Man Meets Goat

The following is a guest post from Courtney Rozen, a former co-worker and dear friend. She has transformed her life over the last few years thanks to a strong commitment to her health and wellness.

Courntey inspires others daily as a Weight Watchers leader and as a cardio and strength instructor in Binghamton, New York.

Picture it – May 2011, the spring wind blowing, a morning rain hitting my face, feet pounding the pavement and the beat of a song making me move one step closer, one step faster to finish my first half marathon.

That was a day I would never forget. I made it; I completed a goal I set out to do.

I cried and cheered along with my friends that “Wow! We just ran 13.1 miles”. I felt invincible!

If I could do a half, these other “little” races were cake. I went to run a 5K with my friends about a month or so after the half and I started out strong, feeling good, music moving me,” I got this” I said to myself.

The first mile came and went, “Okay, that’s nothing. Only 2 to go.” And suddenly it hit me: the panic, anxiety, the words “you cannot do this, you will never make it to the end.”

I walked about a half mile, then ran for a bit and then walked to the end. What had happened to me?

What had happened that I couldn’t complete a 5K especially after running a half marathon? I chalked it up to a bad day and said to myself, “There will be other races”.

The next 5K came and I volunteered to walk it with a friend who was not going to run the race but wanted to be a part of it.

The truth was I was too scared to run. There was no rhyme or reason for this, but my head saying “No”.

May 2012 came, the annual bridge run was upon us, and I didn’t do it. I never signed up. I never went because I had stopped running cold turkey – I just couldn’t.

My workouts were getting less, I was losing strength and endurance, my eating was spiraling and I was binge eating at night sometimes to the point where I would make myself sick. I was living a secret.

I was in a very dark place, yet to the world I was their shining star, motivating them to lose weight as a Weight Watchers leader and fitness instructor.

My clothes were getting smaller, and we know nothing feels right when your pants are too tight! I didn’t know what to do, until a road trip with my mom and a very long car ride home I admitted I needed help.

I told her I was too scared to run anymore and my fears had led to other bad habits, like secretly binging.

I said I don’t want to live this life like this anymore. I had lost 55 pounds and it was slowly coming back. I needed the strength to believe in myself again.

It was my turn to reach out and ask for the guidance that I gave to others. I called my friend and said “Please meet me at the park now and run with me.”

She was surprised by my call but she did. It was the hardest mile I had ever run. I wanted to literally puke after doing it, but it was a step in the right direction.

That night I went home and started a countdown chart I called “Taking back control.” I assigned myself minutes at the gym, and eventually added miles to my workouts.

I would cross them off as I accomplished each day.

It is now 455 days. While I still fight binge eating, I have not made myself sick. I just work out harder the next day or occupy my mind with writing in a journal or simply writing on my fitness page on Facebook.

In that time, I ran that May half marathon and beat my time by 1-minute! I did the Warrior Dash, a couple 5k’s, a 5-miler or two, and a 10-miler.

I have not let fear take over me, I have taken over fear by conquering it with “I can’s, I will, I have!” I am proud to say in 2014 I will run my first full marathon.

I did not ask anyone’s permission or conference with anyone about the decision. I just did it. I run for me and only me.

I love running with my friends in races and to just run and catch up. But this decision was something I needed to do alone to believe in myself, to challenge my abilities and to prove to myself you have come a long way baby!

The following is a guest post from Kalimba Edwards, a friend, athlete, firefighter and self proclaimed “everyday soccer mom”.

Her current goal is to attempt one competition every month in 2014. She regularly shares her adventures on her blog Aye Kalimba – the training, the people she meets, the highs and lows, and the lessons learned.

Each month, we will catch up with Kalimba to hear about her progress. This month Kalimba tells us about competing in the Freeze Fest Team Challenge.

This past Saturday, my brother, Josh, and I competed in our first partner CrossFit competition. Overall I was very happy with our performance.

Josh had little over a month to prepare and learned a variety of the movements in the week leading up to the event.

He did awesome and really was the driving force behind our team. At the end of the day we were 37th out of about 60 teams but I wasn’t concerned with the ranking at all.

We won in my eyes because we did 21 pull ups and that was no easy task for us. The lifting events went well, the endurance/conditioning events went okay, and he carried me 50 yards twice so yeah, pretty much badass.

He’s a great partner and having an event to train for makes those 5:30am workouts so much easier.

I also had a great time cheering and hanging with my friends from CrossFit Rigor and TwinTown CrossFit. They are a great group of people and would do 50 more burpee box jumps to joke around with all of them.

When the day came to an end, Josh said he was excited to do another competition soon and I’m game as long as we are partners again.

Will I do another individual CrossFit competition? Probably not anytime soon. I do love CrossFit, but I’d rather use it to train for other events.

Events like, hmmm, boxing. Yeah boxing. March 1st. Unite to Fight at Uppercut Gym. Time to get my Rocky Balboa on!

The following is a guest post from Michael Deem, a fellow athlete from my CrossFit gym who also recent;y competed in the Freeze Fest Team Challenge.

Michael was a rower for all four years of high school, attempted rowing in college, and quickly got distracted.

After more than four years of neglecting fitness, he’s relearning what it means to be an athlete.

For any regular reader of Man Meets Goat (or anyone who has stumbled upon on and been blown away by one of my guest posts—anyone?), you will know that I have competed before.

I became familiar with athletic competition in high school as a rower, but I never got comfortable with it.

I still distinctly remember and can feel the slow, uneasy curdles of nausea rolling through my stomach when I imagine myself lining up next to five other boats for a 1,500 meter sprint.

I didn’t know how much they had trained or where their pain thresholds were, but I knew mine.

And I knew we were about to find out definitively whose was higher and who was more willing to push theirs.

I am thrilled to report that the days, hours, and minutes leading up to the Freeze Fest Team Challenge and the individual events felt nothing like this.

Sure, I got a few butterflies in the warm-up area at the thought of walking out in front of the crowd to attempt a clean PR or to show my friends their first kipping pull-ups, but they immediately flew away when my partner and I took the platforms as the well-worn paths from countless hours of metabolic and strength training lit up in my brain.

My first take away from my first Crossfit competition is complete trust in the programming at my gym: Everything was manageable but challenging because the programming taught me how to challenge myself; and to be confident in my abilities.

With that new-found confidence, I recognize the need to push myself even harder in training, the need to go even further out of my comfort zone if I want to be even more competitive, if I want to push my athleticism even further.

Perhaps the biggest difference between partaking in and spectating at any athletic competition is your visibility to the correlation between work done in training and capacity for performance on the big day.

I need to constantly remind myself of that correlation as I train for my next competition (with Jeremy) in June.

I am particularly excited for this competition because it is an individual competition: just me and my ability – my willingness and preparedness to lay it all on the line.

I am so grateful for the opportunity to have a partner for my first athletic competition in over five years.

I am sure the nerves and nausea would have returned in full force had I been on the platforms alone. (Actually, I’m not even sure I would have signed up.) But now I am ready to enter the crucible of competition alone to see what I am made of alone.

Our head coach actually “never encourage[s] athletes in the gym to compete.” Not because he does not want them to, but because he wants them to work tirelessly at their fitness for themselves. Not for the gym, or a coach, or a trophy, or a team.

Not to beat another contender or arch rival. For themselves. However, he is elated when one of his athletes decides to compete because that athlete will invariably train harder. “The competition people work under pressure,” and you need pressure to make diamonds.

I am not doing Crossfit to compete. Rather, I will continue competing to discover why I am doing Crossfit.

If it was just to get and stay in shape, or just to make new friends in a new city, I could coast through class. I wouldn’t need to push myself. I wouldn’t hunger for the burn deep in my legs and lungs.

But I do. Perhaps I am just the kind of guy who needs to keep working towards something, like a shark, always moving forward or he dies.

The fire is still alive and I must quench it.