“Well, it’s kind of like I’m looking over the edge of a cliff a few seconds before going over that edge–that’s where I am right now.” My therapist’s eyes turned a little sharper than they had been thus far during our session. She shifted in her seat and drew her breath. “Have you been thinking about hurting yourself?” Alarmed that my description of the imagery that had been rising unbidden in my mind for the last few days was causing my therapist to break out the “do we need to bring in reinforcements?” checklist, I reassured her that no thoughts of self-harm had crossed my mind for quite some time.
But looking down the side of a cliff I’m about to jump off of is what things do feel like right now–I am so close to the major changes that are about to happen in my life that it’s like the time you would spend breathing a few breaths before jumping off the ledge. Those breaths will only give you a small window of time in which to get your bearings before everything goes nuts. Its the period before the big event–the night before the test, the seconds before the race starts, the breakfast before you lift in a meet–that I cannot stand. I have historically done some pretty stupid stuff during this period–wandering around target for an hour with a shopping cart I’m not filling, calling people I haven’t talked to in months or years on the phone, driving 45 minutes away from town to sit in the parking lot of a farm equipment company shuttered for the night. I hate the cusp. I hate it.
I haven’t written in this blog for several months now because I have been at a loss for what I really want to say here. I tend to treat this space on the internet as more of a place for my editorialization than as a diary, but I write more freely when I write in a diary so that is what I’ve finally chosen to do. Indeed, most of the time, I can’t figure out what to say about training, and because this blog is about my lifting, nothing gets written at all. But my lifting isn’t what’s hard, it’s not what REALLY challenges me, it is just the constant in a stream of changes. The thing about my lifting is that it forces me to confront what is going on in my “real” life; what’s going on there impacts what happens in the gym. Most of the time, this impact is limited to how I feel about myself: if I feel self-doubt, if my self-esteem is running low, the gym doesn’t go so well. Sometimes, larger events in my life trickle into my training. In a little under three weeks, I will start a new job. In one week, I will move to another city. Both of these events are landmarks on a path I didn’t think I’d be taking over the last year–a career change, giving up a major facet of my life that has been there since childhood, trying to understand myself and my identity when ways I had defined myself for years fell away.
I am not complaining. I am deeply lucky to have been given the opportunity to start a new career with financial stability in a good-size city in which I have more friends than I have had in a long time in one place. I am deeply lucky to have the support and patience of my fiancé, who has watched me stumble through this past year and held me when I couldn’t even manage to stumble. I make sure to think about what I do have right now, because it’s an excellent way to ward off the “scrambly moving freak-outs,” as I fondly term how I tend to react to moving.
Indeed, the stress of all this change coupled with an aggressive caloric deficit have impacted my training. My energy is not often on point, and sometimes it’s so below par that it’s a miracle I get through my work sets. While my numbers have steadily increased for months even as my weight drops, my gut tells me that I’m going to have to tread very carefully over the next two weeks when I do train. As much as I hate to admit defeat, the move and the career shift is creeping into my training. Continuing to pretend that nothing’s wrong when I have felt the impact of stress both in and out of the gym is stupid. Its a lot more stupid than pushing an empty cart around Target for an hour.
I’m not making excuses for why I’m not training, because I am training. No matter how poorly the training has gone some days recently or how stressed I am about things outside of it, I believe in what I’m doing so I find ways to do as much as I can within the limits of my current psyche and situation. It’s better than calling it off for a few weeks. It’s not perfect, but it is better. I tend to blog about my training in periods when it’s not ideal, when barriers prevent my carrying it out as well as I would like to carry it out. I have been very lucky for months now with my training and I have enough rep PRs as well as some new one rep maxes to show for it. I bow now to moderation and survival. Right after I drive for an hour to the nearest John Deere for no reason, anyway.
Babyeater Lifts 