paleo

You’re standing there wearing a harness with a slacked bungee cord attached to your back and you don’t even know it. That cord holds you inside a circle with a radius that you haven’t yet discovered. That radius will soon be made known to you as your currently perceived boundary of personal limitations. One day you wander far enough from the center of your own world to feel the tension build. You realize you need to put more energy into moving further from the stagnant world of comfort you live in and the bungee cord starts to tighten up, holding you in a pattern. As you struggle, you get stronger, but at the same time, while attempting to break through the barrier and be released from the grips of the bungee cord that’s holding you at bay, you fear the few seconds beyond the release as you know that you will be completely out of control until you situate yourself. Stronger and stronger you become as you persist, tugging, and pulling, hoping that the cord will finally break and you’ll go flying out into a new realm, expanding your reach, enlarging the radius of your world. You’ve grown accustomed to the angle of attack, the pressure on your shoulders, the burn in your thighs, until suddenly, the cord snaps sending you tumbling forward towards a new horizon. Wham, crash, bang, scrape. Again, another SNAP as the end of the bungee cord whips you from behind, reminding you of where you were and making it evident that even though you’re somewhere new, and your world just got bigger, breaking through was a struggle followed by a short period of being completely out of control.
That moment when we realize we are stuck somewhere and that we need to get out is often enough to foreshadow the impending “snap” of the past which will inevitably send us flailing into the unknown feeling completely out of control. More often than not we perceive our current circumstances to be less painful than change, but the truth of the matter is, change is good, and yes it is painful, but it leads to a bigger and better world for those who dive in and make it happen.

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I’m on my 18th month at Cactus Crossfit. That’s 18 months of community-building, physical suffering, and a growth curve that seems to be exponentially slowing down. This could, were I not tracking my progress at every turn, become discouraging as the physical changes that I can see are not as prounouced as they once were. When I started this journey, I was at 216lbs and I couldn’t do 10 push-ups, a single pull-up, and I was limited to 8″ box step-ups. I’ve surpassed those limitations and am now able to do all of those movements as prescribed. I am now 187 1/2, which is actually 7 1/2 lbs up from the lowest that I’ve been, and it’s a result of impatience and compromise. Impatience to reach the next level and see additional results in the mirror (rather than just see numbers improve on the score-board) and compromise in diet as a result of boredom in the kitchen.

It wasn’t until January of this year that I actually started to see drastic reduction in size which was due to surrendering to the reality that what I put in my mouth during the first 10 months of Crossfitting was preventing me from progressing to the next level. In the past few months, I’ve been a bit less conscious of my dietary decisions, and while I still subscribe to a clean eating regimen, I don’t necessarily always take my prescription on a daily basis. Happy hour, beer, a bad habit of an occasional slurpee, and ultimately sloth are part of the equation.

The good news is that I’ve developed metabolic conditioning that can easily combat bad habits that I have had in the past. I’m 30lbs lighter than I was for a better part of my adult life leading up to last year, and I have WAY more energy and strength, and I look younger than I am. I attribute ALL of this to the rigorous activity that is programmed for me every day at Cactus Crossfit. I don’t have to think about it, I just go and do, and the people there and the competition that awaits me every day, not just with others, but against my former self, keeps me going, regardless of the widely held perception that it’s “excessively expensive.” Really, it’s less than $10.00 per class for world class coaching. It’s also the cheapest “bar” hopping I’ve ever done.

The challenges that I face now center around the speed at which I see results and a daily fight to give in to the choices in life that keep us from our goals. I still have long road ahead of me, and it’s sobering to experience 30lbs of fat loss in such a short period of time only to be faced with the converse, which is a long, arduous process of building muscle to reach the next PR. The time it takes to lose that initial weight is a drop in the bucket compared to the time it takes to refine what’s left over to see the same upward swing in progress when it comes to lifting…but, that’s not going to deter me. Crossfit is about setting goals and breaking through the ceilings to reach beyond those goals, not just physically, but in all areas of life.

The good news about an exponential curve is that it’s still a curve, and there’s always forward progress regardless of the speed of that progress, and that’s what keeps me going over and over again.

Now if I could just not be so damn sore all the time.

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Exponential Growth Curve

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