My All

On Monday night the athletes competing in the CrossFit Games were surprised to learn that one of their first events would be a half marathon row which they completed yesterday. One thing that the commentators talked about with the athletes was the mental game and the internal fortitude required in such a long endurance event. To sit and perform the same movement over and over again for more than an hour, close to two hours in some cases, requires you to be able to dig down to the depths of your resolve, to take your mind elsewhere, to ignore everything your body tells you about how crazy you are and how much it hurts and how much it wishes you would stop.

Yesterday I rowed. Not a half marathon, but 200m sprints, 4 times. During each sprint I started out really strong and rowed the first 100m without much trouble, but it seemed like every stroke after got increasingly more difficult. As much as I wanted to maintain the same intensity, each subsequent pull caused my legs to ache more and more and I could feel my energy fizzling out. I kept moving, but as much as I wanted to row the second 100m as fast as the first 100m, each round was a little bit slower. I thought about this on the way home and it was one of the many, many instances where I second guessed my effort. Part of me wants to think that I did my best, left it all on the rower. That I was pushing as hard as was physically possible, but another part of me knows I probably could have given more. I wondered if my technique was as solid as it could be and if I was rowing as efficiently as I could have. I wondered if I had taken more time to set the foot straps on the first sprint would my time have been better? I wondered if my legs hadn't been cramping would I have done better? Mostly though, I wondered if I really gave my all during the workout. All the other wonderings were really just the excuses I was making for not working as hard as I could.

I feel like this happens all the time. Not really intentionally. I never go into a workout thinking, "I'm totally gonna half-ass this one" but sometimes, when I'm not feeling 100%, I just don't dig deep enough, or push myself hard enough - maybe I don't want it bad enough in that moment - to really go all the way up to the edge of the cliff, to kick through the wall, and achieve everything that I'm capable of achieving.

Sometimes I feel like every workout is a long endurance workout for me. Something that might be low intensity for someone else causes me to get buried in the pain cave, struggling to fight my way out. I think we all have that thing, or things, that we have to fight against - be it approaching the bar with a weight on it you think is too heavy, or a workout with a lot of running, or with a lot of box jumps when you really don't want to bang your shins into the box. I feel like my mental fight has been the toughest part. It's not only been a challenge to push myself to what I thought my limits were, but to trust that I can go beyond that point, that my coaches won't let me go to a place where I'll get hurt, and that it's okay to reach the point of failure - it's really the only way to find the limit.

Initially I just wanted to keep moving. I hated having to stop and sit down and catch my breath. I'm not sure that I always had to stop, but that was the first part of the fight for me - to keep going when I felt I had to stop. I fight to do more reps in a row than I thought I could. I fight to run further than I think I can. To get to the point where my body or my brain says stop and I tell it "No, do a little more and then we'll rest." I've found my line to be much farther away than I thought it was, but I'm pretty sure I can go beyond where the line is now. I'm not convinced that I've ever really reached my breaking point, though it's felt that way more than once.

Not every workout is high stakes. It's not as if you win a prize for finishing first on every Metcon, so it might be easy to think that pushing yourself to the breaking point every day isn't necessary. However, if you never go to that place when it "doesn't matter" how will you ever know what to do when you get to that place and it does matter?

Another thing I struggle with is pushing myself enough throughout the workout and not just in the last minute. In an effort to not completely burn out in the first minute I tend to pace myself too much, take too much rest, break up my sets too much. I always seem to have an extra burst of energy when 1 minute left is called. I discovered this during a competition last weekend. I competed in the Brickhouse CrossFit Classic, a part of the Virginia Commonwealth Games. The first workout was a scaled 3 minute AMRAP of Fran (thrusters and jumping pull-ups) followed by 1 minute of rest and the second workout, a 2 minute AMRAP of either Grace or Isabel (ground to overhead). I didn't do amazing on the first workout, but I tied for second place on the second workout.

Me & Wes, my judge & workout buddy, after Fran/Grace/Isabel
Photo by Brickhouse Media

What I learned later when I was checking the leaderboard is that if I had completed just one more lift I would have tied for first. Two more reps and I would have won the whole event. All I had to do was pick up a barbell and put it down two more times. That would have taken maybe 10 more seconds at the most. So then I got to thinking about how much I rested during those two minutes... was it equal to the 10 seconds I would have needed to win the workout? Probably. Did I really need as much rest as I took during what was supposed to be a 2 minute sprint? Probably not. It's situations like this that make it obvious that I don't necessarily need to work harder on my snatch or clean and jerk to compete better - of course that's important - but more than just improving my skills and lifts I need to improve my mental strength. I need to learn how to push myself to my breaking point more often, even when it "doesn't matter." I need to learn that it always matters. I should always give my all in every workout or I won't be able to when I compete.

Those who are the most successful aren't always the strongest, the fastest, or the ones who can lift the most weight. All those things are important, but it's just as important that your mental game is strong. I turn 31 two weeks from today and 31 is going to be the year of mental strength.