Ok so you may have been wondering where I have
been lately. Well, to be honest, so have I.
I was enjoying my ”time off” from
training a lot. Like, A LOT. Too much perhaps. And despite my best intentions
of exercising everyday, that old voice was back in my head louder than ever. You
know the one – the one that’s so good at coming up with excuses NOT to run or exercise that you can’t help but abide it.
So at first, when I was contemplating going for a run after the marathon I
found the voice telling me, "you really deserve a rest". Not so long after it would say, "you should
really have a burger and beer, you’ve earned it". And before I knew it, 3 months
after running the Jungfrau Marathon the voice was somehow convincing me that I
deserved extra calories, beer, and loads of recovery time. That’s what the
voice will do to ya!
Truth be told my friends, I had well and truly fallen off
the fitness wagon.
So it took a while of gradually convincing
myself that I was still a runner and, despite an extra couple of kilos, cold
weather and increased levels of laziness, I could still do "it". "It" meant a
number of things: go for a run at lunch, do some burpees in the morning, or get
back into yoga. Regardless of what "it" was, I knew I had to get back into "it" and fast.
That’s when my old friends at Hillskeeker
Crossfit reached out to me. I guess they realised I had been off the radar for a
while and wondered what I had been up to. The truth was, I had done a whole lot
of eating and resting and not much else. So they invited me to take part in the
Warrior Challenge: a 5-hour series of outdoor activities featuring both
physical and mental challenges. Was I interested? Hell yes!
The Warrior Challenge took place in what I
can only describe as a blizzard. There were activities that challenged every
aspect of the athlete: physical, endurance and mental.
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| Carrying heavy stuff far - and this was only the beginning... |
We were wet, cold and
tired, but something kept us going.
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| Bear crawl up the hill, log roll down the hill. And repeat. |
After having been in the snow, wet and cold
for 4 hours we were being shown the last, and toughest, bit of the challenge:
an obstacle course that we had to complete, in teams of 4, carrying logs and
people on stretchers.
It was at this point I really wanted to give up. I had
had enough. I was wet, cold, hungry, and exhausted both physically and
mentally. I was actually thinking to myself, "how do I get out of this? Do I
say I have a train to catch? Or would it require something even more dramatic –
like a twisted ankle, perhaps?". Not because I didn’t want to do it, but because
I felt I simply couldn’t do it. The fear of holding my team back and letting everyone down was what scared me
more than anything. I convinced myself I was giving up for them, not for me. I let the fear grip me for about 10 minutes.
Then got a hold of myself, told myself to MAN UP and get on with it. And I did.
 |
| Carrying a log through an obstacle course. |
We weren’t first, but we weren’t last. I was muddy, frozen solid, exhausted
beyond anything I thought possible, and victorious. It was awesome.
 |
| Carrying heavy logs makes me pull attractive faces like this. |
Once again I had pushed through the barrier to
see that the only person stopping me was myself. No, I wasn’t the fastest. No,
I wasn’t the strongest. But I didn’t give up. I refused to let that voice in my
head that was telling me to just go home, get warm, put my feet up and eat some
cheese, defeat me.
I was back on the fitness wagon my friends.
JenFrau is back.
*photos courtesy of Hillseeker Crossfit
