Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Sunday musings…

1) Illin’. This respiratory thing can go away any time now, thank you very much. Totally get what you’re feeling RW.

2) Breakable. We learn in our L1 seminars that CF is universally scalable. We talk about it here all the time. The good folks at Brand X give you 4 or 5 versions of each WOD published on .com every single day. And yet certain folks in all too predictable groups continue to get broken.

My brother-in-law was in town for about 14 hours to pick up my darling and altogether delightful niece at school. Great visit, but one that was tarnished by his tale of yet another injury which came from “too much” in his Box. It’s tragic, really, because Pete really loves CrossFit. He openly states that it’s the only thing in his 51 years that made him excited to exercise. Now despite his love for it he’s afraid to start up again.

Who’s to blame? Certainly Pete bears some responsibility because he admittedly can’t make himself throttle down during a WOD, and he has never insisted that he be slowly ramped up to having the ability to safely redline each WOD as Rx’d. Here’s where the coaches at his Box, especially the lead dogs, need to step in.

Lil’bingo has 3 or 4 guys just like Pete, mid-life men who are driven to perform, and a couple of them ended up “breaking”. The one who just crumbled under the intensity of the volume of even heavily scaled WOD’s was a pretty simple fix, especially since he realized his problem and brought it to his very young coaches. Scaling for him needed to include less volume, lengthening and flattening the steepness of his onramp to the highway of fitness.

The other client was just like Pete. He broke himself by redlining when he knew he shouldn’t/couldn’t. Here’s the difference, though. Lil’bingo’s client got smothered in coach attention after his injury because it was clear, and he admitted, that he was not to be trusted to protect himself. Injure yourself by not listening to or following advice? Shame on you. Do it twice though and at least some shame on your coach. That’s part of the beauty of a Box vs. just being on your own, the fact that a coach lives in the box.

The message here is to the coaches in the Box: the further away we are as athletes from the athletes you may be coaching to the Games the MORE attention we need. Job #1 is don’t break us. Job 1A is keep up from breaking ourselves.

3) Mom. It’s Mother’s Day in America. Mrs. bingo, mother to “The Heir”, “Lovely Daughter”, and “Lil’bingo” is astride her beloved Lyra, riding riding right in front of me as I type. They are a beautiful couple, all the more so because of the joy that springs from their mutual love and trust. Two very happy girls sharing their passion. Nothing in my life (except Mrs. bingo) makes me as happy as riding Lyra makes Beth happy.

A Mother’s Day gift was easy for me: make sure my girl got to ride her horse.

Other than that the gift that I will send to my Mom, and the one I’m hoping my kids will send to Mrs. bingo, is a simple expression of how wonderful it’s been to be her son. I’ll search my internal hard drive for a couple of happy memories and bring them up when I call her. I’ll make sure to let her know how lucky I am to still be the son of a Mom. In my case I’ll also gently tease her about how she can probably relax a bit on the need for ongoing parenting her son, but we’ll both know that dialing back on that is genetically impossible, another source I hope of happiness and smiles between us.

Unlike Father’s Day, a day that I’ve proposed should be spent in the active pursuit of fatherly stuff, Mother’s Day is quite reasonably a day to devote to whatever Mom might want just for Mom’s sake. Like an hour at the barn for Mrs. bingo, or an hour at the Box for anyone who shows up to the Open Gym I’ll run in a bit. And if Mom wants to do some Mom stuff today, well, we should all be as OK with that as we possibly can, at least for today.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you still fortunate enough to have a Mom to celebrate, like me, and the Clan bingo progeny. Tears and only the happiest of memories for those orphans of any age who must make do with only memories, again hopefully happy. Happy Mother’s Day to each and every Mom chez CrossFit, making the world a better place one MomWOD at a time, especially Shelly who will hover over “The Heir” for a couple of months. I hope you all get to do just exactly what you want all day!

Now, off to see what else will make Mrs. bingo smile! Happy Mother’s Day to my darling Beth.

I’ll see you next week…

Posted by bingo at May 11, 2014 7:22 AM