Now I'm getting confused. I can't remember if I'm seven, eight, nine, perhaps even ten weeks in. I know that I'm three weeks out, and I know results equate directly with hard work. The battery on my scale is low, but I step on it everyday since it only works correctly one day in three. I work, today the scale worked, and I weighed 174.6 - through the sticking point. So when I did "Christine" today, the body weight dead lift was not the formerly normal 185 but rather 175, which felt great.
Maybe the best thing about CrossFit is how it rewards hard work. It may take weeks to drop ten pounds of lard, but your work in the meantime gets noticed. If you work hard enough at the right time, you get to go to California and get free Reebok shit, but if you "only" work hard enough enough to start routinely hitting PR's I think the reward is even better. If you can blast through a WOD, avoid the time wasting "bar stare," PR, then rip your shirt off and collapse heaving in a puddle of sweat, nobody says you were five minutes slower than the guys who get free Reebok shit. No, rather they say, "dude, you're a manimal - you fucking killed that work out." Which feels great.
This all happens when you get serious.
Now when you get deadly serious, you have to approach eating the same way you approach working out, except that instead of five, ten, or twenty minutes of misery, you're doing this all day, everyday, for days, weeks, and months. You follow the plan, and if the plan says you eat 855 grams of chicken, again, that's what you do.
That's hard.
And let me just say, when you avoid the "fridge stare," eat the last of the 855 grams, unclasp your belt, wallow to the futon and collapse, absolutely nobody is there to say, "dude, you're a manimal - you fucking killed that chicken." Which is hard, again.
Post work out nutrition is important, and when you're leaning out, you don't get your favorite protein shake, milk, or cream. Those all cause insulin spikes which make you fat. No, you follow John Welbourn and eat real food, lots of real food. Lots of the same chicken and yam in fact.
I'll be ecstatic when I stop trying to lean out and go back to trying to be awesome. I'm not going to go insane, but for a few days, I'm going to eat however much I want of whatever I want. ( My pancake source thinks ice cream may be overkill. I should probably defer to her, but if I do it's going to be a half gallon of ice cream for breakfast the next day.) I am, though, going to make a serious attempt to keep the real food post work out meal.
After the other CrossFitters go home or go to work, there's just the drying puddle of sweat, the memory of the dead lifts, and the chicken and yam. And there's a moment of clarity. The chicken and yam, you realize, make the dead lifts possible. Here you do what you want. I like to thank the deity of my choice, who may or may not be Almighty Evolution, for this miracle by which real food is turned into dead lifts, not fat. I like to think that the chickens forgive me for not having the disposable income to buy them from the farmers who raise them responsibly - free, happy, and eating worms, and that the yams forgive me for having only enough money to have them chemically treated and shipped in dark trucks from Mexico. In any case I thank Dieties and Yams and Chickens for Strength and Health rather than curse convention for disease and decay.
And it's still a pretty good world until it's time for the post-post work out meal of chicken and yams.
No comments:
Post a Comment