9/13 Mental Toughness Thursday

Coaches Noah and Leslie do a burpee workout in the gym before we opened. Coach Leslie has been doing CrossFit for 8.5 years. 
Do you remember your first CrossFit workout? I do, it was the Baseline. I did it as part of my free intro. It took me 9:39 minutes and I had to use the green band for pull-ups. I went home, puked, and told James about this incredible thing called CrossFit. 
Fast forward 8 years and I can do the Baseline Rx'd in half the time. In fact, I have done the Baseline 14 times and I have a graph that shows my progress. Keeping track of our workouts, be them a Baseline time or 50 Burpees for time, allows us to track our progress and provides us with data about our fitness. 
You all learned from our Foundations program that CrossFit places a high value on measuring and repeating workouts. Comparing times, weights, distances, and heights gives us real data on how much faster and stronger we are. Seeing a positive trend in our measured fitness can keep us motivated and engaged.  
Like most of you, I use Beyond The Whiteboard to track my workouts and have done so since my very first Baseline on March 19, 2010. I can look back over my workout history and see my strength gains, notice how my fitness dipped after vacations, and compare where I am now to where I was 8 years ago. I can tell you, with real numbers, that I am more fit now at nearly 47 years old than I was at 39. 
Here's my Fitness Level graph (I found it the Analyze tab on BTWB on my browser). You can see that my Fitness Level has increased from a 48 to 86 over that past 7.5 years. I dipped to a 72 after my 40th birthday trip to France and then I oscillate about 10 points between 75 and 85 throughout the year. My Fitness Level has stayed very consistent since over the past 4 years and this tells me that I've probably reached my highest CrossFit potential. My goal now is to maintain good fitness as I age. 

Increased fitness is earned through consistency and focus; both of which are mental toughness traits that can be trained. Consistency is trained by scheduling time for your workouts. Enroll in an entire week of classes and sync your Pike13 account with your calendar. Make your CrossFit time non-negotiable. This is your time. While you're in the middle of a workout, focus on the current rep. Don't worry about what's next. Be in the moment and breathe. Get through the current rep and then focus on the next. One breath, one rep at a time. ​

Click Here for The WOD