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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?
