The Green Band.
Green has never been a good color for me. When thinking of green, I think of money. Money I don’t have. (Non-profit is known for making money, obviously) It even reminds me of the color of my shirt after a little kid I taught tennis threw up on me. (Man, I miss that shirt.) It’s also the color of jealousy. Jealous? Yes, I was green with envy at everyone not using a green band to do pull-ups at the box. The band I now needed. The band I promised myself I wouldn’t use again. The green-eyed monster was back and she was not happy.
Y’all, I went to CrossFit on Wednesday for the first time since surgery. It was the happiest I have been in months, but also the most frustrating. I couldn’t do much with my knee, but I did part of the workout. This part included fifty pull-ups.
Pull-ups frustrate me. It’s one of my favorite moves, even though I can’t seem to tackle it. One, I’m still learning kipping. But, in this process of learning kipping, I had moved up to the purple band. One away from no band at all.
Then after months off, the inevitable happens; I lose strength. Before beginning our workout of fifty pull-ups, I grabbed the red band. I knew it had been awhile, so I needed the extra support. I practiced one. When I mean practice, I attempted to lift my body with absolutely no luck. Fifty pull-ups? Not going to happen.
Defeated, I grabbed the blue band and waited for the time to start. I miss those timed workouts, the way your heart pounds so loud you swear people can hear it. It’s the same adrenaline I used to get from running a race. The same butterflies in my gut before the start of a tennis match. My type-A personality needs that adrenaline. I crave competition. Without it, I’m lost.
The time starts and I manage ten pull-ups in a row. Then muscle weakness, then failure. Wait, this is not supposed to happen yet. I’m on the RED BAND. Forty more of these are left. I jump off the box and stretch my arms to try again. Five more, okay, actually it was really only one more. No one would count those last four.
A guy at CrossFit once told me I looked like T-Rex when doing pull-ups. It wasn’t until this workout that I agreed with him. I did look like T-Rex. I knew if I straighten my arms and did a full chest to bar – I wouldn’t be able to go much longer or at all.
Frustrated, I jumped off the box. Josh, one of the CrossFit coaches, comes over to me to make sure I’m not overdoing it. I’m known for overdoing things.
“I lost all my strength, what happened?” I told him. Josh brushed my negativity aside and told me to get the green band.
The green band! The band I used the first day of CrossFit! Are you saying I lost it all? I started getting angry at myself. Maybe I should have done more strength in rehab, maybe I became lazy – my head was spinning.
Stop. I thought in my head. The new me doesn’t get defeated this easily. I’m only cheating myself with this attitude. Not doing the pull-up correctly was wrong. No one cares at CrossFit about your past or what you can’t do; it’s that you are trying your heart out and not giving up. If I didn’t do the workout correctly, I was giving up on myself.
Yes, it’s the green band. Yes, it’s disheartening to go back to where you started. But, I didn’t go back. The old Ash would push through doing T-Rex pull-ups –and not try to improve.
So I swallowed my pride, it’s a big pill to get down, and grabbed the green band. I finished the workout. I even managed to look like a human just coming back from surgery and not a dinosaur.
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