Turning a Corner (or two)

The other day after complaining to my husband about my blistered hands and sore muscles--the result of a tough week of workouts, he said, "I think you've turned a corner". He went on to explain that he thought I was making progress with CrossFit.  I tried to act cool about it, but inside I was beaming.  Have I really turned a corner?  Finally?

Looking back on the entries in this blog, I realized I have gotten stronger.  I'm no longer doing puppies workouts, but pack workouts, every time.  Sometimes I have to scale the weights by 5 or 10 pounds, but otherwise I'm right there.  I've even done a few porch and big dog work outs. Those are the best days.  I'm currently on day 94 of the 100 day pull up challenge.  I jumped in at 63, inspired by a friend who was doing the challenge, and knowing I sorely needed to improve my pull ups.  So I haven't been doing this since day 1, but coming in at such high reps isn't easy.  Especially for me, a girl who has been known to cry, yes, SHED TEARS of frustration about the difficulty of doing just one pull up.

I can't believe it, but I actually enjoy doing pull ups now.

Sunset at our house in the mountains.  Who could ask for a better view while cranking out pull ups?

This alone is a huge change I never expected to experience. If I can learn to do something this difficult and actually start to enjoy it, well, then many things are possible. I'll stop now before I start to sound like a Hallmark card.

Now I'm just trying to figure out why it's taken me so long.  Why didn't I jump in and start making progress right away, or after six months?  Looking back I realize I had a ton of mental hurdles to overcome.  To begin with, I thought that all I wanted out of my fitness routine was to keep my weight in check.  I liked doing some cardio and fiddled around with weights, but other than that I just liked to get the work out over with.  When I was introduced to CrossFit, I was overwhelmed by the difficulty of the program and frustrated with a new way of eating that I thought was totally un-fun.  It violated my lax fitness expectations and required more discipline that I thought I had.  After many ugly work outs and pain sessions, it started to grow on me.  Journaling my results and breaking personal records especially changed my attitude.  After multiple set backs and personal epiphanies, I began to accept the barrage of new weird information and ended up loving the discipline/torture of it.  For the time I spend doing a workout everyday, I experience a state of Zen that I don't get from anything else right now.  For a few minutes, it's just me and the numbers.  

What makes this entry so hard to write, is that in less than a week I'll be boarding a plane to New York City, where I'll be living.  Goodbye garage gym and hard-earned fitness goals.  Much of that will be temporarily abandoned while we resettle our lives (and our three cats) in a huge expensive city.  Leaving our house in the country where we can do pull ups and sprints in the spacious back yard, and workout on our time at the garage gym will be difficult, not to mention stressful.

And have I mentioned that I'm a stress eater? 

We've decided we will be joining a CrossFit gym in New York.  I briefly entertained the idea of not doing so.  Of working out in a park, or doing CF in our tiny apartment, or even joining a regular gym (gasp!).  But these options are unrealistic and silly.  We know we love CF.  Like a religion, it's something we believe in entirely.  How could we live with ourselves if we joined a gym like Crunch?  We'd be frauds.  And we'd only approach such a place with the elitist arrogance of people who think they know more and are therefore better, which isn't right.

So we will join an affiliate, probably in Brooklyn, and it will be great.  It's the only way to keep up with what I've worked so hard to accomplish, and on top of that, it's a guaranteed way to make friends and establish a sense of community in a new, large, unfamiliar place.  This is the other corner, and although we aren't there yet, I can't wait.