Strength #7: Self Motivation

The pain face while working out alone

Being a swimmer for a good chunk of my life, I spent hours looking at a black stripe on the bottom of a pool. And in case you were wondering... It's not that exciting. Now don't get me wrong, I absolutely love swimming but there are definitely more exciting things that you can do than swim. However, swimming is a beautiful sport. It teaches you so much about yourself and helps to build your character. One of the greatest things for me that it did was teach me how to be self motivated.

Swimming although a team sport, is also a very individual sport. You have to be the one to push yourself in the pool day in and day out. Sure your coach can yell at you to swim faster and "get your head out of your a**" but when it comes down to it, the results you get reflect what you put into it. Throughout my high school career, I really had a coach who pushed me day in and day out of the pool, however, when I got to college that changed a little bit.

PR plates working their magic
by making things slightly
heavier everyday 

My college coach was amazing, don't get me wrong there, he helped me become a great swimmer and I loved my time swimming at SLU, but motivating his swimmers was not his strong suit. I quickly learned that when I was at practice, I would have to push myself day in and day out if I wanted to get better. Just going through the motions and completing practice wasn't going to make me any faster, but pushing myself to reach certain times on every set was what I needed to do to excel.

I am not sure if I had the most effective strategy, but I got very good at setting goal times for a set and trying to better them as I moved through it. I learned how to push through the pain when I was feeling crappy and to keep moving. Self motivating myself became a game and every practice I found a way to keep myself moving at the speed I needed to.

It became especially handy when I was a senior and I had to practice on my own often due to being in grad school and still swimming at a NCAA Division I program. Then I had to jump in the pool three afternoons a week by myself and find the motivation to make it through practice on my own. At first it was guilt that got me through the practices... Did I deserve to be on the team if I wasn't doing what everyone else was doing? But as I started to spend more and more time alone looking at the bottom of the pool my perspective changed. My motivation started to become the goal times I was reaching for and this made the time alone a little more bearable.

Self motivation includes
eating a healthy diet day in
and day out, even when
there is delicious food every
where around you

This skill of self motivation has really helped me while training alone in Champaign. Thankfully there are other people at the gym to at least talk to, but if I want to get the CrossFit Invictus work in (which I do), I have to do it on my own. Some of these workouts are extremely hard to do on your own or it would be very easy to take the parts out of them that I don't want to do because no one would know. But I would know and I know the parts of the workout that I don't want to do are my weaknesses. If I want to reach my goals this year, one of the biggest things I need to do is to train my weaknesses.

Some big ones for me right now are deadlifts (oh the dreaded deadlift) and then high volume of repetitive motions that used to really cause a lot of pain with my knee (wallballs, rebounding box jumps, lunges, lots of squat cleans). Thankfully my knee has been a lot better recently but still it is a big mental barrier for me to do these because I am unsure of how my knee is going to respond and I am tired of set backs.

Anyways, this past week I have been extremely proud of myself and my self motivation to do these crazy hard workouts. I am so tired and sore moving through things, but I feel like I am getting stronger mentally and physically. Self motivating myself has taken some effort but I have successfully completed all the workouts that I have needed to. It helps that I don't want to let my team at CrossFit St. Louis down, but it also helps that I don't want to let myself down. I have been working extremely hard this past year to reach some goals I set for myself and there is no stopping me now.

University of Illinois
Basketball game

Paleo pizza crust!

One of the great things about Champaign are the two families I know here. The family I am staying with has been incredible and have started making 3 paleo meals a week for me to eat with them. So far we have made paleo pizza, some delicious turkey burgers, and chicken fingers in almond flour! I went to a U of I gymnastics meet and basketball game this weekend and watched Pitch Perfect for the first time ever with them! So great! My dad's business partner who is basically my uncle and his family took me to see American Sniper, a great movie that makes you really think about a lot, and then I joined them for dinner. I am so blessed to have these people here, let me tell you.