“Sometimes the bravest and most important thing you can do is just show up.”
– Brene Brown in her book Daring Greatly –
This season we hosted our second winter committed club. The idea of the committed club was to encourage our members to make their fitness a priority during two of the hardest months of the year. Between two major holidays, finals for students, changes in the weather, less daylight, end of year stresses at work and everything else going on in our members’ lives, November and December can get a person way off track whatever their goals might be.
Our mission here at Lincoln Nutrition and Fitness is to create a strong, healthy and brave community and from the quote above “the bravest and most important thing you can do is just show up,” the strong and healthy piece will follow.
Being a coach over the years I can attest to this showing up business. The athletes who consistently come to class have gotten stronger, developed better movement patterns, and have embraced a more positive mindset both in and out of the gym.
Well that all is pretty neat! As a coach I am definitely going to say all the good things about my athletes and community. What about me as an athlete…
I have been Coach Emily for 5ish years (half part-time and now full time) and Athlete Emily for almost 10 years… The committed club is a new club in our community in the last year, but the concept has been a part of my life for 10 years.
In life everything is bound to change in some form or another, jobs, partners, family, homes and beyond. The one constant in my life has been the opportunity to show up everyday and move my body. More often than not this has been in the form of a CrossFit class at Lincoln Nutrition and Fitness Home of CrossFit Lincoln (what a mouth full…let’s do LNF for short).
LNF over the last 10 years has provided me with:
- A positive and encouraging community
- A space for me to fail and get stronger
- Coaches who care about more than the weight on my bar
- Programmed warm ups and workouts
- Structure and stability for my day
Throughout the last ten years the gym and the community have definitely been through its fair share of transformations, but 1-5 has not changed.
Have I gone to class everyday for 10 years?… absolutely not! Just like everyone else things come up:
- Life gets busy
- I am not feeling it and am tired
- I go on vacation and get off my routine
- It’s the holidays and I should rest
- The workout looks awful
- I get sick or injured
To be honest this happens more often than I would like. When I stop going to class I notice a few things change in my life:
- Sleeping becomes a challenge
- I get Restless throughout the day
- Ice cream and pizza insert themselves in my daily life
- I get a short fuse with family and friends
- Less productive at work
- Naps and coffee are a midday must
- My confidence in what I do do goes down
- Insert a bunch more things here…
This winter’s committed club came at a perfect time. All those things above were much a part of my life and I had been dealing with an injury on top of it. I took some time to figure out what the heck I should do, what had helped in the past…GOING TO CLASS!!!
It may seem trivial, or even “of course you would say that you are a coach.” But again, I have been an athlete much longer! So starting in November I went to class 5-6 days a week. My one and only goal was to show up for class each day. It was a struggle. I wasn’t as fit as I was a year ago. I felt out of breath and weak. Some movements I had to scale because I was coming back from an injury. “Just go to class!”
When life feels a little off something is usually missing. Most likely your focus has drifted away from yourself and the things you enjoy toward non beneficial habits and routines. For me one of my anchor habits is fitness related. When fitness goes, so does everything else. To keep it simple, just showing up for class each day gets the job done!
The beauty of my journey as an athlete is now I understand how important it is to be brave and show up no matter what. As a coach I can try my best to pass this along to other members of our community and hope they show up for class and know when they do the rest of their day will be so much better!
Thanks for reading and see you in class,
Coach/Athlete Emily
