Five years ago today, I took my first CrossFit class. The workout was called “Nasty Girls”. I was SO NERVOUS walking into the gym!! I didn’t know anyone, my hands wouldn’t stop sweating, and I was so scared I was literally shaking. At the time, I remember thinking “um, I can’t do those ring things”, and wasn’t sure why the workout was named. In hindsight, how lucky am I that my first wod was such an OG CrossFit workout?!! To this day, Rx'ing “Nasty Girls” is still one of my biggest CrossFit goals.

Of course, you know how the rest of the story goes. I did a very scaled version of the workout, I got my ass kicked. I FREAKIN LOVED IT. The energy I felt in that gym and in myself from the experience was ELECTRIC. I was sold.

One of my favorite expressions is, “When you know, you know”. Well, let’s just say I knew I loved CrossFit from the start.

CrossFit has added a richness...

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”

-Teddy Roosevelt, 1910

If you’ve read my previous blog posts, you know the following:

1. I am incredibly fascinated (but conflicted) by the space between the drive to accomplish and the feeling of “I am enough”.
2. I tend to overthink things...

I’m pretty sure everyone has seen some form of this picture before. The little circle labeled “Your comfort zone” and the much bigger circle outside of it that says: “Where the magic happens.”

Totally one of those lessons that is ridiculously cliche but also SO TRUE, to the point that it kinda makes you angry. Like when someone tells you to “relax” and you already know you need to relax… so you’re all “DON’T TELL ME I NEED TO RELAX!” and it makes it worse. And then however many minutes/hours/days later when you finally DO relax and make the connection that, “Oh wow! I’m actually relaxing and this is exactly what I needed all along…” You can’t help but follow up that realization with a “DAMN YOU, [insert name of person who told you to chill out before]!!”

Let’s be real, no one likes to lose or be proven wrong. If you disagree, I don’t believe you. (But am also extremely curious...

“It’s like, you hear a song by a band, but then you hear somebody do the cover song better, right? And you’re like, woah….. And so, there’s nothing new out there, there really isn’t. And I’m not talking about anything new, it’s just how I see it. And I feel like I’ve got something to share about it, and that’s all I’m doing.”

• Brian Mackenzie, from “The Four Percent Podcast” 10/19/17 ________________________________________

Is it all connected or am I just connecting all of it? Is it both?

Do you believe in fate?

If I never fell in love with playing soccer on DAY ONE and started playing competitively as a little girl, I probably would have never gone on to play in college. If I never played college soccer, I would have never run college track (with a few cross-country meets sprinkled in there, too). And if I hadn’t run track, I probably would have never gone right into...

The greatest class I have ever taken was a course I took in grad school five years ago, called “The Rhetoric and Aesthetics of Everyday Life.” The major premise of the course was simple: Does life imitate art? Or does art imitate life?

Let me guess your follow-up to that: “Why does it matter?” Fair enough question.

IT MATTERS BECAUSE SPORT IS ART.

Let that marinade in your mind and we’ll come back to it.

I left EVERY SINGLE CLASS of “The Rhetoric and Aesthetics of Everyday Life” feeling like I had the runner’s high. No, we were never actually running in class, just blowing up our minds analyzing some of the most thought-provoking books I’ve ever read. I’m going to go ahead and share some of those texts:

The Poetics & The Rhetoric -Aristotle
The Birth of Tragedy -Nietzsche
Pedagogy of the Oppressed -Paulo Freire
Theatre of the Oppressed -Augusto Boal
Sexual Personae -Camille...

“What happened? …. that kind of change where you went, ‘Where did you really stop holding on, and let go, and started living?’ Found that moment when you go, yeah… That’s where. I will live right here. I’m willing to die here and I’m so alive here.”

• Randall Wallace, Braveheart screenwriter (“The Truth Barrel with Gabrielle Reece and Neil Strauss” podcast from 5/30/17) ______________________________

The first time I heard that I got butterflies. Then proceeded to rewind & play it over five times in a row. You know that feeling when you hear something and it just resonates so deeply inside you? Like YES, THIS SPEAKS TO ME. Well that’s what happened. And for better or for worse, I have been profoundly moved similarly in SO MANY WAYS in this past year alone, all thanks to a newfound love for listening to podcasts and reading more.

But I want to rewind for a second and unpack...