Life can be crazy sometimes! Some days we can be super inspired and other have zero motivation and an overwhelming sense of doom hangs over us. It’s what makes the good times good and the hard times hard, life has its ebs and flows.
Over the weekend I had two members who are kind of on the opposite end of each spectrum tell me there stories and both are REAL and EQUALLY inspiring in my honest opinion. One is a real life motivation YouTube Highlight reel of amazingness while the other is LIFE in its realest form of stress, being rundown and losing focus. It’s actually really neat that these were both given to me this weekend!
Let’s start with the Highlight Reel. Jamie came to me on his 45th Birthday at 203 pounds wanting to make a change, he needed to lose fat, gain muscle, strength and endurance because he wanted to run his 2nd marathon of the year and make it his best ever!
Jamie signed up for his first 6 week challenge and got amazing results losing 10 pounds of fat and gaining a pound of muscle, he felt stronger, lighter and more motivated than ever to run this marathon, he felt so good that he signed up for another 6 week challenge just a week later. (he also told me he couldn’t believe how cheap it was, I really like this guy)
Another 6 weeks of hard training and proper nutrition go by and his runs getting harder and longer and Jamie lost another 11 pounds of fat! Getting down to 183 pounds for his Marathon looking lean and mean. He really put in the work on both his nutrition and training. It was my pleasure to guide and coach a long the way.
Jamie ran a 3:34 Marathon on Sunday, a whole 18 MINUTES faster then his last time in February, his best ever! Coming 48th overall! At the age of 45. I’m so proud of how he did and what he achieved, it really made my day!
Ok so life is not always butterflies and marathon PR’s, more often than not it’s high stress and testing times. Carolina has been coming to the gym for a while now and recently we had been working on her nutrition with awesome results but life happens and having 2 kids, a crazy husband named Mark 😉 (Mark is an awesome guy and a staple at our 6am class), a job, and selling your home and moving to a new build can be quite stressful. I’ll let Carolina tell her story.
“I fell off the wagon. The nutritional wagon that is. I felt its affects and I now know the impact it has on my well being and ability to function at my full potential. I made a commitment when I started Crossfit in May 2018 that I would get into the gym no less than 3 times/week. I have been so good at sticking to this and as I’ve gone through this year and a bit other things have become apparent….sleeping is important for your recovery, and nutrition is also VERY important. Two things I feel I should have known but it just never really dawned on me. Over the past summer I decided that I was tired of feeling exhausted all the time. I always felt like I was in a fog and even though I was now working out and getting better…something was missing…NUTRITION. Eating and nourishing my body. It really happened from one day to the next that I realized…I was starving my body. I reached out to Dan and he gave me a nutrition plan. I started following it and low and behold….I no longer felt as drained or foggy; BUT I didn’t realize this, until life happened and things got hard. I was ( and continue to be) so busy at work, at home, with the kids, juggling schedules, and THEN we sold our house and moved and it all went to hell. I started skipping meals and eating easy carbs here and there…because I was so busy and so overwhelmed and it was easy and I didn’t have to think about it…or prep or anything. In less than two weeks I felt weak, low energy and in a perpetual state of feeling hung over….except I wasn’t drinking alcohol. It took less than two weeks to go back to feeling like crap. This not only had an impact on me physically but also mentally. I felt like I was walking on a tight rope and would soon fall over. I lost my ability to take charge and take control. It is so hard to walk the talk when life happens, but I recognize now when things get hard it is even more important to take care of yourself. Nutrition, for me, is more of a challenge than actually working out and it is a challenge that I will have to continue to work on and make a concerted effort to be better about it.” – Carolina
Now this circumstance stinks and sucks but it’s amazing at the same time because in these types of hardships in life we learn and we GROW as human beings and guess what Carolina is going to come out of it stronger as she starts to re-nourish and eat more healthy foods again her energy will come back and she will start to feel better and better and I’m so glad she reached out during this time so we could do this together. See life isn’t about what happens during the rough spots it’s about how we return and become stronger because of them. Without us breaking down muscle it will never grow into something bigger and stronger, we’re they exact same way. I’m so proud of what Carolina has accomplished here and what she’s going to do in the future!
-Coach Dan