Everyone has good days and bad days. Every once in a while one of those bad days will affect your workout and things won’t go the way you want or think they should. Weight may be heavier than it usually is or a run may be slower than you expected. This happens to everyone and you can’t always help it. So what do you do when you don’t hit a PR you felt you could have?
There are several paths open to everyone. Probably one of the most prevalent ways to deal with a bad WOD is with self-doubt and self-pity. All of the sudden if you don’t hit that flying Fran you were expecting, you start wondering if your as fit as you thought. You can also spend your time complaining about how bad that WOD was. You can even let it ruin your week.This can be incredibly detrimental to anyone participating in the kind of activities that we as CrossFitters engage in everyday. If you let that doubt start to creep in, the next time you walk up to a heavy barbell suddenly your not sure if you can lift it and then you don’t. This can snowball into a really hard to time to stay motivated and stay after it in the gym. In case you can’t tell this is not the best way to deal with these kinds of hurdles?
The other way is to simply accept that it was ONE bad WOD.Not much can be done by crying about the past. The past is the past and i haven’t seen any time travel vacations yet so its not changing. These workouts, while they all work together to accomplish the goal of GPP(General Physical Preparedness for the new mothers out there), are singular events that are independent of one and other. Just because you do badly on one does not make you a bad CrossFitter nor does it mean you will do badly on others.So from there you should find out why these things happened.?Maybe the slept you got the night before left you a little bit more tired than you would have, Maybe the things you ate the night before didn’t give you the fuel you needed. Those reasons should not be used as excuses. Once you can recognize what is affecting your performance you can fix it. If you realize that you feel really tired then maybe you should consider getting more sleep or not eating so close to bedtime. You guys are high performance machines and all run differently. If you are trying to fine tune the way you perform best ask a coach for some advice. As coaches we are here to help you get the most out of CrossFit and life. Have you ever had a bad WOD? Did you let it ruin your week?
-Chris aka TI
Amy working on box jumps! Click here to check out more pics on Flickr!
