Sunday Story…The Aftermath

It’s over. 3 weeks of tests have come and gone. You did well on some, but not so well on others. Or maybe you exceeded all your expectations. What matters, however, is that you showed up and gave it your full effort. Full effort is full victory.

Now, in the aftermath, the question becomes, what is next? What are you going to do with the knowledge you have attained about yourself, your fitness, and your motivation? Often in the aftermath, I hear about all the plans, all the skills, all the motivation to do better next year. And that’s great.

Here’s the sad truth, however. If you are like most people, you have the desire and motivation, but you don’t have a plan. At this point what you have is a vague sense of needing to work on certain things to get where you want to be.

If you are serious about improving your skills and/or strength, you will need to do three things. First, make a cohesive plan. Second, decide how to implement that plan. Third, go to work. It’s simple, but not easy.

Here’s my offer…if you want to sit down and discuss what your goals are for the coming year make an appointment with Ellie, Alex, or myself and we will sit down with you to help make that plan. Once you have your plan you can hire any one of us to train you and make sure the plan is working.

Here’s my other offer: Get four of your super friends, and we will create a small group class for you that can meet once, twice, or more often every month to work on improving everyone’s skills so that next year, some of those holes in your game will be less glaring.

Let’s do this!

 

John Mariotti

www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com

www.crossfitodyssey.com    

775-338-2412

 

 

 Sunday Story…The Thrill of Victory

By now you may have done the first 2 CrossFit Open workouts. You may be pleasantly surprised or vastly disappointed, or both! This is one of the best things about testing yourself like this. You get to see both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

If you found yourself staring down a skill you didn’t have before, and went ahead and tried it and discovered you had it or almost had it, you should celebrate that. And decide now you are going to do what you need to do so next time that skill pops up you can own it. Maybe you will need some personal training lessons. Maybe you will need to dedicate 5 or 10 or 15 minutes of practice every day or week to dial in that skill.

Maybe you found out your conditioning was weak in one area or another. What’s your plan to improve that? Here’s an example from my own discovery. Yesterday, on 25.2, I discovered my conditioning while doing thrusters was weak (that’s being nice, it sucked). It’s not surprising, given the fact that I have kept my intensity exceptionally low over the last 3 months. If I want to improve, I am going to have to change what I am doing a little bit. I need to add some intensity around moving weight fast once or twice a week.

By the way, this is a life lesson. If you want something different, you need to do something different to get a different result. You can’t solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it.

So, look at your results and make a plan to do better in the future.

 

John Mariotti

www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com

www.crossfitodyssey.com

775-338-2412

Sunday Story…Competing

How does competing fit in the path to health and longevity? After all, getting out on the edge, pushing your heart, lungs, and muscles past the point of comfort into suffering seems antithetical to health and fitness. In many ways it is. Yet competing is part of our human condition. For millennia we have competed for resources, land, and more. It is in our blood.

Yet going all out is in that territory where, on the old maps, “dragons be!” We don’t want to fall off the world's edge, yet like the explorers of old, we don’t want to just skirt the edges of the known world, we want to go beyond. And although we may risk mutiny, we don’t want to wreck our ship in pursuit of something that isn’t going to serve our long-term goals.

At this point in our journey, we recognize that going all out, sinking the ships may not be the best strategy. Leave that one for the 20 somethings. If they fall off the edge, the climb back isn’t so bad. For those of us longer in the tooth, the climb back may be impossible.

So, after all these years living in and using this body, I need to be able to regulate my effort. Take a breather, give yourself 5-10 seconds and restart. Have the discipline to maintain your rest time and get right back to work. In a sentence: work smarter, not harder. You can compete, you can go hard and harder, but you must be self-aware enough to know when and how to back off from the edge.

Like last week, I will leave you with this nugget:

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

John Mariotti

www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com

www.crossfitodyssey.com

775-338-2412

 

Sunday Story…This is the Week

The Open begins. Every Friday for the next 3 weeks we will do the Open workout. It will be fun and interesting (that’s an understatement).

There is a lot to be said about testing your fitness with your classmates as well as worldwide. We don’t need to do it every day or month. But occasionally, we should put it all out there. This is that chance.

It doesn’t matter if you are just starting out or if this will be your tenth Open. What matters is that you put forth full effort. What matters is that you test the limits of what You can do.

Every workout will present challenges. Maybe the prescribed weight will be too much, or the skill is not in your repertoire. It doesn’t matter, there will be scaling options available. CrossFit always puts out a scaled version of the workout as well as something they call foundations. Keep in mind that, at the end of the day you are doing this for yourself not for anyone else. Do it this year and then next year you can compare!

If I am being honest with myself, I suspect I will be doing some workouts in the scaled division. There are just too many places where my current physical limitations force me into non-prescribed movements. And that’s Ok. It indicates where my fitness is at this moment. And that is what we want to know.

I leave you with this familiar quote from Mahatma Gandhi::

Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment, full effort is full victory.

See you on the leaderboard!

John Mariotti

www.crossfitodyssey.com    

www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com 

775-338-2412

 

 

Sunday Story…More Recovery

Now that I am 2 ½ months post-surgery it feels like I have turned a corner with my recovery. I no longer have much pain in my knee and what I do have is very intermittent and more like an electrical shock than a stabbing acute pain. Before surgery, I would wake up in the middle of the night in pain, that no longer happens. I still have some swelling in my knee and lower leg, but every day seems to be a little better.

Some movements are still difficult, and the knee hasn’t returned to full proprioception. In other words, it doesn’t always listen when my brain tells it to do something. Going up stairs, especially going quickly can be tricky as my right foot will trail without warning, and the next thing you know my face is heading for the floor. I’m still not jumping on a box. Many of the skills we use here are very fungible. That means they disappear if you don’t practice…toes to bar are a fitting example of this.

Besides certain movements the real problem is twofold. First, I’ve had a tough time getting my heart rate to stay in a narrow range like it did before. It will jump from 120 to 160 with no extra exertion or difficulty. It comes back down but it bounces all around. Second, my ability to push hard into the outside edges of my fitness has diminished greatly. In other words, I can go hard but I can’t go hard for as long as I used to.

At this point, I do 15 minutes of GOWOD mobility daily and another 30 minutes of physical therapy exercises as Dr. Amanda Anderson of Raise the Barbell Physical Therapy prescribed. She treats people here at the box a couple times a week. If you need some help, ask me for her contact info! Then I will do some weightlifting and work on some gymnastic skills (these are the most fungible). And then I finish with some Zone 2 training.

Slow and steady wins this race.

 

John Mariotti

www.sunday-stories.blogpost.com

www.crossfitodyssey.com

775-338-2412

 

Sunday Story…The CrossFit Open

 

 

Sunday Story…The CrossFit Open

The CrossFit Open starts on February 27^th and ends on March 17^th. This annual 3-week online competition marks the beginning of the competitive CrossFit season.

For most of us the Open is an annual test of our fitness. Am I stronger? Am I faster? Am I better? Remember, the whole idea of this fitness thing is to increase your ability to move large loads over a longer distance. Each of us needs to perform to the best of our ability.

There are lots of ways to do this. This morning, for example, I participated in S.W.E.A.T. (Southwest Ergonomic Amateur Tournament). This competition is simple…row 2000 meters as fast as possible. Did I go faster than I had in previous years? I did not. But in past years I wasn’t 2.5 months out of major surgery. Excuses, excuses, I know. But now I have a new metric to look at in the future.

This I will be signing up for the open. Part of this is to maintain my streak of the last 1313 years. I have participated in every open since 2012 (the second year). Do I expect my performance to be as good as last year? No but what these 3 weeks will tell me is how far down I am compared to previous years. Now, I don’t need to sign up and pay my money to do the workouts. Anyone can do them at any time they choose. But if you want an official score, or you want to be listed on the leaderboard, you need to sign up.

We will be doing the CrossFit Open workouts every Friday, starting on 2/28/25. So, sign up or not, we will all do them. Let’s celebrate our progress (or lack of) and see what lies ahead for our fitness journey.

 

John Mariotti

www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com

www.crossfitodyssey.com

 

 

Sunday Story…Personal Responsibility

Most of us have no problem taking responsibility for the things that happen to us. We don’t leave our finances to the vagaries of chance. We don’t leave our careers to the whims of the marketplace. So why do we leave our health to chance?

Lately, we have been reading and hearing about how the big food companies, the big pharma companies, and the big tobacco companies (who are often the same as the first two) have hijacked our perception of what is healthy in our food supply, what is a safe drug, and how we should move. The issue is we believe and take advice from people and companies who do NOT have our best interests in mind. No, their interest lies in their bottom line.

Think about it…if they can convince you that moving your body is not in your best interest, that you should eat chemical laden sh#% instead of real food, and then when you get sick, consign you to taking a drug for the rest of your life to maintain the crappy state of health you are in. That’s great for their bottom line but where does it leave you?

You are not deficient in statin, Ozempic, or any other unnatural substance. You are deficient in treating your body like the temple it is. Eating real food, keeping drug (alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, THC) use to a minimum, and getting off your butt and moving every day is the prescription needed to maintain robust and vital health.

You are the only one responsible for your health. You are the one who must live with the consequences of those decisions. The buck stops with you, not your doctor, not your farmer, not your best friend…You and you alone. Start now, right now with just a baby step. Go for a walk in the sunshine, choose real food for a snack, hug your loved ones, and decide today that you will be better tomorrow.

John Mariotti

www.crossfitodyssey.com

www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com

775-338-2412