Wasted Tears

It's been a year today since I sat down and wrote the first post What is Courage? for this blog. I started writing to try and work through all the tough stuff that I thought I was going through at the time. At the time I felt like the world was crashing down on me and like everything was oh so difficult.

Someone, or several people probably, told me that one day I'd look back on that first month (or first several months) and laugh at how silly I was. Now when I look back and read through my entries from the first few months I don't really find much humor in them. I've never been one to not own my feelings. I feel completely justified in being upset, but with a year of perspective I almost feel stupid about how upset I was.

I'm a pretty emotional person and I cry a lot. I'm okay with it. It's almost an involuntary response sometimes. I cry when I'm frustrated, when I'm angry, sometimes when I'm tired. I cry at movies, and books, and sad country songs, and commercials, and sappy internet stories. I cried while I wrote many of these blog posts. I have even been known to get a little misty eyed with pride for someone else's accomplishments - like watching someone win a gold medal. When guys cry, forget it. I'm a mess.

I didn't cry all the time when I lived alone in DC. Not every night, not every day... probably more often than I did the year before, but not an extraordinary amount. Except for during my first week up there. One day in particular, when I'd had a frustrating day at work, and was having trouble figuring out how to get a Metro card, and mistakenly took the bus from Rosslyn to Annandale and it took 2 hours, and I was hungry, and had a headache, and my phone was dead. I started crying on the bus (it really started in front of the guy who finally sold me my Metro card) and I didn't stop for about 4 hours. When I finally made it home to my empty apartment (my stuff didn't get delivered for a whole week) I fell down on my air mattress and cried harder and longer than I had in a long time. I was lonely and tired and frustrated and I did NOT want to be in DC. I felt trapped. I was ugly crying - crying so hard that I got all blotchy and red-faced, and snotty, and puffy.

At the time it felt good to cry that much. I felt like I deserved to be that sad because this was the hardest thing I'd ever had to go through. Except it wasn't really. Looking back those were a lot of misused tears. Tears that should be cried for true pain and suffering. Not because you're lonely and frustrated with your life. Not because you miss you friends. I feel stupid for wasting my epic sorrow tears on something that in the grand scheme of things wasn't really all that horrible.

 

I love this card. I bought with no one to give it to, just because I thought it was hilarious and also a good life lesson. I love this card because it reminds me that on the bad day scale...no matter what happened or how I'm feeling... at least I didn't miss the boat that caused my whole species to become extinct. Right now it's something I need to remember. I need to learn how to keep things in perspective and focus on the bigger picture of life. I need to stop wallowing in self-pity and wasting tears on "problems" that aren't really all that big. I know too many people who have real issues they're facing. Too many people who have, and are, experiencing pain and loss and sorrow. People who are fighting and struggling against bigger things than a strained back and a lack of self-control. Things more worthy of epic sorrow tears than a frustrating, lonely day.

 

 

The Push

I've been in a melancholy and introspective state of mind the last couple of days and when that happens I think a lot. I'm probably at the lowest point of my journey so far right now. Deep, deep down in a valley. One of the biggest reasons that I wanted to move back home is because over the last few months I've been on the down slide to this point and sensing that I was heading down this road I wanted to be back in a place that was familiar and where I felt I would be in the best position to climb back out. That's where I find myself now.

 

In many ways starting from this point is harder than being back at the beginning. I've lost ground in the weight loss arena, I'm mildly injured, and I'm having to scale way back on everything in the gym. One of those things alone can be pretty defeating, but all of that at the same time has been difficult for me to work through. Add in stress, going on work travel, moving and living in a transient state, the chaos of my parents remodeling their kitchen... not to make excuses, but it's definitely taken a toll. I know starting over is harder than starting initially, but I have to look at every day from here on out with the same optimism that I had on day one. It's going to be a lot easier to climb out of the valley and move forward if I can do that. In my thinking about how that's going to happen, one of my thoughts today was that this is going to be a lot like pushing the prowler.

 

Photo by Tim Young

This thing I'm pushing in the picture is a prowler sled. It's one of the many fun toys we get to play with in CrossFit. Sometimes we use it inside, sometimes we take it outside. You load up weight, grab the handles and push it some pre-determined distance. There are many ways to make this exercise more challenging. Many things that factor into the ease or difficulty of the push.

Pushing the prowler on a flat surface, no weight added, on the high handles is relatively easy and can be done fairly quickly and efficiently. Adding more weight makes the sled harder to push. Switching to the low handles adds a level of difficulty. Uneven ground can complicate the issue. Pushing the sled uphill is harder still. Multiple passes in a row is really tough. Up on the high handles, back on the low handles, adding weight each time... this was exactly an event we had to complete in the Garage Games. Each pass was a little more difficult than the last, especially considering that this was part 3 of a 3 part event.

Reflecting on this event today I was able to draw some parallels to what I'm facing right now. Like the prowler, things in life are more difficult when they're more complex, when you're already a little beaten down, and when you add more weight, which unfortunately I have. I learned at the doctor today that since my last competition in May I have gained back 22 pounds. I know I shouldn't be, but I'm ashamed of myself for the weight gain because I should have known better than to let it happen, especially knowing how hard I worked to lose those 22 pounds in the first place. I feel guilty for not being more honest with myself and others about how much I've been struggling and making it seem like things were better than they are. I feel regret for all the bad choices I made. I'm upset that for the last few months I gave up on myself and didn't care enough about myself to fight harder. I'm mad that I let what I wanted in the moment overshadow what I really wanted in the long run.

Ultimately though, shame, guilt, regret, and anger aren't going to help. It is what it is, I am where I am, and I just have to try again to keep moving forward. Like when you're pushing the prowler, sometimes it stops and you can't make it move. Sometimes you need to let go, back up a little bit, get a little lower, put your head down, and start pushing again. You only have to get the sled to move a little and then just keep putting one foot in front of the other and build up a little momentum and eventually you've covered more ground than you thought you could. At least that's the hope. When things get tough you have to focus on the push and not on how far the sled has to move.

Chasing "Her"

BHC Garage Games 2013 - Photo by Matt Borden

From the minute you wake up, step out the door, enter the room, at the sound of "3,2,1 GO"... every second, you see her just ahead of you. Before you even take a step she's nearly out of sight and you can barely make out her perfect ponytail or the color of her adorable outfit. It doesn't matter if you're running, lifting, or just standing still, her form is perfect. Everything you wish you could do someday, she mastered a year ago.  In every area where you feel you excel, she surpasses your best effort. You kind of hate her and secretly wish that you were her. Deep down you know this girl isn't really as perfect as she seems. Intellectually you realize that there's probably something she struggles with or an area she thinks she needs to work on. There's no way that she's really as infallible as you think she is. She probably has a girl she chases, a girl she thinks is perfect, but it's hard to see her faults from so far behind. As hard as you try to catch up, the gap between you never seems to shrink. For every gain you make, she makes one too. Every time you have a set back she pulls even further away.



BHC Garage Games 2013 - Photo by Tim Young

It's hard to not feel discouraged as you chase her. Your pursuit of the girl that is stronger, faster, smaller, more capable, more agile, more beautiful consumes you. Sometimes you don't want to chase her and you wonder why this all has to be a race anyway? You try to ignore her and stay focused on just the road in front of you, but even when you can barely see her you always know that she's still in front of you.  You want to make peace with the fact that you'll probably never catch her, but in some ways the pursuit is what keeps you motivated. Chasing her is a constant. Having someone to chase gives purpose to your efforts. Even if she always wins, even if she's always better, in chasing her you become better than you were the day before. You beat the you that was chasing her yesterday. You may not be as strong as her or as fast as her, but in trying to catch up you can't help but get stronger and faster than you used to be.



BHC Garage Games 2013
 Photo by Tim Young

In time you realize that she isn't the girl to your left or right in class. She isn't the girl at the top of the leaderboard or the girl that wins every competition. You know her better than anyone else, but you've haven't even met her.

She is you.

The girl you chase day after day is the girl you have yet to become. She will always be there. You will never catch her and you never want to because to stop chasing a better version of yourself is to stop growing as a person. You will always be chasing her because there will always be room for improvement, and that realization helps you learn to love the chase.

Crawling Back

First official workout back at BHC - "Hotshots 19"
Photo by Brickhouse Media

When I started writing On Change and Courage the topics for my posts came fairly easy. I felt like I had so much to say, things I wanted to get out, stuff I needed to work through. I was lonely, missing home, missing friends...at a total loss for how my life would play out. I was scared of failing, unsure if I was strong enough to keep fighting on my own. I feel like I've shared so much of myself and my story with so many people and I still find it a little unsettling that I've let so many people see into my deep, dark, not always pretty places. Who does that? But you know what? I wouldn't take any of it back.

While I've been honest in my writing, I'd say there's probably about a 2% censorship factor that I've put in place, a small little fraction of myself that I've edited out or kept inside. I think that's okay. No one really wants to know everything about a person, right? There's a couple of posts that were difficult for me to write and get just the way I wanted them. Some I wasn't sure I really wanted to post - some I wanted to post, but knew I needed to pull back on a little. Some of them just appeared under my fingers and I hit the publish button without a second thought. Every one has been a little chunk of my life, something important to me, another stone I've laid down to mark the path of where I've been or one I've set out in front of me to keep me moving forward.

All of that was an overly verbose way of saying, I'm not really sure what to write about lately, so I'm just gonna start writing stuff and hope it turns into a post. I never really wanted to post something just for the sake of posting it, but I also want to keep things rolling. Much of this journey has occurred in chapters - leaving Roanoke and moving to DC, exploring the world of Olympic Weightlifting, making it to the 1 year mark, and now leaving DC and moving back to Roanoke. As I stand on the precipice of this next segment, the edge of the cliff looks vaguely familiar, but at the same time not at all what I had envisioned over the last 12 months when I was dreaming of the day I'd get to come back home. Don't get me wrong, I love being back home and I was prepared for things to be different, but I'm glad that for the most part it still feels like home. That first day of school feeling I got on Tuesday, the first night back with my Big 6:30 team, was amazing. It just wouldn't feel normal if things weren't a bit of a struggle.

Where I find myself now in some ways feels like I pulled some magical card out of the deck that sent me back to the start of the game board. It's familiar territory, but in many ways I'm at a disadvantage. Since I spent so much time developing my weightlifting over the last year, to the admitted detriment of my weight loss and conditioning, I have a lot of work to do to get back on track. Stepping on the scale and seeing that the number has gone up, and not just a little. Creeping back into the mentality of feeling fat and uncomfortable in my clothes. It's been a little deflating, and painful, to learn that I can't base high rep percentage work off a one rep max I hit 6 months ago and haven't really come close to with any consistency since. Knowing that I've snatched 105 pounds before, yet here I am struggling to snatch an empty bar. It's not a fun place to be. As much as I want to fall back in with the same training partners and groups I was able to lift with before, I'm finding that their consistent training has moved them well above me to a level I'm unable to meet. There's a lot of things I can do now that I couldn't do when I started CrossFit, but there's also a level of intensity that I used to have that isn't quite there anymore. To be in a similar situation and think, "I don't remember it being this difficult before." It's humbling, but that's good for me. Letting my ego get the best of me is just going to hurt me in the long run.

Pushing through the last round of "Hotshots 19" with Diane
Photo by Brickhouse Media

As unnecessary as it may have seemed at the time, it's taken me talking it out with someone else for  me to realize that my true deep down goal is, as it always was, to lose weight and live a healthy life. I still want to be a weightlifter, I still want to compete - there are other goals that I have - but at the heart of it all is weight loss. To do all the other things I want to do, I have to first conquer that piece. The first week has been rough, but I'm loving (most) every minute of it. I feel pretty beat down right now, but I like the feeling of needing a rest day. My charge is to put my heart and soul into consistently training and getting my diet back on track. Putting in the work, but being smart about how much and how fast I push . Scaling back on the weights and getting my technique solid, my conditioning built back up. Crawling. Walking. Running.