This Week's Goal...
Do you remember your first exposure? Can you recall the day you found out about what "Fran" really was? Do you remember being devastated by your first taste of metabolic work capacity?
But now you're habituated to suffering. Sure you realize you can still improve your Fight Gone Bad, and you can squat, run, push, pull, and burpbee till you literally blow up. And as gawd-awful as that is, and as bad as it is each time you do it, it literally isn't equivalent to "first exposure."
Buddhists believe that humility is equivalent to concern of how to be liberated from the sufferings of life and the vexations of the human mind. No matter how hard a workout is, you know you'll survive now, and given enough time, stomp that same WOD.
First exposures are humility made manifest. You have no reference points, only a vague notion that you are really not the athlete, machine, human you thought you were.
First exposures are vital.
Gandhi is attributed as suggesting that attempting to sustain truth without humility is doomed to cause it to become instead an "arrogant caricature" of truth. Crossfit as fitness paradigm is legitimate because it recognizes that there is always improvement to be had. The Crossfit athlete is never finished, always developing. Because of this nimble, emergent, guiding principle crossfit can never become a caricature of truth, nor our athletes arrogant at their blossoming work capacities.
How could we? There's just so much to be bad at.
Coach Boz and I committed a while back to embracing our physical failures, and to even flaunt the ass kickings we were taking in our physical seekings. For example, Boz got to hang out with a senior Navy Seal Instructor in the training pool. (Boz is not designed to float. He can do it, he just doesn't dig it.) It wasn't pretty, but he IS committed to seeking out the margins of his capacities.
And you should too.
So here's your homework.
Go suck at something. Get out of your comfort zone and be terrible.
Borrow a bike, go for a long run, go sprint in the pool with your tri-buddies, go climbing, kayaking, surfing, whatever. Just go have a first exposure. Go remember why Crossfit got your attention. Go out and realize you have just scratched the surface of what you can do. Go find your "first time you did Fran" humility. That's why we train. We train to realize our unseen, unknown potential.
Post the week's humilities to comments.
Coach K
