The Pressure Might Be Getting To Me

I'm about 4 weeks away from my meet. 
Missing workouts is completely counterproductive to my progress at this point - more so than normal as I now have a sort of "due date."
Eating over my allowed calories is unnervingly counterproductive to my goal of making my weight class, and the pressure to stay at or under maintenance is much greater the closer the meet gets.

I'm trying to approach this meat as leisurely as possible since I don't realistically expect to do well in any capacity. I'm using it more as a learning experience and to satisfy my competitive side. If it's fun, I'll continue. If it's not, this will be my first and my last meet. Either way really is fine with me. But no matter how nonchalantly I tell myself I'm going into the competition, the fact of the matter is that it's a competition, and I love to compete. I also love to succeed. (I'm still unsure how success will be defined for me in this meet.)

If I don't make my weight class my chances of succeeding immediately take a huge dip. If I skip workouts, fail lifts, or screw up my prep in the week before the meet my chances of doing well will suffer as well. But, you know what? This is all part of the experience for me. This is what I wanted; to see what it's like to compete. Well, here it is.

It's a huge mental challenge.
It's definitely messing with me. 
I'm the kind of person who doesn't do well with deadlines and "you can't have that," or "you have to do this." As soon as I tell myself I can or can't, I immediately want the opposite. Oh, you mean I absolutely can't eat above maintenance until the meet? The next thing I know I've blown over my calorie max for the last 5 days. I can't skip today's workout, it's written for today for a reason! Suddenly that day's workout is wayyyyyyy on the back burner, and I can't seem to make myself want to. 

It's definitely frustrating, and the worst part is KNOWING exactly what I'm doing. It would seem as though the more I understand about my responses the easier it would be to control them, but unfortunately, that has not become a truth for me yet. So, instead, I remind myself that I have goals to meet and that those goals happen to have deadlines this time. Then I watch myself actively take huge steps away from those goals, and I feel pretty powerless to stop it. Very frustrating.

But there is good news... 

Today was shaping up to be a pretty terrible one. If you were to follow my posts on facebook or instagram you might not even believe the reality of my day today, because social media is so much like a highlight reel of my life. But here's how things really went... today was a snow day, work was closed, and I slept until 1:00 pm. I reluctantly woke up, thought about everything I had to do today (laundry, dishes, shovel, workout, etc.), and collapsed on the couch. I barely motivated myself enough to get up and make food three different times, and on each occasion ate until my stomach literally was throbbing. I fell asleep twice before 6:00 pm while watching TV. Then, around 7:30 pm I felt so disgusting I had to do something about it. Too many of my recent days had looked something similar to this... lounging around, napping, sleeping late, going to bed early, doing nothing productive. It's gross. Plain and simple. So I finally got up and showered. I did all the dishes, finished up the laundry, and went out to shovel. I'm not gonna lie, 45 minutes into shoveling when I was only about half way done I considered quitting. But I didn't. I finished shoveling the entire driveway, and then I went to the gym. I finally got there around 9:45 pm, and I did it. I did the thing.

Honestly, the rest of my day doesn't matter. I can either choose to dwell on it and be disgusted with myself, or I can choose to focus on the fact that I got up and did something about it. I hit a major rep PR on squats today of 190 x 3.5 (I failed the 4th rep). THAT'S what I should be focusing on, and that's what I will focus on. 

I'm always going to have bad days and good ones. The past few weeks have been wrought with bad days, but that's okay. I'll have good days again, and tonight was a great start. :)