It started last year after competing on the CrossFit St. Louis Regionals team... As a team we ended up placing fourth! One spot away from going to the games. As a team we sat down afterwards and said we were going to focus on team this coming year. Even if someone made regionals individually we were going team. It created a great focus for me throughout the year. Every time I struggled with a workout I thought about my team and how I was letting them down and it helped me push through. It made me a better athlete.
Being a physical therapy student, we have to travel for our clinical rotations. I found out last summer that my last two rotations from January-May of 2015 were not located in St. Louis and I was pretty upset. Not about the locations, per-se, but that I wouldn't be able to train with my teammates everyday and I thought I wouldn't be able to compete with them this year. However, looking though the Cross-Fit rule book, it stated that college students, even if they are traveling due to schooling, will compete for the gym and region that their school is in. So I went on for 8 months believing I was totally in the clear competing for CrossFit St. Louis' team.
Fast forward 8 months and it is two days before the CrossFit Open begins. I get an email from CrossFit headquarters stating someone was questioning my integrity and if I actually was a part of CrossFit St. Louis. They wanted all of my training logs and pictures of me at the gym for proof that I train at CrossFit St. Louis. Apparently, we had misread the rules and although I am in the clear to be a part of my home gym due to school, I wasn't meeting the standards of training at St. Louis more than 50% of the time in order to be a part of the team.
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| Photo credit: scissortail photography |
So a day before the open started, I was told I couldn't be a part of the team. The team that I had been training with all year long. And because of 7-8 weeks of the year I wasn't training at CrossFit St. Louis I wasn't allowed to be a part of the team. Even though all of my other training was at St. Louis and I have literally become the athlete I am there, I am not allowed to be a part of the team. I was devastated. I felt like all of my hard work was for nothing. I had no goals anymore. All of my goals were centered around being a part of the team. And I felt like I had no time to refocus and get ready to participate in the open.
I had great support from everyone in my gym. They all tried to keep me motivated and positive. Most of them were telling me to shoot for making it as an individual, which in my mind was the stupidest thing they ever said. There was no way I was going to make it as an individual. My goal for this open was top 100 in the North Central (top 30 get a potential an invite to Regionals) and I knew that top 100 was going to be extremely tough.
I performed the first workout on a Friday morning before work. I did alright but definitely felt like I didn't live up to my potential. I walked away from that workout hurt, upset, and really down on myself. All the training I had been doing for the past 7-8 weeks on my own was for nothing, I felt like I had absolutely nothing to show for it. I had basically given up on being able to do anything in the open and was really over CrossFit.
Thankfully I have some good friends in STL that encouraged me to keep my heavy head up. One in particular, Matt, sat down and devised a plan for me that even gave me an exact warm-up. I was totally dragging my feet to redo it because what did it even matter anymore, but he was persistent and he got me to do it again and I saw huge improvements. 15.1 jumped from 175 to 188 and 15.1a jumped from 172# to 182# (1# under my clean and jerk PR!). At the end of the first week I was sitting in 90th and actually pretty proud of that.
Week two came around and I was able to do it in STL, which makes a huge difference. Not that the other gyms I have been training in are bad by any means, but having your people there to cheer you on makes a difference. Since 15.2 was a repeat of 14.2, it was easy to see how a year's worth of training paid off. I made a 59 rep improvement from last year, which is huge for me and I was extremely happy with it.
Week 3 was a long workout that somewhat suited my strengths. I did it for the first time right after driving 4 hours from Kansas City to STL and actually threw up a pretty decent score, but I felt like I had more again. I retested it on Sunday with a group of people cheering me on and threw up a huge score for me. Something I was very proud of. At the end of the third week, I was slowly starting to have confidence in myself but I still needed some positive words from those around me to keep me reaching high.Week 4 played into my wheelhouse with the handstand push-ups. I shocked the hell out of myself and placed 18th overall in the region on this workout! Holy cow! I never ever expected to do that well. At the end of the week I was 47th in the region... Wow. I think this was probably the first moment where I saw myself as a competitor in the region. Up until that point I didn't have the faith in myself that I could actually compete with these girls.
Week 5 was a terrible workout and somehow I was convinced to do it a second time... I am not quite sure how that worked out but I am glad that I did. After putting in my first score, I realized I wasn't going to have a shot at making the top 60 girls in the region, which is something that I wanted to do after the fourth week. Even with being sick, I was able to push myself through the pain of the workout one last time and take :44 seconds off my time. Something that boosted me back onto the front page of the leaderboard and helped me land 50th overall in the North Central region. (50 spots better than my "far fetched" goal).
I cannot believe where I ended up at the end of the CrossFit Open. It still shocks the crap out of me but it is something I am very proud of. While I may not have gotten an individual invite to regionals, I learned a lot of things! Here are a few of them...
1. I am strong inside and out. I trained for 9 weeks basically by myself and was able to push myself through a lot of workouts that I never thought I could. Pushed through a lot of things without help from anyone else.
2. I have a lot to be proud of and I am allowed to be proud of it.
3. I need to get stronger... A lot stronger.
4 Confidence is huge. I know this and I know it is something I need to work on. But once I got a little confidence this open season, it helped me a lot.
5. I have the best gym and community at CrossFit St. Louis. Their love, support, and help when I was down helped drive me to do the best I possible could.6. People do mean things to others for no apparent reason. Someone reported me and called me out for not meeting the standards was down right mean. While I wasn't meeting the rules for competing on a team, I literally had no idea this was the case and was not intentionally trying to break the rules. Someone called me out trying to dismantle our team and stop us from qualifying for regionals. Well guess what it didn't work because CrossFit St. Louis still has a team going to regionals, ready to kick butt.
7. To add to that... This individual showed me that I am a force to be reckoned with. They gave me the power to focus on myself and see what I could do standing alone. Because of that I was able to show myself just how far I have come and how close I am to ultimately reaching my goals. I finished 50th in my regional this year. If this was last year, I would be going to regionals as an individual. Holy crap. That is something to be proud of and to hang my hat on.
8. Next year I am going to be ready to go. Ready to show everyone exactly what I am made of. So you better be on the lookout for me.
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| A comparison of last year's finish (top) to this year's finish (bottom). Huge improvements for me. Ready to compete with the big girls... Almost |
