by Coach Lam
Society often celebrates successes and extraordinary results in ways that dismisses the effort and hard work. It’s the talk about the talent, flashiness and sexiness that makes all the highlight reels.
What you don’t see is all the work and hours put behind their craft. In one of many videos I’ve watched about Mat Fraser, he talks about athletes who ask for his advice for training. They come up and ask him how he manages to be able to crank out pull ups when he’s tired during a WOD. It’s like they expect him to respond that he manages to conjure up some magical power drawn from a Rogue rig that allows him dissipate his pain to do more pull ups. Nope! His simple answer was, “I’m able to do that because during training, I do pull ups when I’m tired.” Short, simple, elegant.
There’s no magic pill to replace hard work. We all see the sexiness of box-mates winning competitions or the people you work out with making moves look easy during the WOD but most of us don’t see what happens when everyone leaves the box, the unsexy. Most don’t see Deb and Fox doing the same workout over and over week after week until they’ve essentially mastered it. You don’t see the hours and number of workouts Dori does every single day. You don’t see the double under misses and all the extra time Anthony puts in after every class in order to be more efficient. You don’t see Becca failing over and over on hitting her pull up goals at home.
So when you wish that you could squat heavier, be better at double-unders, have better lungs in a running WOD, have a sub 3 minute Fran time, or make a strict muscle up look easy, ask yourself “Have I put in the extra work to accomplish my goals?”. Have you put in extra work in a squat program outside of class? Have you practiced a flight simulator WOD to help your double unders? Have you worked on your thrusters and pull ups outside of the WOD? Have you worked on any muscle up transitions or worked on your false grip at all?
The unsexy is sometimes the most boring things that no one wants to do, but it’s the things that are done by those with the GRIT and determination to conquer those goals.
“Most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is, in a sense, ordinary.” – Angela Duckworth