Stress and Comebacks

June has been an intense month. I've spent most of it really stressed out and anxious. There's been a lot of waiting for change at work and it's been pretty unsettling. Both my boss, the director of our service for the last 7 or 8 years, and another employee, my good friend and mentor, are retiring in 3 days. There's a lot of uncertainty about the direction of things to come and I will be inheriting a lot of new duties. Not knowing who will take the director's place and there being a very real possibility that it won't be someone who has any experience in our field makes a lot of us really nervous about the future. That alone is enough to make me stressed out, but it doesn't really help matters that my mentor is a very beloved employee by our field staff and has been the go-to guy with all the answers for many, many years. I have very big shoes to fill and I feel that there is a lot of expectation for me. We've also been going through a server change-over for our main software package and working on a possible new project that could mean even more changes for me. I'm also taking over facilitating the training for new field staff and I'll have to be in Kansas City for two weeks straight this August. It's been a lot of waiting, learning, and trying my best to be calm and patient.

In the midst of all that was a semi self-imposed break from CrossFit and weightlifting that put me in pretty dark place feeling like I had no direction. I felt like I was losing my drive, my purpose, my outlet for stress relief, my source of happiness. I got myself attached to an attitude that if I didn't have to fuel my performance and workouts it somehow didn't matter what I ate anymore. Logically I knew this was wrong and terrible for me, but I started to not care again. I had high expectations and lofty goals that I would continue to be strong and workout on my own and do everything I could until I was able to get back to CrossFit, and it just didn't happen. Not only did I not maintain, I backslide and lost ground on the progress I had made, which just upset me even more and buried me a little deeper in the muck and mire of my unhappy place. I wasn't writing like I should have been to try and work this all out. I opened up my blog several times and just couldn't find the words.

I was finally able to get things in order and go back to CrossFit and for the first time in long time I felt like everything was right in the world again. Since January, with the exception of the Open, I haven't been involved in the CrossFit world or consistently going to traditional group classes. District CrossFit has two locations, NW and SW, and I'd been going to the SW location to use the platforms and work on Olympic lifting, mostly on my own, for the last 5 months. As much as I loved lifting, it was very isolating and I was feeling physically beat down. All the time. I really missed the group dynamic and the endorphin rush I got with CrossFit and when I had to pick one over the other, it wasn't as hard of a decision as I thought it might be. I decided to go back to doing CrossFit full time and also transfer back to the NW location as it is a more manageable walking distance from work. It's also where I started when I first moved to DC.
 
From the first night back I knew I'd made the right decision, but I also knew that the road ahead was going to be tough. Starting over is much harder than starting. I have to be okay with the fact that I'm going to struggle for a long time. My endurance and conditioning are pretty much non-existent. The weights and reps that I can do are lower than they used to be. Everything is a little (okay a lot) more difficult than I remember it being. It's hard to know what you were capable of not so long ago and not being able to match the intensity that you used to have. I'm sure I'll get back there eventually, but it's going to be a slow climb.


Even though I'd only been back a few weeks, several months ago I had signed up for a CrossFit competition that was held last weekend in Raleigh and I decided to go ahead and still compete. I know how much competition fires me up and my hope was that it would help keep the ball rolling in a good direction as I worked on restarting my journey. I also knew a lot of friends from home were competing too and I was excited to see and compete with them. I was surprised at what I was able to accomplish and happy that I didn't come in last (10th out of 11), but the weekend ended with an interesting and difficult conversation that I hadn't quite expected. I ended up driving home confused and conflicted, with a lot on my mind. I'm still sorting out my thoughts and I'm still not sure how I feel about everything. I hope I'm able to put it all into words soon, but I do think this conversation may have given me useful insight that I'm going to need in the next few months. It was upsetting and hard to hear, but I'm grateful that it happened. Sometimes the medicine we most need is difficult to swallow.