on taking it easy

I started doing Crossfit regularly on May 17. I spent three weeks improving steadily. I know that three weeks isn't a very long time, but Crossfit has already become such an immense part of my health and happiness that it feels like much longer. I began attacking the WODs as much as I could and improving my strength and stamina more quickly than I've ever done. I fell in love with the intensity, the competitive atmosphere and the camaraderie; I found myself making goals to lift heavier weights rather than to run longer distances or lose more pounds. I learned to both anticipate and dread the three beeps signaling that a workout is about to start, to check the day's workout online before bed or as soon as I got to my office and to bounce into the gym optimistically each night, ready (to a degree) for whatever my coach would throw at me. There were, of course, negative side effects to this infatuation, specifically my reactions when it felt like my love was unrequited: when I couldn't clean 70 pounds, when my time finishing a WOD was much longer than everyone else's, when moves that seemed instinctive to others were completely foreign to me. Yet for the most part, I was thrilled to be involved in such a challenging and exciting activity, and I was happy with the progress I was making.

And then I overdid it. I did Fight Gone Bad (three hellish rounds of sumo deadlift high pulls, push presses, box jumps, wall balls and rowing) and topped it off with handstand push-up practice and kipping pull-ups with a skinny band. The next morning I tried to do inverted rows and felt twinges in both shoulders, and I realized that I was hurt. Which was fine. I've hurt myself before working out; a few days of R&R and babying my injuries and I should be good to go.

Except I'm still not. I know that it's actually been less than a week, but it feels like an eternity. My first time back in the box with the aim of taking it easy, we were doing a deadlift-clean-thruster-run combination. I scaled the workout, replaced the cleans with SDHPs and the thrusters with front squats and contented myself to doing a pansy version of the exercises I wanted to be doing. The next night, I deadlifted (and PRed!) while everyone did a fun-looking MetCon workout that was pretty much all shoulders. Tonight, one of the coaches gave me a completely different workout (front squats and ring rows) in place of the killer WOD of ascending sets of cleans alternating with rounds of Cindy.

I've been trying really hard to have a good attitude about it, but I'm getting frustrated. I know, intellectually, that it is better to take it easy now than to push myself, hurt myself and be totally out of commission for a longer time. I recognize that what I'm doing is the best thing for my body and the only thing it makes any sense to be doing. I'm glad not to be doing movements that cause me the bad kind of pain. But it's still hard to walk into the gym and feel like I'm out of the loop, like I'm not going to make real gains until my body gets back into fighting shape. I can't tell how much of my attitude is me being annoyed at my body for slacking on the job and how much is me feeling like I'm stuck at the kids' table while the grownups get to do their cool, "real" workouts. Either way, this 'tude isn't helping anything and is only leading to me being dissatisfied with myself, despite hitting PRs in deadlift and front squat this week and stringing 50 double unders for the first time.

As I mentioned, I've been injured before. I got a stress fracture that left me unable to train for weeks, tendonitis that required me to take it easy right before the biggest competitions of the year, a dislocation-and-fracture combo that incapacitated me for six months. I broke my growth plate in my knee, sprained my ankle twice in one month and had numerous other ailments that kept me from training. And I can't remember any of these injuries getting to me so intensely and so quickly. To be honest, I think it's just that I am so happy with this new form of exercise (and with my new lifestyle in general) that anything counter to it is almost unbearable. Though this is a shitty way to have my appreciation for this fitness regime (sport?) confirmed, I think the positive lessons I need to take away are that I have found a program that works for me and that I need to trust my body to tell me what it's capable of.