Today's Workout: 061110

The “Q” Word

“Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.”  —-Lance Armstrong.

As CrossFit athletes we are constantly faced with obstacles in WOD’s. Sometimes we may be fortunate enough to encounter one that we are good at, but then there are those other days.  Days those ten minutes feel like a lifetime or a simple 21-15-9 of Fran feels like a marathon. Your staring at the pull up bar that looks so high, the medicine ball that seems to keep getting heavier after each throw, or those 20 box jumps that aren’t just simply 20 box jumps anymore. This is where we as CrossFit faithful are faced with a certain dilemma. It would be so easy to just give up at this point, right? Who is going to know and for that matter even care? It’s not like there is a penalty or punishment if we sandbag the workout. Questions like these pop into our heads sometimes because we just want the pain to stop. We want that nauseating feeling to go away and for our heart rate to come down from 200 beats a minute. At this point we want it to be over. Not because we are scared or weak, it just sometimes feels like we have to in order to make the pain go away. So some quit or sandbag the rest of the workout just to get it done. The clock runs out or your look at your time and for some reason you don’t feel good at all. It’s not a painful feeling anymore, but more a shameful kind of pain. Yes, you just did it, the horrible word that is a forbidden in the world of sports. You just QUIT and there is nothing you can do about it. It is where you go from here is the important part.

  We all make mistakes; the important part is that we learn from them. Just because one workout wasn’t finished doesn’t mean that we hang up the Chuck’s. Next time the “Q” word pops into your head, disregard it completely. Remember that unfulfilling feeling and disappointment. From now on quitting is not an option and we must finish at all costs. Dig deep to get that next rep and then dig deeper to get the one after that. Set a standard for each workout and make sure that you maintain it no matter how tired you may be. You wouldn’t quit your job if it was hard for a day, so the same type of thinking should be applied here. That may seem a little too extreme of a comparison to some people, but it’s not about the task at hand, it is about the type of person you are. If you are going to quit at a workout than what is going to happen when life becomes hard? Our strength is only measured by how strong we are at our weakest moment. So if you know that you can make it through a gruelling task like a “Murph”, it speaks more about your character than a thousand words. We just need to stop looking for things to be easy and embrace hardships. So next time you are facing a WOD that may look difficult remember that the sacrifice in order to achieve a goal must greatly outweigh the goal itself.