For anyone who knows me or goes to the early morning WODs, you know that at times I fall off the wagon hard with my eating paleo and attendance at WODs.  It’s not something I actively plan for, in fact every time I do it, I tell myself “never again”.   Despite me telling myself “never again, it still happens every now and again.  I have a few busy days at work and can’t make it in, I do a little too much volume and have to take a few extra rest days to ease and overused body part, or maybe it’s just a nice summer day and I want to eat a burger and relax with an adult beverage of choice.  That’s how it starts, then one bad decision leads to another, then another and so on…Before I know it, my belt is fitting tighter, I’m moving slower, and those wall balls I used to breeze through now feel like I’m hurling a ball of concrete.

Enter in the memories and current viewings of the Crossfit games.  Hello motivation and inspiration overload.  Just watching the top tier athletes compete at the level they do makes me want to stop what I’m doing and start doing burpees.  That’s not a joke, it just makes me want to workout.  When I see them doing a skill that I generally suck at and they are doing it so easily, it reminds me that at one point they had to work hard to obtain that skill and work exponentially harder to master it at their current level.  In fact, that is how I got unbroken double unders.  In the summer of 2012 I was on vacation with my family and we were watching re-runs of previous games workouts.  One of the WOD’s had double unders and I remember how effortlessly the athletes were just jumping up and down doing insane amounts of unbroken doubles, their faces looked like they were getting rest time in while doing this.  Well, some of them anyway.  At that time I was just getting back into shape from some time off recovering from shoulder surgery.  I said that when I get back home I am going to get unbroken doubles.  When I got home, I worked every day on my doubles and before I knew it, I was stringing unbroken doubles together.  I kept working on them and now doubles are often times my strongest skill in a WOD.

Also along the lines of motivation is how strict the games athletes must be throughout the rest of the year.  We all probably know that Rich Froning was once again the male games champ.  Looking at the other names on the leader board and the podiums, a very high percentage of them are all repeat games athletes.  One can only imagine the kind of strict eating, training, and planning it must take to achieve and maintain that level of fitness.  For many of them, certain slip ups on clean eating and/or workout regimens may very well mean the difference between watching the games at home or watching the games from the eyes of an athlete on the rig.  When I feel myself falling into a slump of eating crap food or taking the easy way out, I think of this and force myself to eat a paleo meal or get into a class and as one bad decision often leads to another, one good decision more often leads to another.  This helps me stay on track and feeling fitter and better.