If you don’t know me very well, you might not know that Strongman, my sport, my hobby, my athletic pursuit, one of my greatest passions, is a lot more to me than just something I do to stay in shape or entertain myself.
For me, Strongman has been a refuge, a place of rediscovery and a training ground for who I want to be. It is a spiritual disicpline. It has helped me cope with anxiety and depression, and helped me prevent bad habits from becoming lifelong demons.
Strongman, particularly training for competion and actually competing, is a how I endlessly dig into, reveal, develop, and learn myself. I have always needed something like Strongman, and when I found it, I no longer felt compelled to drink to melancholic rumination while chain smoking on my fire escape – I had something better to channel my angst into. And lifting gave more back to me than any physical vice ever did.
So with that in mind, I want to talk about how one of my biggest disappointments helped me get back on the road to trusting myself and becoming as successful as I can be as a competitor and as a person.
Last Strongman Corporation Nationals in 2016, I bombed, placing 37th out of 43 in the overall weight class (middleweight). It was my second time there, and like a lot of green athletes, I had big aspirations. But I didn’t have the mental methodology or trust in myself to get there.
Since then, I’ve obviously had the generic big goal of “do better next time.” Be stronger, be faster, get your head right. But what does that look like?
There are a million small pieces to these things – the obvious ones being good programming, skill practice, proper fueling, adequate recovery. I’ve been working on those consistently and I know that I just need to keep doing them.
But what about my head?
What was off last time?
A million more pieces.
Stress. A bad work environment, more stress, my old friend anxiety…and lack of belief. Lack of mental discipline. Lack of strong mental habits to reinforce my physical ones. I had contests where I was much more mentally present and calm, and Nationals was a shitstorm of bad circumstances for my head game. It wasn’t just Big Day jitters, though that was certainly a factor. For whatever the many reasons were, I wasn’t able to bring my A game, my best self – I didn’t bring who I knew I could bring, and it was devastating.
In every one of our heads, there is a running monologue, a narrative, a story that we tell ourselves about who we are, and consequently, what we are capable of. I have taken great effort to become conscious of this narrative, and conscious of the ways it both helps and hinders on every aspect of my life.
The narrative I was telling myself last October, underneath my excitement and enthusiasm, was You’re Not Enough. You’re Too Weak. You’re Too Inexperienced.
Day 1 I felt solid, and the first 3 events I completed respectably. I legitimately was not quite strong enough to do very well, but I was happy about my numbers. And then Day 2…I completely psyched myself out. There was no physical reason for my events to go as poorly as they did. I choked. I barely got the max distance 225 lbs husafell more than 100 ft (despite having taken 275 lbs for about 100 ft in training, and done at least twice that distance with around comp weight), and my keg medley was a glacial 34+ seconds (even though I had been smoking my conditioning). My poor performance on the husafell mentally destroyed me and I gave up. I wasn’t there anymore. I felt like I had let myself down and felt deeply embarrassed.
The story – YOU’RE NOT ENOUGH – came true. I lived out the unconscious mantra I had been telling myself for weeks.
I cried a lot that night and struggled to hold back tears while my friends placed topped 10 and got their Arnold invites. I was legitimately happy for them, especially my coach, who fought brutally all weekend through an injury from the first event. I was so proud of them, and it made my utter contempt for myself that much worse.
My boyfriend patiently listened while I sobbed and rambled. But out of the total mess, right before we decided to turn in, clarity happened. I say happened because it really seemed like a fairy godmother dropped into the room and tapped me with her wand, bringing me out of my self pity.
“This is what you needed. This was the best thing that could have happened. This was your worst fear, and you survived. This will make you invincible. This will give you the courage to admit what you really want – You want to win.”
I want to win.
Since I started competing, I never quite considered myself strong enough to even deserve to aspire to winning. It felt hubristic and silly and unrealistic.
But my hedging my desires didn’t make them go away. My refusal to freely admit my true and ultimate desires – to place and go to the Arnold – created a chaos and internal conflict within me that drained my energy and maybe even caused some of my error.
And the truth is, I want to win. And it feels damn good to admit it. And since admitting it, I have gotten a lot of clarity in what I need to do, and I actually feel a remarkable decrease in stress. And the beautiful thing about self-honesty is that it can snowball. In the last 8 months I have become more honest with myself about all kinds of different things totally unrelated to Strongman. Truth begets truth. Clarity begets clarity.
And ambition begets ambition.
So, since last October, I’ve done a lot of thinking. I’ve asked myself over and over, “what do you want?”
And the answers keep coming back, clearer and louder.
So the obvious next question is,
“What do I have to do to live this new story out?”
This isn’t about simply wishing I was stronger, or thinking I can will myself into my ultimate goals with magic.
This is about understanding that for me to be successful, every part of how I think of myself is important. Every part of how I treat myself is important. Everything I say about myself is important. It’s all important because ultimately it shapes the reality that I Iive out – in training, at work, in my relationships, and in competition. I believe this to be as true of training as it is of anything else – I can only create true value in what I put in the world if I truly love and invest in the value in myself. And that means being honest about everything, including my faults.
I may not be strong enough or good enough this upcoming November, but that will only be because others worked harder, and showed up stronger physically and mentally, and I am at peace with that. I am at peace because I know when I show up in November, I will have spent a year living a new narrative, creating a new mantra, a new reality:
I am enough.
I may not be the strongest, the most skilled or the most talented. But I will keep getting stronger. I will keep practicing. And maybe my goals will change, maybe other pursuits will take focus over Strongman. I’ve changed a lot in the last few years and I’m open to more change. But right now, I want to win. And I’ve just started learning who I need to be to make that happen.
I’m starting to take control of my story.
