Frustrated

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Frustrated!

I jacked up my knee last Saturday and I can’t seem to get it to loosen up. My back totally froze up in a work out a couple days ago and I had to DNF. Yesterday I had to choose not to put more weight on the bar during a 3 rep max back squat for fear of further wrecking my knee or back or both… I have no engine. I feel like I’m going uphill on a skate board during every wod. Every second of the wod seems to take an hour. And during that one-hour-second I just want to quit. It feels like it takes every bit of energy just to convince myself to keep moving. And that has nothing to do with the knee or the back… it’s only my engine… my endurance, my strength…

Perhaps I’m doing exactly what I wrote about in my last post. But at the moment I don’t care. I’m frustrated with my performance…

I sound like a big baby right? Well here I go, I’m about to throw a temper tantrum…

I’ll start by saying I know people say “it’s showing up that counts” and that that I’m “probably going through some physical change” or maybe “it’s the weather”. I know that everyone goes through valleys or slow periods at one time or another. I’ll even go as far as to say maybe “it’s just mental”.  But after I get all the pep talk, cliché, psycho therapy babble out of the way, I’m still left with the real stuff that’s on my mind.

I’ve regressed or maybe I’ve just hit a plateau while those around me continue to progress. Either way, my neck is sore from watching each of them pass me by. I’m frustrated because my times have gotten slower. My AMRAP rounds are fewer.  I grit my teeth during the wod and hang my head after the wod just to keep from screaming or crying from frustration.

Everyone has been supportive. Everyone is encouraging. My pep talk jargon would say “Leah, you’re your biggest critic” bull! To me the white board is the biggest critic… It would say “Leah, you’re only competing against yourself” bull! At this point I’m ONLY competing against not DNFing. “Leah, at least you show up. At least you’re moving. At least you’re not quitting.” At least, at least, at least… I don’t want “at least” I want more.

I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to snap out of it. If it’s mental I don’t know how to improve my mind set. If it’s physical I don’t know what changed. 

I don’t know what to do.

Highlight Success and Attack Weakness

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I know firsthand the struggle we as women face when we decide to get healthy. The cravings, the fear of failure, the busy schedule, the extra time and effort required to turning your life around.

Do you see the beauty in the changes you have made?

I have found myself in more conversations recently, with women talking about their health journey. I listen to their story and I hear about their work out routines and diet changes and I am truly excited for them. But what resonates is often how hard they are on themselves despite these great changes. They have made life altering decisions and are taking all the right steps, but now more than ever, they feel like failures. They talk about how weak, ugly, fat and sometimes worthless they feel. It seems that by choosing to do things the right way, in their mind, it only shines a brighter spotlight on their wrong things they do, which in essence drowns out the beauty of the actual successful steps they have taken. 

Do you realize that no extraordinary journey is without a few pit stops and getting lost once in a while?  

It’s like despite the good things we do for ourselves we often mentally consume ourselves with our weaknesses more than our wins because anything less than perfect is devastating. We get embarrassed that we haven’t reached our goals yet. We get frustrated that we still have cravings, don’t feel like working out all the time and that the scale seems to only go down in .25 lb increments. I truly hurt for women when they tell me that they had a bite of their Grandmothers homemade pumpkin pie and now it’s ruined their whole day. Or when they just want to cry because they’ve only lost 1 pound in a 2 week period. It breaks my heart to see how hard they are working yet continually feel beaten down.  

I see beautiful women all around me. I see is the beauty they possess inside and out.  These women have given their lives to friends, family and church. They are blessed with love ones, friends, jobs, an education, a house, walking, talking, breathing, loving…. living. They wake up every day with a new resolution to do their best for themselves and those around them!  They sweat, and grunt at the gym and invest in healthy foods and activities for their families yet, one wrong move and they are up in arms at their lack of self control.

Leah Mae wrote a post a while back called “Put Good In” where she talked about how to change your diet and make it easy.  In her post she says “rather than taking the all of the unhealthy things out of your routine, put good things in.  The theory being that the reinforcement of good things, like a new sheriff, will run the bad things right out of town.”

I have started to make these changes in my own perspective. My goal is enjoy my wins. I want to show people what works for me and be excited about my journey every day.  I want to set new goals and keep pushing toward them. I want to change my paradigm and the paradigm of those around me that my successes needs to be talked about and highlighted but my failures deserve only to be attacked and changed. Letting our weaknesses mentally consume us only beats us down, but enjoying and sharing our successes propels us forward on to new successes.