When Things Come Together

As I mentioned a little bit in my last post, I have been going through a lot of transitions in the past few months. The biggest one being that I became a wife, but Brandon also finished 2 years of being a full-time student, started his first ever non-seasonal job, and I am starting to sort of look at the rest of my life and think, ok, what can I do with this time? As opposed to what my life has been like the past few years, which has mostly been me looking at my current situation and thinking, ok, what do I need to do to make this work. It’s been a nice shift to no longer feel like I’m in survival mode, but it’s also a bit overwhelming.

A big reason why I haven’t been writing so much is because I have, in the midst of all that, been wondering why the heck I am still doing CrossFit. I like it, I really love the people who I’ve met through CrossFit, and it gives me about 90% of my social interaction for the day (when you work out of your dad’s living room, you don’t get a ton of exposure to, y’know, people), but I’m not exactly making huge gains or posting huge PRs every day. Or, like, at all. So, why do I still spend over $100 a month on something that has no “why”? The goal setter in me has been grappling with this question a lot, and the result has been a very inconsistent WOD schedule, a very inconsistent diet, and a few half-assed workouts. Which always make you just feel wonderful.

Then last weekend I took a ski lesson. This was something I had been wanting to do for a while, because even though I grew up skiing, I switched to snowboarding in high school (what can I say, it was the 90s) and just tried skiing again for the first time a few years ago. I loved it, but I sucked at it, so I’ve been slowly getting my ski legs back, taking laps on the greens and easy blues while Brandon goes and skis with our friends on the terrain that I actually want to be able to ski.

So I signed up for an intermediate lesson. Going into the day, I was a little apprehensive, but the morning started out the way I expected: we spent a few runs just showing our instructor what we knew, what we could do, and talking about what we wanted to work on. When one girl said that she wanted to work on moguls and black runs, my blood pressure shot up a little, but I reassured myself, thinking, “This is an intermediate lesson, there’s no way we are going to do those things.”

But as soon as those first few runs ended, our instructor skied us right over to the more advanced terrain. In fact, we went straight to the lift I used to work back when I was a liftie, which was a blessing and a curse: I knew EXACTLY how hard these runs were, I’d ridden them dozens, if not hundreds, of times on a snowboard. I also knew there was no way I was going to get down them on skis.

“What do you think?” my instructor asked me at the top of the lift. “You know this part of the hill, should we take Mine Dump?” I smiled. Surely he was joking. Mine dump is nothing but moguls. I had never tried a mogul before in my life.

Well, he wasn’t joking. We took one bump run after another, circling back a few times to go down an even more challenging set of moguls on a nearby run before we came up the lift again, this time headed to a back bowl I had never even considered skiing. After a seriously epic fail on my part while trying to load the T-Bar lift, we eventually made our way to the very top of the mountain, and, with my stomach in my throat, I looked down at the back side of the mountain, where I was apparently preparing to ski.

But then a familiar feeling came over me. “I can do this,” I thought. I had just proven to myself that I could ski in areas I didn’t think I could ski. I had been learning all day that I could take the hill at my own pace, that I could ski as slowly or quickly as I needed to, and as my instructor kept reminding us, you can only make one turn at a time. Just make that one turn, then focus on the next turn. That’s all you can do. I’d heard that before, but it had been with a barbell in my hands instead of with skis on my feet. Just go as fast as you can, and focus on one rep at a time. That’s all you can do.

I looked around at the perfectly blue sky, and mountain peaks I had never seen, because I had never been confident enough to come all the way to the top of the mountain like this before. Another girl in my lesson, from North Carolina, stood next to me. “You don’t get views like this in North Carolina,” she said. “You don’t get views like this in most of Colorado, either,” I replied.

I made it down the bowl, and then down the extremely long black run that led us back to the lift. By the end of the day, I had skied terrain I’d never even seen on a snowboard, and I’d loved it. And looking back I realized, I could have never done that without CrossFit. Not because I wasn’t strong enough; when I worked as a liftie, I was on the hill every day, snowboarding, hiking, and swinging an ice pick at 12,000 ft of elevation. But because “I can do this” would have never, ever, not once, entered my mind.

And I remembered. THAT feeling is why I started CrossFit. Not to be the strongest, or the fastest, because let’s all just be honest and realize that I will never be either of those things. But to be the type of person who looks at a challenge, and instead of politely declining, looks up, takes in the view, and says, I can do this.