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.