That is, I pretend that I’m not competitive when I can’t compete, which is, like, all the time at CrossFit. But I am, in my head, competitive. Sometimes.
Last week, we were supposed to find our new one-rep max for dead-lifts. No way I’m as strong as a couple of my girlfriends, but I hit 248 that day, and I was really proud of myself, first because it was a 35-lb. personal record, and second because my form was really good up through 243. Two forty-eight was ugly, but it still counts.
Usually for all matters CrossFit, I comment on the CrossFit Durham site or Facebook page, but that night, I posted on my own wall:
I feel like even my non-CrossFit friends should know that I dead-lifted 248 pounds tonight.
Status was Liked. Props were conveyed. Yay, me.
But one comment made me go into full-on Ivan Drago mode. It was from my cousin, who said:
Nice work! I did 200 lbs a couple months ago. Not sure what I am at now since I couldn’t go today.
This particular cousin is six months younger than me. We rarely, if ever, see each other these days because she lives on the other side of the country, but we grew up as summertime besties at Grandma‘s house.
And I was always ferociously jealous of her.
She was beautiful and vibrant. Flawless skin. Body that could stop traffic. She laughed at everything, all the time, including herself (something I’ve had to work very hard to learn). Her family went on cruises. Her clothes were just about the coolest, not that I could borrow any of them because I was always half again as large as she was. She grew up, got married, had two ridiculously cute children, and is now a total MILF who goes on Mexican vacations with her hot husband. Both of them do CrossFit out on the west coast.
Now, back up a second: a month ago, the Universe offered me a particularly jarring lesson about being jealous of people. A 40-year-old acquaintance who still got carded when buying beer and her husband who, in a friend’s words, was so handsome you could hardly look at him, well, he committed suicide, and now she gets to raise two kids, one of them with special needs, on her own.
So intellectually I realize that You Just Don’t Know About People, ergo You Shouldn’t Be Jealous, but when my cousin posted that comment, I just thought, “No. You get everything else. You don’t get this one.”
And I immediately started planning my next trip to the gym and my workout regimen because I was not—was not—going to let her dead-lift more than me.
The problem is that there’s no such thing as healthy competition in my disordered brain, and it went, in about six seconds, from “work on dead-lifts” to “eat paleo and lift every day and lose 50 pounds” to “shove Peanut M&Ms in face at kitchen counter”.
A little later, I realized that this competition (a) was decades-old, (b) lived entirely in the real estate of my crazy-ass brain, nowhere else, and (c) made me feel bad.
This is the part of the story where I tell you that this realization lifted a weight off my shoulders. Changed my life’s paradigm. Set me free.
Would that it were. Nope. I’m still petty and shallow and jaundiced.