story.  Couple that with being a ballerina, I wasn't exactly right in the head about what a strong beautiful woman looked like.  CrossFit truly changed that image for me.  However, it doesn't mean that 17 yrs of thinking Galina Ulanova was the end all, be all of beauty goes completely away. Don't get me wrong - I still look at Galina with awe...she was an amazing ballerina and boy could she soar through the air!  But she's not snatching her lithe body weight of 100# for reps (and she wouldn't be even if she hadn't passed away at age 88 a few yrs ago).

Galina Ulanova

I'm pretty damn happy with my body now.  I worked my butt off to drop 18% body fat over my time in CrossFit.  But that doesn't mean when eating goes a bit on the wayward side... and the scale creeps up... and numbers you never wanted to see again unless they were a snatch PR come rolling across a little digital screen - you don't pause and that evil little red cow with horns starts sitting on your shoulder.  Couple that with this other "little" demon:

There's nothing cute about him.  NOTHING.  This demon is called "Your workout sucked and you should just quit."  He's a far more precarious devil.  Because everyone in CrossFit has faced him.  He lives in our community, and you often don't recognize him in your ear.  Last night was one of the most demoralizing workouts I've ever had.  My negative pullups were atrocious - as though I had no control over my body whatsoever.  And the skin on my hands were burning and pulling like a Salem witch being drawn and quartered with torches under her.  I couldn't understand why my body wasn't simply doing as it was told.  But fine.  Finish the set.  Get off the bar.  And head to my strength work.  At least tonight was cleans which means the worst part is over.  

Or so I thought...

Snatch is supposed to be THE lift I stink at.  I LOVE CLEANS!  It figures since I can outdo Monica Gellar with neat freakiness.  So what was going on here?  I'm not hitting my target points.  Stacey's telling me to tighten up and no matter how many times I tell my body to tighten up, I may as well be a Bill Cosby gelatin jiggler.  The frustration builds and builds.  The little devil of "you suck!" is growing with every attempt.  He's starting to take up all the space there is in the box (and ummm CFMC is the largest CF gym I've ever seen).  Finally, Stacey pulls the plug.  This is olympic lifting.  It's about technique.  If I cannot calm down, it is only going to get worse.  I need to get my frustration in check.  But I'm not one of those breathe and meditate kind of people.  Once amped up, I stay there.  Horribly frustrated, he calls that lift and makes me move to the Front Squat.

Trying to breathe and reboot, I do my warmup sets fine.  Stacey wanted me to do about 7-8 on the RPE scale.  I did 115 last week, which is no where near the 135 I was doing a month ago when I was going at 85%.  But at 105 tonight, Stacey says stop.  Do this weight.  "Are you serious?", I ask.  Surely not!  I argue that the 105 was light.  There was no way I was going to stay at 105.  I load another 10 to keep warming up.  Stacey watches that set, and with the look of a headmistress about to slap the child with the dunce cap tells me to check my ego - "You WILL be doing it at 105.  I KNOW 7 on RPE.  I watched your bar speed.  Do 105!".  At this point, I'm near tears with the frustration.  My head is saying I NEED to go heavy.  More than Justin needs Kill Cliff, more than Lizza's career needs the gays, more than CrossFitters need the Kool-Aid.  I NEEDED to make up for the clean performance.  But did I?  No siree-bob I did not.  I was not the bomb dot com in this workout.  No, I was DOS 1.0 (nerd alert! - comment if you know what that is).  I was not Bill Gates.  I was the professor who told him he wouldn't amount to anything.  The voice was growing.  The devil of failure was looming large.  I was shrinking, and the devil was growing.  If I had a mirror in front of me, I'm pretty sure I would have seen one of those people you see at Walmart late at night.  I was getting pretty low.  I was this character.

 

Mentally, I was done.  I was so defeated, so demoralized that I sat on the ground changing from my Oly shoes to my Frees, and told Stacey I had hit the point of "What's the use?"  

We've all been there - if you haven't, just wait...it'll come.  Where the work, not just for a minute, but for a period of time (mine has been going on for the past 3 weeks) seems to be for naught.  I haven't been improving.  I feel like I've been on a roller coaster of extreme highs and lows, and it hasn't been balancing out to be able to see if there's any real improvement. 

And here's where the sage advice of a coach, repeated by a friend, hopefully will carry me through.  Both Stacey and later on the phone, Twinkie, assured me that if I couldn't get past the mental frustration, if I let that devil of failure and negativity beat me up every workout that didn't go as planned, it would be my demise.  That would stop me more than any physical injury.  I could forget Garage Games.  I could forget the Open.  I could forget muscle ups and handstand pushups and 300# deadlifts.  A mental check was more important than any of those things.  Let Stacey worry about the numbers.  Just go in and do the work.  That's all I have to focus on.  Do the work.  Do the work consistently.  Do the work with integrity.  Do the work giving it 100%.  But that's ALL I must do.  Who care if today I muscle snatch 100#, but miss a 50# squat snatch tomorrow?  To be consistently great, you must put the work in consistently.  And never let the devil of failure take over the work to get you to quit.

I didn't quit last night.  I did my metcon, and despite breaking more than I thought I should on the wall balls, it went fine.  But boy did the desire to quit overwhelm me.  And I did continue to beat myself down for the rest of the night.  I know that part of me is still defeated writing this.  But devil failure isn't growing.  I'm not blind to him.  And tomorrow when I go in, I will just do the work.  :-/