One round at a time.....

I found out late Thursday night that we would be doing "Murph" on Saturday at Crossfit Invictus, so after such a wonderful but exhausting week in Austin and my first ever attempt at "Murph" on deck, I decided to take Friday as a rest day and chill at home for the night. One of the movies I had to watch that night was the new "Hubble 3D" documentary; little did I know that this short film would be a source of inspiration and motivation for the weekend.

Let me explain. The baseline for the documentary follows one of the last crews that had to visit the Hubble in order to do repairs before the every day wear and tear became too much to cease function. Since they are were up there, they had some upgrades to install as well. Of course, I don't have to tell you that any of this was not an easy task and some of the documentary consisted of the interviews that they did with the astronaunts, describing afterwards what they had to do and the dangers they faced while this or that.

The way one of the astronaunts described a task really stuck with me, and it was just a great coincidence that I watched this the day before doing Murph. The astronaunt had to replace two mirrors within the Hubble, and in order to do this, he had to oh so carefully remove 20 tiny screws in an almost impossible way. When asked how he handled the stress of such a difficult task, he stated that he looked at each screw as it's own separate task and concentrated on just one screw at a time. As he was unscrewing the tiny pieces of metal, he wasn't thinking to himself how many he had done or how many he had left to do; he just conquered one screw at a time.

Going into Murph on Saturday, I had the same mentality and same line of thought when facing this monster workout. I had already decided that I was going to partition the WOD into Cindy; 20 rounds of 5/10/15 for the pull ups, push ups and squats. So once it was game time, I told myself I was not going to agonize and concentrate on how many rounds I had left throughout the work. After round 5, I wasn't going to think about how I still had 15 rounds left. I had a post-it note on the rack and pen near by and after each round, I did my tick mark on the paper for tracking purposes and then just moved on to the next round. I tried hard to think of each round as an individual task, just something that needed to be done. And when I was done with that one, I was just going to move on to the next, and not agonize over how much work I still had left to do. 5-10-15, done. Tick mark. Breath In, breath out. Repeat.

And for me, it worked. Before I knew it, I was finishing round 15 and still going strong. It's easy to get intimidated and even a little scared right before performing some of Crossfit's work outs; everyone is guilty at sometime or another of overanalyzing and overthinking a WOD, and over planning how they are going to tackle it. Sometimes it's better to just not think about it at all. Turn off your mind and just do it. Don't think, just lift. And sometimes when you do that, you'll find that the work out wasn't as bad as you thought it would be.