And so the journey begins…

When we embark on something grand, or are debating such an embarkation, the space of the endeavor can be overwhelming. There is so much room. Room to succeed, room to fail, room to totally fall on our ass. The question is: how do we define that space? How do we conceptualize that room to move? Is it as emptiness or as potential? Continue reading →

Oh, the rings…

Why are you here? I ask this of my students quite a bit. What forces brought you through that door and got you moving? Before I found my gym homes at Qi and Crossfit Verve the answer I got all to often from instructors was minimization. “Every squat you do gets that butt even tighter.” “Want those arms to stop a wavin’ – pick up those weights!” Yeah, sure we all want to look good naked (and in our snappy clothes too for that matter.) Affirmative. No questions asked. And not to toot my own horn, but I’m feeling pretty darn solid sans clothes of late. But here’s the thing, if we surround ourselves with those types of cues, if we let them become part of our own mantra, we orient our health around the concept of reduction. The problem with reduction: you can always get smaller. You can always get skinnier. And skinnier does not mean healthier, happier, or stronger. Continue reading →

Showed up to my USAW Olympic lifting cert this weekend carting one of these bad, and very green boys – add full lulu into the mix and being one of two women… feeling VERY girly. Owned it!

When we look back at our lives we remember pieces. Not a narrative, but little moments that have stuck into our consciousness. Our memories are filled with the good as well as the bad, but both are pieces that have changed us, that have transformed us into the person that we are at this very moment. And we are constantly filling our heads with moments that haven’t yet happened. We construct future narratives via imagined pieces. Through the ideas of what our life should look like in this future we have perfectly mapped and set before us. In this world full of moments, it seems the one we most neglect is the one we are in currently. In our mess of backwards and forwards reflecting and projecting, we lose the moment that perhaps matters the most, and we prevent ourselves from being genuine, physical, and tangible entities in our own lives. Through the absence of the present moment in our consciousness we lose our ground and we lose ourselves. Continue reading →

Sometimes you just have to test that edge…

Sprinting up a hill is a tricky thing to do in a spin class. Ignoring the fact that there actually isn’t a hill in the first place: irrelevant. What is tricky is that high resistance on a bike can easily be translated to going hard simply because it’s heavy. So it’s heavy. Freaking duh! It’s supposed to be heavy; you are theoretically climbing a monstrous hill here people. But is it just heavy? The question is: are you allowing that resistance to act on you, or are you acting on that resistance? Are you creating power, or are you succumbing to load? Continue reading →

A rather apt description of my general state of late…

How do you respond when you lose your footing? Sure, it’s easy to imagine that you’ll be cool calm and collected – or in my case, quite easy to imagine the opposite, and instead wait for the utter meltdown of my personal sanity to ensue… But either way, we often expect our reaction to crisis to be binary. We expect to flourish in the face of adversity or to flounder. We don’t necessarily expect to do both – especially not concurrently. But hey, we’re complicated beings here people. Of course our reaction to a sticky or generally un-fun scenario is going to be equally as complicated, and the thing is, we need to allow it to be so. Otherwise, we truly are setting ourselves up to fail. Continue reading →

A little Paleo feast (yep – that brownie is totally paleo legit) at mmm…COFFEE! on Santa Fe. Check out this caffeinated Paleo gem for sure! Great people and great food.

As trainers we continuously walk the line. How far do you ask our athletes to go? Do you drive them past control or do you keep them safely nestled within it? How much of themselves do you ask them to give? Or in the case of this last question, perhaps instead: how much of themselves do they trust you with to give? I am the first to admit that I like control. I like to be in control as an athlete and as a coach, and I like my athletes to feel in control at all times – almost. Continue reading →

I’m a serious prep-er. For reals. I like to glean all the information I can before I even think about embarking on some glorious venture. The problem with that life technique: I think I am some glorious ventures short. While preparation establishes the foundation for expansion, a preoccupation for the former can also stagnate the latter. To often I tell myself that I am not ready. In some cases: duh. Totally not ready for that business. Example: dog owning. Not nearly responsible enough, and have an odd aversion to picking up poop via a plastic bag – gross. But in other cases, I allow my lack of experience to excuse me from taking a risk. At some point we have to believe that we know what to do. We have to let go and trust that we’ve got this. Cause chances are – it might not be pretty – but we do. Continue reading →

Pretty much how I’ve been spending most of my time lately. AKA: gymnastics training!

Starting is terrifying. Like super freaking scary. Or rather, the moment right before the start, the instant before you commit – that is the truly terrifying part because it is in that moment that you need to make a decision: are you in or are you out? It was that instant I always dreaded when racing as a rower. All eight of you have your oars in the water and are just floating there (mind, you are floating in a boat a hair past a butt wide – you feel every fidget, every piece of nervous energy) waiting to hear the horn, and waiting for the race to unfold. On the one hand I would sit in my seat wishing that that stupid horn would never blow. Wishing that I could somehow be transported back to shore, back to a place where it didn’t feel like impending death and back to a place where I didn’t have 2000m of pain in front of me (well technically behind me if we’re being literal…) But on the other hand I would sit there, blade ready, willing that horn to blow so that I could dive into the experience – and also so that I could start kicking some serious butt. Duh. Continue reading →

We’re in it now, officially. 2013 has commenced. This is where sh*t gets interesting. The brief stint of frolicking blissfully into the unknown of the new year under the presumption of a clean slate has started to wear off a bit as the reality of the actual progression of a time begins to reestablish itself. January is always a curious month. It is grounded in a sense of newness and yet it is overlaid with the continuation of whatever came before it. It is a renegotiation of sorts. A reorientation of the person we are, the person we have established over the last year, and the person we aspire to become in the next one. If you have ever been to one of my classes, you will know that one of my favorite cues is: set the tone. You hear a lot of times in an athletic setting that it doesn’t matter how you start, it matters how you finish. Yeah, I guess I endorse that statement. Sort of. But to be honest, it matters to me how you start; how you progress; AND how you finish. I find those first two thirds rather crucial. It’s not that you have to start out like a rock star, but that you have to be willing to start. That you have to be willing to throw yourself into the process without totally knowing the outcome. That you have to be ready to struggle. And that you take the opportunity, the responsibility to set the tone, to establish how that business is going to go down, not just how it is going to finish. Continue reading →

Climbing trees in CA!

I acknowledge that this would be a very appropriate time to write a snappy New Years resolution piece. In fact, it would be the perfect time to do so – to have all of my NY resolutions wrapped up in a happy little bow, with a perfectly extrapolated message to boot. Love that theoretical blog post. Here’s the thing though, and I’ve tried to flirt around this fact in every one of the 800 drafts that came before this one, but when push comes to shove I get a little anxious about New Years resolutions because often people (I’m including myself in this broad statistic) just don’t follow through. Come January 1 it seems like everyone is making resolutions. Come February 1 – not so much. I resisted this blatant pessimism in my, ought to be peppy and uplifting, New Years post, because let’s be honest, not as warm and cuddly as the other options. Continue reading →