(If you didn't catch this movie reference, go bang your head off of a wall a few times. Then run -- don't walk -- to your nearest video store, purchase The Princess Bride, and watch it immediately. You're welcome.)
Pain is an unavoidable part of life. As an ER nurse, way too much of my existence revolves around it. 99% of the patients who walk through our doors are there because they are in some kind of pain. For forty hours a week, pain is my job.
Part of our initial nursing assessment of patients is the pain assessment. We ask patients to rate their pain on a scale of zero to ten, and have them describe their pain from a checklist of adjectives. "Is it a sharp pain? Dull? Aching? Stabbing?" (Incidentally, I never knew how obnoxious the pain assessment really is until I was a patient in the ER myself prior to my gall bladder surgery. How would I describe my pain, you ask? It feels like an irate family of piranhas are trying to gnaw their way through my fucking abdomen. Is that on your checklist?) Generally, when we ask people to rate and describe their pain, we are met with blank stares and a fairly typical response: "I don't know. It just hurts."
I can relate. For someone who is not used to being in pain, it can be hard to put a finger on what kind of pain you're having. Prior to the beginning of my weight loss and fitness adventures, I was fortunate enough to have relatively little experience with pain. I have been blessed with good health (for which I am incredibly thankful, especially considering how poorly I treated my body for 30 years), and have always thought that I had a pretty high pain tolerance. After spending my entire childhood being tossed off of rowdy ponies, skiing into trees at high speed, and demonstrating spectacular gravel-burned, blood-smeared bike wipeouts while racing the neighborhood kids down my mother's hilly driveway, I've obtained my fair share of injuries. I've had more stitches and casts than I can keep track of, and it seemed like I was always getting bumps, scrapes, and bruises of some sort as a kid. But I'd never had a serious medical condition or severe injury, and growing up with Dr. Gold's "take a Tylenol and suck it up" parenting method, I learned from an early age not to overreact to pain. Sure, it didn't feel awesome to have my toes stomped on by a horse wearing steel shoes, and it didn't exactly tickle to be thrown into a wooden fence at high speed on days when my temperamental horse Frankie decided she didn't feel like jumping that day. But it hurt, and then I got over it, and then it went away. Pain was rarely a big deal, and was never a part of my daily life.
Enter CrossFit.
Before stumbling upon CrossFit TPA, I had no concept of how many different ways the body can experience pain. Now, I find myself in the unfamiliar position of always hurting. I can count on one hand the days I've woken up and NOT felt sore after a WOD. At the beginning, I thought that once I got past my initial horrendous out-of-shapeness, the pain I experienced during and after a WOD would decrease.
Yeah. Right.
As it turns out, quite the opposite is true. I'm finally getting to the point where simply surviving the WOD isn't good enough anymore... I want to succeed at the WOD. The stronger I get, the more often I'm attempting the prescribed weight and trying to ditch some of the old modifications. This is a good thing; it means I'm improving and making progress. But it also means that I'm pushing my body harder, and, as a result, I'm experiencing all sorts of fun new varieties of pain.
The more in tune I become with my body, the better I am able to identify the many different kinds of pain that come along with being a CrossFitter. This awareness has allowed me to distinguish which kinds of pain come from what, and how to cope with them.
First, there's warm-up pain. This is the aching tightness during the morning's first set of air squats, or the protesting cracking of joints when I first hop onto the rower for my warm-up row. It's my body bitching about being put back to work... didn't we just do this?! I feel this kind of pain pretty much every morning for the first ten or so minutes of my warm-up exercises, and sometimes even through the first few reps of the WOD. The solution to warm-up pain? Simple: warm up. Stretch. Throw in a few extra air squats in the warm up until your legs stop hating you. Tell your body to suck it up... it will feel better once it gets moving. So just get moving already.
Then there's the pain you feel early-to-mid-WOD, when you're finishing round 2 of 5, or are 8 minutes into your 20-minute AMRAP, and you have a "holy shit I'm not even halfway done and I'm already DYING!" moment... wait, no? Nobody else? Okay, well, I always have that almost-mid-WOD panic attack, at which point I notice a generalized pain that I'm convinced is more mental than physical. It usually only lasts for a moment, then I'm able to refocus, tune out the clock, and push on through my workout. But I almost always have a few seconds somewhere early on during which everything just feels achy and weak. The solution to this kind of pain is a swift attitude adjustment. As soon as I am able to get out of my head and focus on the task at hand, I'm good to go.
Another type of pain with which I think all CrossFitters are all too familiar: it's what I like to call Last Round Pain. It's the burning, shooting, brutal sensation when you are trying to push through your final round, despite the fact that your muscles are SCREAMING at you that they simply can't handle one more single rep. It's when your arms and/or legs are literally shaking from the effort of the WOD; when the fatigue that has been creeping up behind you over the past few rounds finally catches up with you and sucker punches you with 90 seconds left to go. It's the agony you feel when your body is at its breaking point, and you keep on going anyways. The internal struggle between your body wanting to quit and your mind wanting to finish strong is, for me, what CrossFit is all about. Whether you let your body win and just let the clock wind down, or you force yourself to bust through that last painful round... that's what makes or breaks a WOD. So the solution to Last Round Pain is obvious: PUSH THROUGH. Get those reps in. Push yourself. Ignore your screaming muscles. You can do anything for 90 seconds... just keep going. A minute and a half of pain is so much less crappy than feeling discouraged all day because you bitched out at the end of your WOD. Pain is just a sign that you're doing it right. So keep doin' it!
Of course, there's also superficial mid-WOD pain... the pain you feel when you scrape the shit out of your shins with the dead lift bar, bruise the hell out of your forearms with a kettlebell during Turkish get-ups, or when a callous rips off of your hand mid-pull-up, leaving a gaping bloody hole in the flesh of your palm. (This happened to me for the first time EVER this week... it was glorious. I felt like a real CrossFitter at last.) Scabs, scars, and bruises happen at the box. And sometimes they hurt. The solution: suck it up and wear that shit like a badge of honor. Battle scars are badass.
Then there's legit injury pain. I've only experienced this once at the box: when I was going for my dead lift max and let my form slip. It happened so fast that I barely even had time to register what was going on; as soon as I went for it, I felt a sharp, stabbing pain in my low back, like something had popped out of place and stayed there. I tried to work through it and complete the WOD, but the more I did, the more it hurt. Tammy, always the voice of reason, stopped me about halfway through and sent me to a quiet corner of the box to pout with a foam roller. At the time, I was more distraught about having to write my first "DNF" in my WOD book than I was about the injury itself... but the following morning, when the pain was worse and my range of motion was terribly compromised, I began to worry that I might have done some serious damage by not listening to my body and stopping immediately after the injury occurred. What if I had really hurt myself and had to miss days or even weeks worth of WODs, all because I was too stupid and stubborn to give up on one WOD? Fortunately, I took the weekend off, and was able to work through the back pain the following week with no long-term effects. However, I definitely learned my lesson about dealing with injury pain: STOP. Be smart. One DNF is a hell of a lot better than a month off with a back injury. This is the one kind of pain you shouldn't try to push through.
Last but not least is the kind of pain that has essentially taken over my life: post-WOD soreness. It's the nagging ache that starts to set in a few hours after the WOD ends, and progressively escalates throughout the day until you wake up the next morning feeling like a 90-year-old woman. It's reaching up to a cabinet for the cereal box and realizing that it hurts to lift your arm over your head. It's squatting down to pick something up and feeling every single thruster from the morning's ass-kicker of a WOD. It's noticing little aches and pains with every movement and every action... a constant reminder of how hard you worked and how much your body hates you for it. Call me a freak... but I absolutely love this kind of pain. I love feeling sore after a brutal workout. It makes me feel like I've accomplished something; the worse the day-after soreness, the better the WOD must have been. After so many years of waking up and hating what I saw in the mirror, there is no better feeling than to crawl out of bed, hobble to the bathroom like a cripple, look in the mirror, and think, "I feel like walking death. But I look awesome!" So worth it. The more it hurts, the better I feel. The solution to post-WOD pain: return to box. Turn it into warm-up pain. Repeat process. Feel badass.
CrossFit and pain are kind of synonymous. The more time I spend at the box, the more true this statement becomes. It never stops hurting. In fact, it just hurts worse. But I welcome the pain. With pain comes change, and progress, and improvement, and strength. RXing my WOD today even though it contained dreaded overhead squats... that hurt. But you know what? I couldn't have done it a month ago, or maybe even a week ago. And as I lay here on my couch, covered from neck to knees in ice packs and eating Ibuprofen like candy, I wouldn't trade this pain for anything. I earned it. I'm proud of it. And I want to enjoy every agonizing second of it.
Before I sign off for the evening to cheer on the Pens (is anyone else BEYOND STOKED to once again be able to say, "It's a HOCKEY NIGHT IN PITTSBURGH!!!"?), I feel the need to share this morning's small victory with the blogosphere, because I don't think most of my real life friends would appreciate it. So, you've all read my endless bitching about my ongoing failure with pull ups. Even with the biggest black band, I've never been able to do good ones. I just suck at them. So I was less than excited to walk into the box this morning and see that our pre-WOD skill practice for the day was none other than the dreaded pull up. It didn't help that I was the only girl in a group of beastly strong men who all do pull ups like normal people breathe, so Tammy's full attention was on me... no cheating, no slacking. I was even less excited when I tried to set up my box and trusty black band, and Tammy immediately took them away. Whaaaat? No black band? The flimsy little green band she handed me might as well have been dental floss, as far as I was concerned... no way, no how. But Tammy told me to just work on beat swings, to get used to the smaller band and work on activating my shoulders and core. So I did as she instructed, and after flailing around awkwardly for a few minutes, I managed to get into a rhythm and get in a string of respectable beat swings. So I decided, what the hell? Might as well give this a shot... and I'll be damned if I didn't swing myself right up into my first ever good pull up! I couldn't believe it. I literally almost peed myself with shock and excitement. Granted, it was still with a band, and I definitely couldn't have done several in a row... but I did it, no black band, no box. It might not sound like much, but for me, it was a glorious victory of epic proportions. I tried a few more times, and, using the beat swings to get my momentum, I was able to do two more pull ups with just the green band. And it... felt... AMAZING! And you know what? I probably would have kept on using the black band forever if Tammy hadn't had more faith in me than I had in myself. Sometimes a little faith is just what a person needs to break through their walls, and I'm incredibly thankful to have coaches who believe in me and encourage me to believe in myself. This was the first day that I've seen significant progress in my pull ups, and it gave me some hope that someday, I might actually achieve my goal of getting unassisted pull ups. And sometimes, a little bit of hope is all a girl needs to... wait for it...
So, that's the plan. Work hard. Practice more. Hurt more. Get pull ups. Do epic shit. It's amazing how something as small as switching to a smaller band can totally renew my determination and drive. I'm so ready to get back to the box tomorrow and have my ass kicked in the best possible way. Progress is empowering, my friends... and I'm planning on putting that power to good use. Bring on the pain!
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