The box stares at you, awaiting your presence. It mocks you as it wants to slow you down. The bar daunting in it's presence as you shake off the nerves. You look up at the pull-up rig with hopeful thoughts of flowing through the toes to bars like they are nothing. It is here, It is Now, that you must choose, choose to be a champion, choose to not look back, choose to put forth your best effort until there is nothing left to give. It is all right here, right now. Leaving it all behind is the name of the game. You know the challenge lies not in Round 1, 2 or even 3, but in the subsequent rounds after in which fatigue and your thoughts change the game. What will you do to overcome this, to push through the challenge, to move through to the next level?
Hector was faced with incredible adversity and now just finished Games WOD 12.1 and 12.2 Picture courtesy of Games.CrossFit.Com. read his WHOLE Story There! It's amazing!
All of us face adversity in our lives. But it is what we do with the adversity that dictates what the outcome of each WOD, each moment, each challenge. There are so many areas we can touch on with adversity, but let's narrow it down to a few.
First, when we look at adversity, in any given situation in life, it threatens us to keep us from what we want. It stares at us as we try to pass each achievememnt and goal we have set out for ourselves. We have kids, marriage, divorce, relationships, friendships, work, fatique, sleep, death, family issues, technique issues, so on and so forth. We never feel ready, feel good enough, feel like we can get what e want out of ourselves. We start talking ourselves out of the things we want to achieve because of adveristy.
Let me give you a personal example of adversity and how it can affect you. Each day, as a coach, i have many challenges, many decisions, many factors to consider, many things to look at in my athletes lives. It is rare in which I have a day that is "Easy" and peaceful. My life as a coach and as an athelte has been far from peaceful so I am no stranger to adversity. My ex wife and kids moved away across the country, I have gone through 2 buy-outs with FTF, I have experienced death of friends, family members , I have friends calling me up to ask about their personal lives and what they should do, have moments in which I feel so much for the people in my life, I cant even move... because I really want the world for them. Yet every day, i persist to face the adveristies, the challenges and live to push through them more. A personal friend of mine whom goes through adversitiy on a regular basis is one fo the top athletes in her region right now! Does any of this sound familiar??? Maybe like... YOU?
I had to learn a very important lesson early on when I began facing challenges as a kid and into my young adulthood and now into well.. my professional years we'll call them. I had to learn the story of adversity.....
I often think of this boiling pot of water and the ingredients that were put into it. Imagine for a moment that you have a pot of boiling water in front of you. You also have the three follwoing items:
A carrot
Egg
Coffee
Imagine for a moment you drop the egg into the pot of water. What happens to it? The egg becomes Hardened... hard boiled.
Imagine for a moment now you drop the carrot into the pot... it starts out hard, but softens with the environment, become plaible and now much more breakable.
Finally place the coffee in the pot of water, and watch what happens to the water. Suddenly it starts to change color, starts to become a different animal altogether.
When you face adversity, you look at a WOD, you have a challenge come up at work, how do you react? Do you harden up, and become so rigid that nothing can get to you like the egg? Do you start out harden and break and crumble like the carrot? Or do you fight to change the environment, roll with the adversity to change the environment around you?
So often, the most successful people look at a WOD, or at a challenge in their daily lives and say "it is what it is" and roll with it. There is not a lack of fear, but acting in spite of it. There is courage, putting the ehad down and tackling each challenge without regard. There is a general feeling of success, a sense of destruction of the obstacle, the challenge.
Your JOB as an athlete, a person who is HELL BENT on success not only INSIDE THE GYM, BUT OUTSIDE, is to NO LONGER look at adversity as a challenge, but to simply look at it as a part of our lives. When we stop to look around, each and every one of us has our story. We all have an excuse IF WE LET IT BE ONE! The point is don't fucking make excuses. The difference between your success and the lack there-of, IS YOU. there is NOTHING in your way.. period. Whatever challenges you have in front of you. When you come to the WOD< it's time to lay those challenges aside and PERFORM! You are a WELL OILED machine.. even if you haven't used your machine to the ideal capacity recently. Maybe it's time you stopped making excuses and started to tune up the machine!
When we are presented with growth opportunites(opportunities to make coffee) as I like to call them, we need to ensure we are always using them for that. This is the most important moment to talk to yourself and tell yourself you WILL get through it, no matter what. This is where visualization, determination and drive come into play. There is never a time in which you WON'T face adversity. Once you realize this, then you will start to break through barriers you have left and right. Our mental game, our mental toughness plays so much into how we handle adversity. If we aren't in the right frame of mind so to speak, then the challenge or the adversity we face will seem that much bigger. So get in the right frame of mind. Blow the doors off the excuses, don't let the shit of life get in the way of what you want, what you KNOW in your HEART OF HEARTS you can accomplish, what you can do, what your desires are. Never let the adversity get in the way of your passion, your fire, your dream. Not injury, nor pain, nor life should distract you from achieving that which you want to achieve. It is YOUR time, it is YOUR life. No one else can overcome shit for you!! It is up to you. Do you wnat to make some fucking coffee and go after it? Are YOU ready to face the adversity in your life? THEN GO DO IT!!!!
Comments