WE GET IT.

You have never done a big local competition. Maybe you just had a baby. Maybe you are recovering from an injury. You are not Rich Froning and you can’t do muscle ups like Camille. You don’t have a six pack (unless Bud Light counts) and you may still be chasing the elusive double under.

 

You are just a regular guy/girl who loves CrossFit, loves your gym, and enjoys staying healthy. You do most of your workouts scaled at the gym and you are improving every day. You are competitive with yourself and at the gym BUT not really in front of 300 strangers with photographers snapping photos of you.

Maybe you got talked into doing the Open. You loved it but it was at the gym with your friends cheering you on. It was safe and yet you still weren’t all the way in the whole time.

Now, your gym friends are signing up for a local competition in a few months/weeks. They want you to do it with you. They have done competitions before and keep telling you to do it.

But when you go to look up information on the competition, you start getting really intimidated. You see all the photos and the girls and guys looked so jacked and swole. You start looking at photos of people doing muscle ups and snatching 275lbs and you are like, “Yeah… I can’t do that. I barely get through workouts at the gym. I don’t want to have 100 people watching me come in last place.”

But deep down you really want to do it. You want to crush another accomplishment this year. You may regret not doing it and you hate the way regret feels.

Okay so here is how we would have you think about it…

Just go back and think about when you were a kid. Maybe you were 6 or 8 or even 10 and you just went out and PLAYED. You ran around, you jumped on things, you climbed up trees, and you just HAD FUN.

Local fitness competitions are the same thing but now you just have to pay for it.

Your inner kid is being slowly killed by all the stresses of life. Your inner kid is slowly getting beaten to death by your adult self.

Work, bills, responsibilities, family issues, body issues, too many screens, and too many passwords are just stifling your inner kid who wants to go out and play! SO JUST GO OUT AND PLAY!

Forget about the competition. Forget about who is watching or “how you would look if you came in last.” and just go run, climb, jump, pick stuff up, throw it down, get winded, listen to loud music, and JUST GO PLAY!

Your adult self keeps telling you that you will look stupid. Your adult self keeps saying it doesn’t make sense to put yourself through ANOTHER hard thing. “Life is hard!” it screams at you. “Why add another hard thing to your list?”

“People will look at you and laugh.” “You won’t win and winners win and losers lose.” “If you ain’t first, you’re last, Ricky Bobby…”

Or it tells you “You won’t finish a workout. Everyone will be there gathered around you cheering you on to finish because in CrossFit the last place person gets a huge mob of people cheering for them at the end. They make it seem honorable but it is pathetic. Don’t be pathetic, bro.”

But that voice is a liar. It wants you to be comfortable. It HATES when it gets pushed out of its comfort zone.

So stop thinking about the competition and start thinking about how you have a few weeks or months to have a glorified recess!

Just time to get sweaty, have fun, jump around, and PLAY! Forget the leaderboard. Forget the podium. Forget comparing yourself to others. Just GO HAVE FUN!

Just sign up. Face your fears and tell them to go do Murph. Start training, start focusing, and prepare yourself for a day of playtime. Just you. Maybe you and your partner or team.  Just take a time out from life to go be a kid.

Remember school? Remember just waiting for recess where you could go explore, climb on things, jump off stuff. You imagined yourself as a ninja or a superhero. You swore you could fly and sometimes you did.

Just sign up. Just go do it.

Have no regrets. JUST GO PLAY!