pieces

It’s funny what happens after I post a particularly emotional blog. I can tell when people have read it coz they get all solemn and weird when they talk to me, and do awkward stuff like randomly patting my arm and asking how I am too often as if someone I know has recently died. Here’s the thing…I’m great. What I write about is just how I am feeling in that moment. I like to explore and dissect how I feel and why I feel that way. There are just as many times when I feel like Jack hanging off the front of the Titanic as I do Rose hanging off the back of it, but generally they’re not as pathetically hilarious to read about so I write about them less. No one likes a happy chappy, basically.

Anyway, this one is less Rose and more Jack so you can all can the suicide watch, thanks. This one is about the thing that consumes my thoughts more than things that actually probably should, like my real job and where the heck I’m going to live when they sell mine and Graham’s apartment. Obviously that thing is weightlifting.

I was trying to come up with an analogy for how I feel about training at the moment and was explaining it to my coach. We all know I’m eloquent as fuck, so here it is. Trying to be good at weightlifting is like you’re trying to complete a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, and you’ve got a few areas that are together… a corner here, a bit in the middle…but they’re all really far apart and it’s super hard to tell what the full picture is going to be. And then when (if) you finally do manage to complete it, you realise it’s a giant dick pic, basically. Now I’m not saying dick pics don’t have their place, (Instagram DM’s, obviously) I guess what I’m feeling is frustration at the whole half a step forward, 20 million steps back type of feel that I’ve come to associate with weightlifting over my two short years in the sport.

I saw a CrossFitter post something a while back that truly enraged me to the point I still think about it. Their comment was along the lines of not wanting to ditch CrossFit to focus solely on weightlifting (as had apparently been suggested to them because they were SO good at it) because they would feel lazy taking the easy option. I can sense every weightlifter reading this bristling with rage and completely understanding why this comment irritated me so much. If you’re not, and you don’t, not to worry as I will obviously explain, and you will soon be bristling also.

When I first contemplated changing sports I often heard people refer to the transition as going to the dark side. I didn’t really understand this at the time, because honestly my thoughts on the matter weren’t far from the lazy/easy comment if I’m being truthful. Surely only focussing on two primary movements would be miles easier than the literal fuck-load attributed to CrossFit? HAH. Here’s the thing, which has taken me a solid two years to get my head around, and I’m still fairly close to breaking the stupid fucking jigsaw over my knee and choking myself to death on the pieces on a weekly basis. It’s NOT easier. When you have a whole bunch of stuff to get better at, you see improvement fairly regularly and it’s pretty obvious. Like, last week you could do 10 pull-ups, now you can do 12 kind of thing. That’s a tangible measure of improvement right, like MORE reps = better. Now you probably still look like a sack of rotten meat pegged to a clothesline while you’re doing it, BUT the confidence that tangible improvement builds mentally gives you the acknowledgement that you are indeed getting better, which gives you the motivation to keep trying. It doesn’t mean you’ll get another two pull-ups each week obviously, but with the plethora of movements and PB’s available to you in such a broad field, the chances of seeing improvement in SOMETHING fairly regularly is high.

Now imagine that all you are doing is pull-ups, different variations, sure, but pull-ups. Whilst there are plenty of things you can improve upon to become better at them, the only measure of success that matters to you or to anyone else is how many you can do. No one really understands the other things anyway, so if you can only do 12 pull-ups for an entire year, you’re no better than you were 12 months ago and you may as well just stop trying. Welcome to weightlifting, basically. Yeah, it takes physical strength to lift something from the ground to over your head, but it’s an entirely different level of strength to keep coming in, day after day, and attempting to perfect a seemingly impossible movement to perfect, and whenever you see improvement in one area you’ll almost always see a visible decline in another. It’s like trying to complete an impossible Rubik’s cube…and yes, every side ends up being a different coloured dick (this should definitely be a thing if it’s not already).

The pain of failing to see visible, tangible progress regularly is like a thousand knives stabbing you all over your body, so you cling to things like faster pull, harder lockout, sharper feet…ANYTHING to convince yourself that, despite glaring evidence to the contrary, you are in fact improving. You tell yourself that your pull / lockout / feet are all signs that there’s an epic PB just around the corner, and ignoring the doubt that seeps in as months go by. This is why it’s not easier. It’s the same reason that no one can seem to stick to anything long term, like diet or habits that will actually result in proper progress if they just get the idea out of their head that you can’t get abs in 12 weeks then go back to doing whatever you were doing before that (eating two McDonalds cheeseburgers mashed together with chips inside them) and keep them forever. Readily available results are easy, sure, but they’re fleeting as fuck. Jack and Rose had a beautiful fucking romance, for like two days. Then one of them died and the other one got all old and stupid and threw away a priceless heirloom just to prove some weird point, which still annoys me every time I watch it.

To truly embrace progress, whether in weightlifting or anything else in life, we need to accept that, like that cheese commercial that has been stuck in my head for two decades, good things take time, and that hard work works. So if you’ll excuse me I’ll just be over here on my platform surrounded by dick puzzle pieces, in the hopes that one day it will come together.