Month: June 2017

In which I realise that something has changed significantly: there is no longer any “try”. On the platform, there is only a good lift, or there is no lift. There are no points for trying, no marks for effort, no bonus for working hard, and no Miss Congeniality award. And there’s definitely no sick note from your Mum.

In the run up to the British, and my first chance to qualify for consideration for selection, it’s easy to fixate on numbers. In any competition, it’s easy to fixate on numbers. And those numbers can become a barrier, looming up and blocking the light, blocking the way past.

The number of kilos lifted. The weight of an opening attempt. The weight of the increment between second and third. Body weight. AH points (or Wilks points, if you’re IPF. Sinclair, if you’re a weightlifter.) Height, speed, time, distance, power. Points. Every sport comes with numbers, somewhere.

“Don’t worry about the numbers. Just go out there and lift. Try your best.”

Aye, right.

But, I do worry. (This is ok. Worrying is my default setting.) I worry about the numbers, because it’s only about the numbers. The numbers get me onto a list. It will be a list of one female lifter or zero female lifters. I’m not competing against another person to be considered for selection–that’s a whole other post, about how this sport needs to grow in Scotland–but against a standard I need to reach. If you’d asked me a few months ago, I would have laughed and given you a really self-satisfied smile. I was on track to sail past the minimum. Then life happened. It tends to, right when you don’t need it to.

All the reasons to make a mess of things are no excuse

So, when I was sitting on the floor of the gym on Friday, swearing and not-crying-it’s-a-high-pollen-count-honest when I messed up when I tripped over a number, I realised that a switch had been tripped. The excellent Mister Parkes was trying to cheer me up and make me feel better, reminding me that I was doing pretty well, and trying really hard to get back, considering the rough few months I’ve had.

Because it’s true–I’ve had an awful few months. And I got grumpy (sorry, Ben), because none of that matters.

Oh, it has had an effect. A huge effect. It trashed my training, my sleep, my emotions, and my focus for three solid months. It contributed to a horrible mess at my last competition. But it doesn’t matter. For now, the only thing that matters is the numbers. When I walk out onto the platform and lie on that bench, I have three attempts to meet some numbers.

“Trying” is not the polite term for being a bit rubbish

“Well…. I’ll try,” carries more than a whiff of assumed failure. It wobbles with doubt.  (I am so trying to avoid going Yoda as I write this, but, you know. “Try” and “do” are just not the same.)

It took me a long time to learn to value effort, and the repeated failures inherent in trying, or to apply the “fall down seven times, get up eight” mentality to something other than recovering from surgeries, and re-learning to walk.

At school and college I was in a peculiar atmosphere where trying was the last thing that should show; success only counted if it was effortless. The reliable advice to “try, try, and try again” was swapped out for something more along the lines of “fine, then, try, but either impress us or stop wasting our time.” (I never said it was a positive or supportive atmosphere. This was, for example, a school where we worked out other people’s running average percentages after every exam, and the enviable grade in your report was a 10E for as many subjects as possible: a perfect score, but with no visible effort.)

But lifting taught me that trying counts more than I ever imagined. No one gets strong without effort. No one is born strong. Even Jennifer Thompson tells the story of being unable to bench a 20kg bar at the beginning. No one reaches their potential strength without a lot of work, repeated work, for years.

Learning to love the grind

The work is a pleasure. I like the grind. I like being able to do things that I used to be rubbish at, and able to do them just because I kept on pushing. I like lifting, again and again, and not giving up. And I like that I like this, rather than pretending I didn’t care about it, never wanted to be good at it anyway, stupid lifting, huh! (Etc., etc., continue hair-tossing teenage sulk at will.) It was a bloody glorious discovery–that trying wasn’t a sign of weakness, and that going from completely rubbish to slightly less rubbish was an achievement rather than a slightly sordid secret. (I know, most people figure this out when they are still at primary school.)

Putting in the work is valued, because that’s what makes progress happen. It’s the only thing that does.

A post shared by katie cooke (@slowlight) on Apr 10, 2017 at 2:27am PDT

(There are two videos of ring push ups in that instagram post above:
some progress to kind-of-Archers after three months of daily practice,
and some horrible first wobbly attempts at just plain pushups. With bonus swearing.)

And obviously I like the results: building up until I can rely on a weight that previously flattened me, and then using it for a warm up. I like these numbers–the increments and measures of progress, kilo by kilo, rep by rep.

Sometimes those increments slow down or stop–when life gets in the way, or the numbers get in your head, or something else dumps you out onto a plateau–but the trying, and the working still matters. It will still pay off, eventually. It’s a cliche, but just keep showing up, keep trying, keep working, even when it’s going slowly, or going horribly, or going nowhere.

“Just trying” has got me a long way, and I am absolutely not going to stop.

And then we hit Yoda territory…

So it seems weird that there is a stopping point, a cut off where it suddenly doesn’t apply. You try, and the trying matters. And than it doesn’t. There is only doing, or not doing. Good lift, or no lift.

Then it will be right back to trying, and working, as soon as I’m off the platform. Trying to get stronger, trying to get better for the next one. But out there? There are no mitigating circumstances, just getting it done.

All the points for trying

But aye, here’s the slow donkey getting it at last: while there are no points just for trying, all the points come from the trying (and the failing) you did before. That’s where the trying pays off.

 

 

In which I show you rather more of the inner workings of my brain than you may be comfortable with. There are a lot of feels with my lifting. I love lifting, and it gives me real joy, but it also comes with a lot of negative mental chatter. And some very mixed metaphors.

Old habits die hard

One of the challenges of coming to a sport late is bringing all your emotional and mental baggage with you. I mean those deeply ingrained mental habits that will either set you up beautifully for training and performance, or build an obstacle course beyond the fiendish imaginings of any tough mudder.

Well-raised and well-coached young athletes seem to grow up with encouragement and belief which helps keep the weight of expectations in check, and balances the doubts. (With some of the gruesome examples from Trophy Kids excepted.) Without that history, some of us trip over a lifetime’s baggage.

Any habit gets stronger the more it’s practiced and reinforced–whether that’s getting out of bed and starting your morning training before your brain has a moment to question the wisdom of doing pull ups before coffee, or something as destructive as smoking. While I managed to quit smoking after thirty years, I’m still fighting hard against my tendency to fixate on everything negative in my performance, every error in a single lift.

Clearly, we learn from failure. There are advantages in identifying from mistakes and problems: if you can see them, acknowledge them, learn from them, and then move the hell on, rather than letting them gather and loom and lurk, and fill you with doubt. That’s how problems get fixed. Out of balance, they can take over.

Wolves and donkeys

Every sports psychology book on the planet probably includes a parable about the good wolf and the bad wolf. My bad wolf is a big strong fat bastard, because it ate the good wolf. Years ago. On toast. With extra peanut butter. The giant bad wolf spends a lot of time hanging out with my inner Eeyore. Between them, they can find the cloud around every silver lining.

After every lift I do–even the best lift–I can tell you seven things that was wrong with it. At least seven. Probably eight. Because that’s the first place my brain goes. Before even the “hell, yes” moment of a PB or a good third lift on the platform, I’ll be running through the flaws and bugs.

I suspect this is a combination of three things–it’s partly my upbringing, where “good enough” was never good enough. But I think it’s also a female thing, or a British thing. Or a British female thing: deflecting praise or compliments, even internal ones. The urge is to bounce it back with a mirror, or deflate it. Because clearly, anything that’s not negative is suspect. (OK, fine, this is probably just my wiring not a cultural thing. But if you want to make the average British female squirm awkwardly: praise her.)

Shifting that bug-hunting error-spotting tendency sideways to a starting point for improvement has been extremely useful. It’s served me well in my studies, and in my work. Trying to interrupt the instant bounce to the negative is a good habit to work on developing. Even if that usually slides into an almost instant “yes, but” it’s better than skipping the positive altogether. (Sometimes the “actually, that was pretty good” realisation comes several hours, even several days later, when the bad wolf and Eeyore has stopped paying attention or are busy falling over laughing at the idiocy of my inability to see the blindingly obvious at the time.)

A good session

After my previous post (and my previous training sessions which were a pretty much perfect collection of every error I could make, excepting only falling off the bench, or dropping the bar on my head), Monday’s training was a dream.

A post shared by katie cooke (@slowlight) on Jun 20, 2017 at 12:32am PDT

Sure, I could nitpick things here and there–one lift where I pull a bit to the left, another where my line is a little random–but, I was able to sit up and say “aye, that was OK” after almost every set. And I managed to do that before analysing the details and working out what I needed to tweak or fix or improve. (Though I still found time to curse myself for wearing baggy kit which made it hard to see exactly where my arse was on the bench.)

“Never good enough” is a pretty destructive place to be. The never is the killer. Why bother trying, if you are never going to get there? Not good enough yet, however, is a whole other creature. It’s a hungry, feisty little beast.

As long as I can hold on to the absolute belief that I can keep improving, that I can get stronger, and better, then the waves of doom-mongering are just noise. It’s just the tide coming in, the tide going out. Background noise. Entirely predicable.

Fixing it

Quelling the noise is something I’m working on very consciously. One method is to find and enumerate things that I can accept as both good and true whenever my instinct bounces up a negative. (e.g. “That was shit: I lost my line. But, I am strong enough now to get out of trouble even when I go wonky.”) The other way is with visualisation. As with the meditation practice where you count–acknowledging where thoughts inevitably creep in, and then resetting and starting again–I do the same with visualisation. Over and over again until I can run through a whole lift, from waiting for a “bar’s loaded” call, to seeing the white lights. If there’s a flicker of doubt, or a wobble, or anything that’s not automatic? Back to the wings I go. Because when I doubt, gravity wins.

If the self-deprecating mental chatter is just treated as background noise, the bug-hunting instinct becomes useful; it supplies a work list, not a catalogue of sins.

So, when I train this evening, I will to remind myself of the things I have to work on, and the things I need to improve without getting distracted by wallowing. Because Eeyore is tedious company. And I’ve got better things to do than feed complacent fat wolves. Oh, hey, I could feed Eeyore to the wolf. That solves one problem…