01 02 03 Eat. Pray. WOD.: Try once, fail. Try again, fail better. 04 05 15 16 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 31 32 33

Try once, fail. Try again, fail better.

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No one ever wants to fail.
Failure is bad.
If you don't pass a class in school, you fail your grade. Get held back.
If you do something stupid, it's a fail.
If you fail at life, you're a screw up.

For all intensive purposes, no one wants to be a failure.

I struggle with this in the gym. I don't want to be a failure. I don't want to go in there and not be the best. Because failing is bad, right? I was always really hard on myself when I failed. I'd talk to myself about all the things I could have done better, how I could have strategized more efficiently, negative self-talk galore.

I'm coming back from a long two months where I could barely be in the gym. I've got a back injury that hurts like hell. My first week back, I worked on finding my maxes as a baseline. And that shit hurt. A lot.

I failed on a lot of lifts I probably shouldn't have failed on. At weights I probably shouldn't have failed on. I've completed WODs that I felt really weak doing. 

But according to my badass training partner, my "training attitude" has improved. He's noticed that I no longer sweat the small stuff when I'm training. Yes, I want to get better and I give it 100% every time, but I don't beat myself up everyday.

I think maybe I've realized that failure is a part of success. How can I get better if I don't know what my limits are? And how can I find my limits if I don't fail? Failure is just a benchmark to know where my goals should lie. And once I overcome that failure, I have to push until I fail better. And then beat that.

Thanks to Melissa for the awesome, post-WOD photography

Thanks to Melissa for the awesome, post-WOD photography
If we never fail, how can we know how much we've succeeded?

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