I won an award on Sunday… it was the first award I’ve won in a long time. I wasn’t really expecting to win anything, which made it even better. Combine that with my general Debbie Downer day, and it made everything better.
What was the award? More on that later.
It’s funny… I have to admit that I felt a little “left out” when I wasn’t one of the people recognized during Client Recognition month at CrossFit. But then I realized that I don’t really deserve a workout named after me, at least yet. The people we’re recognizing have truly accomplished great things at our gym, over and beyond simply feeling, performing, and looking better. They’ve transformed their lives in some way. I’m still working on that, and I don’t need a workout named after me to know that.
That said, it feels damn good when someone notices what you do… which parlays right into the award.
My award was the “Superfly Rookie of the Year” award of the cycling instructors at Pure Austin. It means a lot, because it shows that people really do appreciate the work I put into my classes… programming workouts and making them work with music is not easy. Sometimes I question why I do this… between Pure, 24, IBM, and now CrossFit Central, I have like 4 jobs and it gets a little overwhelming. But knowing that I’m providing a support structure that enables a transformation in my clients, just like I had (and continue to have) a support structure around mine, is rewarding.
Despite the fact that us CrossFitters tend to dismiss “Globo Gyms” as useless, Pure Austin really has a ton to offer even the most hardcore CrossFitter. They’re constantly innovating (thanks for the Oly platforms!) and they’re always in a quest to make their members happy and successful.
Recognition is great… and it doesn’t have to be a cool award. It can be as simple as some kind words from a complete stranger. Have you recognized someone’s effort lately (in the gym, at work, at home… anywhere really)? If not, do it! Everyone needs some karma points.
I’m looking forward to some exciting stuff in the near future with Pure Austin and with CrossFit Central… more on that in another post.
I ran the Rock n’ Roll San Antonio Half Marathon this weekend. To say I ran it would be a joke… I made it through. It was humid, hot, whatever… I’m not blaming this one on the weather, or the equipment.
I did not eat breakfast race morning. I always eat breakfast race morning.
I left my gel in the car.
The start line had NO FOOD, and the bathrooms were ill-equipped, at best.
Lovely.
So I get to mile 4 and finally find a bathroom that has what I needed. Great. Back on the course. I’m starving. My body is starting to tell me that bad things are going down, and I know I need to figure something out. I can taste salt in my mouth, and around mile 7, I start getting that oxygen-deprived feeling in my ear like I get at the end of Fran. Not cool. There was not enough Cytomax and water and banana people to get me through this one. And the Cytomax and water was giving me side stitches, which made running even more fun.
I needed real food, which I never got for the whole race, and I paid for it.
There are many lessons here… certainly some around preparedness and the need to establish a “race ritual” and follow it. But I think the biggest lesson here is there’s a fine line that you need to draw between a strict paleo diet and the ability to fuel during a race.
I can’t very well pull out some deli meat, 9 almonds, and some berries at mile 7 for a snack. So I can’t let myself get so far to the real food side of the world that a gel would hurt. But I do need to find a more paleo-friendly gel, because my next 13.1 is going to not suck like this one did.
Thoughts? Grok didn’t have a D-tag stuck to his shoe and he wasn’t timing himself in the hopes to run the 13.1 miles out to the river and back faster than he ever did before. Eric did, and was. And failed.
Everyone has a bad race or two. This is my first, and I want to never have one again.
Holy shit. I haven’t posted in a long time. My bad. My renewed mental focus is clearly due to my first week of the The Label Says Paleo challenge.
I’m going to write the end of this post first, and then I’m going to come back up here and write my original post.
Ok, original post time. There are so many things I want to say, so I think I’m going to limit this to one topic and make more posts (I swear) over the coming weeks.
About 6 weeks ago, I was supposed to start training for the Rock n’ Roll San Antonio 1/2 Marathon. I only needed 6 weeks because, well, I CrossFit, and I know I can run 13.1 miles. It was just a matter of how long it would take to do so, and whether I wanted to PR that race. Then… life kicked in. One bachelor party in Vegas. One trip directly from Vegas to Uruguay. ACL. Swine flu (serisouly, I got fucking swine flu). Recovering from swine flu brought me to 3 weeks out from the race. Then I had a confluence of shitty scheduling on my part (see end of post). Fast forward to 2 weeks out. I decided that with 2 weeks left, it was time to start training.
I went out on a Tuesday morning and did the CFE WOD. 10k, 85% effort for the first 5k, 95% effort for the second 5k. 47:something. Not bad.
Continued my regular CrossFit regimen. 3-on, 1-off. Strength and metcon mixup (which I going to organize soon).
I went out and ran a 10-mile race last Sunday. 1:17:something. 7:41 pace. That puts me spot on for a 4-minute PR for the Rock n’ Roll.
3 weeks of training, folks. 3 weeks. Why? Because I CrossFit. Because I focus on strength and muscular endurance, 13.1 miles at a pretty decent clip isn’t so hard. It just takes a while. Combine this with some proper CrossFit Endurance protocol, and I know I’ll see huge PR’s in my future. Maybe I can get that 25mph bike pace that I need to start placing in Duathlons.
Tomorrow (and I know no one has read this in weeks, so I’m going to assume that no one will show up because of my blog, but if you do, holler!) we’re hosting a free community workout at the Austin High track. We’ll show you some run efficiency skills and drills… breaking running into the “first principles” that Christopher McDougall so eloquently describes when he talks about his book. Then we’re going to put you through a light CFE WOD, some 100s, hopefully using your newfound skills.
Here’s the kicker… are you ready for the kicker?
We’re going to continue these free track workouts. Wednesday mornings (6am) and Thursday nights (6pm) in December, over at the O’Henry track. I’m coaching the Thursday nights and one Wednesday morning… December 3, 10, and 16. Show up. Improve your running. Add some quality to your miles, not trash miles. No. more. garbage. miles.
See ya at the track!
–e
Now for the blur… quick recap since I last posted on my blog (sad, I know. I shouldn’t have to do this)
I participated in the LiveStrong Challenge 5k and 45-mile bike ride, raising over $300 for the LiveStrong Foundation. HUGE thanks to my supporters for donating to a great cause!
I rode a Team Time Trial for the first time on November 2. The Tour de Grune 27.3 miles is pretty tough — hilly, chip seal, some crosswinds. Fun ride, but we didn’t keep the 22 mph pace I wanted. Next year. Moving on…
I ran the Run for the Water 10-miler on November 8. First distance longer than 10k since February, and it went well considering that I haven’t run.
All kinds of cool shit is happening with CrossFit Central Endurance, Pure Austin, The Label Says Paleo… it just keeps coming.
I’m a Nuun Ambassador. Hell yes, Nuun!
I’m starting to see the power of tribes and the communities that can be formed. Mind boggling.
Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat.
Practice and train major lifts: Deadlift, clean, squat, presses, C&J, and snatch. Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits, and holds. Bike, run, swim, row, etc, hard and fast.
Five or six days per week mix these ele- ments in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense.
Regularly learn and play new sports.
This year, I’m going to try something I haven’t done before… racing bikes. You say, “but Eric, don’t you do triathlons and duathlons and stuff?” To that, I say, yeah, but it’s not really racing bikes. You can’t draft, there’s no paceline or peloton, it’s you and your bike, an individual effort. I want to try racing a road bike with other people around. It looks fun (until someone crashes).
So on November 1, I’m going to do a Team Time Trial at the Tour de Gruene, with my buddy Rich (who has no blog… so I can’t link anything to him. we’re working on that). Lance rode this last year, and I think he’s coming back this year, so it’ll be awesome to see that. I just hope we can maintain about 22mph average for the 27 mile distance… we’ll see!
I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Bird Rock, which is kind of between La Jolla and Pacific Beach. It’s like a no-man’s land of beach and surf shops. Reminds me a lot of Santa Cruz. I’ve done this a couple times: end up somewhere in San Diego at a coffee shop, avoiding work, and basically just taking the day off to collect my thoughts. Over the last few weeks I’ve had a pretty frustrating time at work, but for the most part, life is good. Austin’s a great town. I’m traveling on business right now in San Diego. When I get back, I have a bunch of friends to visit and training to accomplish. And then I realized…
My life is so scheduled, it’s amazing that I can even think without checking my calendar first. Then I flashed back to a conversation over drinks at a dinner table with some coworkers and a customer last night… “why do you choose to do this to yourself? what do you get out of it?” That put a quote from Trainspotting into my head.
Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?
Ok so I don’t do heroin. I swear. Those marks around the veins on my arm? That’s acne from shaving my arms and then proceeding to sit with them closed in some fashion all day long (which is officially over with… I will continue to manscape the arm region, but no more razors. people stare at me like I have track marks. it’s hilarious, kind of.).
Everyone has a drug of choice. For some people, it’s booze, for others it’s stronger substances. For me, it’s bourbon. No, not really. Well, maybe, but I digress.
My heroin is building stuff. I sat in a conference room for 90 minutes watching a customer and several coworkers present a proof-of-concept of my software running on their systems. It worked. It took like an hour for me to integrate it. Watching other people be successful with what I’ve built is a rush. So that explains why the waking hours of my day are filled with often-annoying conference calls and trying meetings with frustrating processes. But it doesn’t explain what I do before and after the “real job” — my other job.
What am I building when I’m training and teaching? I’m building people. They’re learning they can do so much more than they thought. They’re getting stronger; they’re going to that first triathlon, running that first half marathon, or just getting out on a bike and cycling. I’m building myself; confidence that I never had is emerging. I can do stuff I never thought I could do. Hell, at 6 AM I jumped onto a 27″ box 100 times and threw a 20lb med ball 50 times.
I want to build more. It’s a rush that doesn’t compare to anything else, because it doesn’t happen immediately. You have to work for it, and then when you have that epiphany — that moment where you can step back and survey what you’ve done so far — all you can see is your successes, built on all of the failures and shitty situations you overcame to get there.
Builders are inspiring to me. Jeremy at CrossFit Central is changing Austin, one person at a time. CJ at Invictus bailed from an arguably more lucrative job as an attorney to change lives in the way his life was changed.
I got my Crossfit Endurance cert to help my own training succeed in ways that we just don’t do in Austin right now. I’m getting my Level 1 in the near future, because I want to share what I’ve built in myself with others; I also want to continue to refine and build within myself all I know I can be.
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