04.12.2012

Skill:
-Frogstand planche: 6x10 sec, 60 sec rest
-5 "perfect" close position negative pushups: 5x4, 90 sec rest
-Handstand holds: 6x15 sec, 60 sec rest

Strength:

Technique work
-OH Squat: 3x3 (45), 60 rest
-Snatch Balance: 4x2 (35), 60 sec rest
-2 snatch pull (knee) + 1 hang squat snatch (hip):  5x1 @ RPE 7-8, 2 min rest Did 2 sets at 35, then 3 sets at 40.  Starting to feel more comfortable with my shoulder stability and pulling myself under the bar.  But definitely not anywhere close to diving under like this guy.

-Push Press: 4x3 @ RPE 7-8, 2 min rest  This is the first time I have done push press since Open WOD 12.3.  And lo and behold, despite my max of 105 a few weeks before the open, I am back down to.....
Warm-up: 3x40 - 3x65
Work Sets: 3x75 - 3x75 - 3x75

Definitely have lost strength.  But Stacey notes that my technique was solid so it should come back soon.  On top of that..was definitely sore the next day. 

 

And the work ended here.  Unfortunately I had a 6pm appointment, so I missed out on doing a metcon.  Sad Face.

Responding to the Demons

I am continuing to battle my demons on a daily basis but it has helped to have support from amazing friends and coaches (as well as the small but momentous victory of learning how to climb a rope this past weekend - Thanks Drew!)

"We each fight four mental battles each day and the first one is with ourselves knowing that we belong in the crowd and that we are the winner and everyone else is just a teamate." - Twinkie

Here is the article Twinkie sent me in response to the demons I have been battling.


The Big 4 of Mental Toughness

Imagine showing up at Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL training (BUD/s) on day one. Around you stand 175 swarthy SEAL candidates from all walks of life. Some are monster Adonis types who played linebacker for their college football team. Others are boxers and wrestlers. Others are underwater combat experts (code for water polo). Still others look like they just parked the tractor in the barn and hopped on a bus to Coronado.

Every one of them is about ready to fight three fights, and the 40 or so who can win all three simultaneously while maintaining a great attitude and their health, will call themselves SEALs in 11 months. If you wonder whether you will be one of them…you won’t.
 
First, let’s discuss the 3 fights.   As my buddy Tony Blauer likes to point out – in a street fight you fight 3 battles.
 
The first is inside you. That battle is overcoming your fears, steeling your resolve, maintaining an offensive mind set, developing skills, knowledge and personal power, and not succumbing to the habit of conveying special powers upon your enemy.

The second fight is the actual engagement; the one most would consider the fight. This is often the easiest of the 3, and is certainly the shortest in terms of time invested.

The third fight is between you and the system. Even if ambushed, a SEAL who beats the crud out of an assailant in California will have to answer for why a Navy SEAL with 25 years of martial arts experience could not control the use of force.

Back to wet and cold on the BUD/s grinder. The second fight is clear to you. You must fight each and every one of these guys to earn the right to be standing tall on graduation day. That means that, out of 40 potential finishers, 39 will be your potential teammates, and the other 135 are your enemies. You are locked in a competitive battle with them to lock your position in the 40. You must do so by being crafty, every watchful, exploiting opportunity, being Machiavellian and Aristotelian at the same time. You must be intensely cooperative and forge a winning team, while also being intensely competitive - the stakes are the coveted trident, which some have literally died earning.

The third fight is against the instructors and the system. This fight is also pretty clear to you. The instructor’s sole job is to determine whether you have what it takes to be on the team. They don’t care about you personally. Whether you or the next guy makes it is completely irrelevant to them. The instructors all have PhD’s in exploiting weakness, finding your opening, crawling inside of you and tearing you apart from the inside out. You will not make it…unless…
 
You win the first fight first. The first fight is in your mind. You must win in the mind, before stepping foot onto the battleground. This is true for any situation in life. The question, then, becomes
how.

This is where the “big 4” come in. I can write volumes about mental toughness, but when it comes to tactics, the big 4 always bubble up to the top. You must master these 4 tactics to win in your mind before you step into the combat-like arenas of life.

Whether you are a SEAL candidate or business professional, the big 4 are your toolkit to mental toughness and success. Stand by for more in the next issue.
Until then, train hard, stay safe and have fun!
--Mark Divine, founder SEALFIT / Unbeatable Mind

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.  :-/