I’ve been struggling this past month with a feeling of…ambivalence, I guess would be the word (or maybe indifference?), when it comes to my own training and nutrition. This may seem a strange thing to hear from a personal trainer and nutrition coach, but hey…I’m just as human and fallible as any of you!
I made a commitment to endeavour to lead by example this year, and this is hardly the example I want to set, so I’ve been keeping these thoughts / feelings to myself and just trying to work them out behind the scenes. Again, though - sometimes I just need to get stuff down on “paper” (or the current digital equivalent) to work stuff out, so here goes…
I’ve set myself a couple of pretty substantial challenges to train for this year, including my first ever 50K mountain trail race, and the first time I will run a Spartan Race Beast event solo with the aim of actually “racing”. On top of that, I’ll be taking another team of athletes through some challenging Spartan Race events as well. Normally, with such big goals to achieve, I’d have no lack of motivation. In fact, the 50K is only 3-1/2 months away in late May, so there is a real urgency to get my shit together and dial stuff in ASAP.
Maybe part of my weird funk is the uncertainty, in the current COVID era, about whether those events will actually happen this year or not? I don’t feel like that’s the whole story though..
Growing up, I was kind of the poster-child for “unfulfilled potential”. I easily had the smarts to do well in school, but I just coasted through putting in the bare minimum effort and got “OK” grades. I had some natural talent in a few different athletic areas, but didn’t have the dedication to train (with the one exception of making my school’s senior basketball team one year based solely on working my ass off in tryouts and practice - I had little actual talent for the game, but literally NOBODY outworked me. Not sure what got into me there…). EDIT: reading back through this, maybe it was because I had no talent for it that I was willing to just put it all out there and WORK - read below for more on that.
I was talking with my daughters about my struggle last night, and it really boiled down to me being scared of putting in the work only to realize that I really wasn’t as good as I thought I might be or as others might expect of me because of my “talent”. If there was even a slim chance I might fail to meet expectations, I just decided not to try so nobody could say I wasn’t good enough.
I feel like that worry about failing to be “exceptional” at things and be met with the stark realization that I might just (gasp!) be “merely average” or worse, end up looking like a fool for trying, is why I find myself stuck in a kind of analysis-paralysis or perfection trap with writing articles or otherwise producing content, and also might be part of why I’m subconsciously self-sabotaging my efforts with my own training and body composition goals.
I talked to my business/mindset coach, and he suggested a couple of books, one of which was “Ego Is The Enemy” by Ryan Holiday. I’m less than 25% of the way through the book, but one of the things I have picked up from it and am trying to put into practice is the idea of not dwelling on past accomplishments OR failures. My coach talked about it a bit in one of his recent podcasts, and basically said “you can’t hang your hat on whatever shit you did / had in the past, good or bad” and that you need to focus on where you’re at now, and what you’re working towards in this moment.
Which brings me to why I’ve put away my Spartan Race (and other event) medals, which used to all hang in the gym where I work every day.
Thinking maybe those medals (and let’s be clear - they were finisher medals, not competitive placings) were keeping me in some kind of good-enough-to-finish-so-why-try-to-do-better-or-you-might-fail purgatory, I’ve decided to put them away in the hope of getting some kind of clarity. Right now, they’re in a pile in a corner of my office, where I can’t see them until I find a box to put them in..
Will that be the magic bullet to light a fire under me? Probably not. But it’s something.
I feel like I need that “Eye of the Tiger” Rocky movie kind of moment, where I get beat down and build myself back up. I don’t have my own Apollo Creed to help me get that “Eye of the Tiger” back like in Rocky III, or Rocky himself for Creed’s son in the two most recent films in the franchise (creatively titled Creed and Creed II…LOL), and I’m not sure how to do that on my own.
I don’t have any real answers at this point, and truth be told, the uncertainty is a bit unnerving, but I just have to keep moving forward.
Sometimes, you just need to start DO-ing, and the mind will follow, so that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to show up and put in work, and see where my mind goes. Clock’s ticking…