COMPETITION BRINGS OUT YOUR BEST

Competition brings out the best in people. Yeah, sure, it can also bring out the worst, but I prefer to focus on how it brings out the best. This past weekend, I competed at the Garage Games, a popular annual CrossFit competition held in Suwanee, Georgia. The competition is open to kids, teams of 4, older folks, and athletes at all levels of CrossFit experience. There were almost 300 individual competitors, 150 teams, and over 25 vendors selling everything a CrossFitter could ever want or need. If you like CrossFit, it was the closest thing to heaven next to the Home Depot Center in Carson, California in July.

The dreaded bear complex…

I am always hesitant to compete. I have self-doubt and anxiety. I wonder if I am good enough. I worry that I might fail miserably on one of the events. The list goes on and on. My coach, Chris, encouraged me to sign-up so that I might find the “fire” that I have been lacking in the gym. So sign-up I did!

I am in a new age division which has been affectionately labeled “Masters.” I am not sure how I ever got old enough to be called a master at anything, but so be it. To me, the Masters category should fall somewhere in between the elite athletes (what we call “prescribed”) and those athletes that can’t yet do prescribed (we call “scaled”). We are older, and we can’t recover quite as well as our younger counterparts. But that doesn’t mean some of us aren’t pretty awesome!

The Masters workouts for the Garage Games were for the most part the same as the prescribed athletes. In both categories, you were able to substitute movements that you might not be able to do but at a great penalty. For example, if you couldn’t do 10 pistols (one-legged squats) then you could sub 50 air squats. If you couldn’t do 10 reps of a lift at a certain weight, you did 15 reps at a lighter weight. The workouts were released a little bit before the event so you had time to do them in the gym and figure out your plan.

I have a bad knee, and the workouts were pretty leg heavy so going in, I had some concerns. These concerns were not alleviated when I received a friend request on Facebook prior to the competition from someone named “BadKat Ljubicic.” BadKat, as it turned out, was also competing in the Masters category. And did I mention she has a 380-pound deadlift? She could deadlift three of me.

Working out side-by-side with my friend, Jim, was awesome!

Oddly enough, as the competition drew near, I cast aside all my worries and realized I was doing this for FUN! I voluntarily signed up. I paid the entry fee. And this was supposed to be FUN! It is not like the fate of the world was resting on my shoulders if I won or not. The pressure was gone.

A part of me knew that I would do better than I thought I would. And to me, that is why you compete. There is something about being in that moment of competition that makes you keep going, that makes you get one more rep in. When you hear a voice in the crowd (you don’t even know who it is!) yelling your name, it makes you keep going. You end up doing things you never thought you could do. That is why you compete. It is not about making it on the podium. It is about bringing out your personal best.

In the end, the highlights of my competition were successfully navigating 24” box step-overs with a 40-pound sand bag (NOT good for the ‘ole knee), completing 15 65-pound bear complexes unbroken (google “bear complex” if you don’t know what that is), and somehow learning how to do pistols that day (though they weren’t really pistols per se).  Even more so, having my husband and kids watch me compete for the first time was awesome and having Chris there to help me prior to each event on form and strategy was a blessing. When you have someone like Chris telling you that you can do something, somehow, you believe him. I also got to see a lot of my CrossFit friends from all over. We are a tight community, and it is incredible being in an environment of such positive, hard-working people. Finally, the cherry on top was placing third overall in my division.

On the podium with BadKat. I still look kind of scared!

The Garage Games reminded me that competing is fun and that it brings out the best. When I wanted to quit, I kept going. For a brief moment in time, I felt like a rock star as I completed workouts to the cheers of the crowd. And I got to see what it felt like to stand on the podium at a CrossFit competition, next to someone who I have no doubt will be at the CrossFit Games competing as a Masters- none other than BadKat Ljubicic! Having an incredible athlete like her high-five you and congratulate you on a job well-done is pretty cool. She was as bad (meaning good) as her name!

ALL IN CrossFit is a new gym, but I look forward to the day when its athletes feel that desire to compete. All of the sudden, showing up to the gym for the daily workout becomes something bigger. It is no longer just about losing weight or trying to look better. It is preparation for the day when you put yourself out there on the playing field and see what you are made of. Whether you finish in first place or last place, all of your hard work pays off when inevitably on competition day you discover the best inside of you.