When the Race is Against Myself.

I love competition. It makes working out fun, it makes long days at work shorter, it’s a confidence booster when you succeed, and it’s a great way to make improvements when you don’t. But my problem has always been, what to do when my only competition is me.

This morning I took my friend Lindsey’s Flywheel class. One of my favorite things about Flywheel is the races. Two or three times every class the instructor throws on the board, and for a minute we all compete against each other. Today, my name wasn’t on the board, and I noticed something… I pushed myself A LOT less. And this was not only during the race, it was the whole time. Knowing that no one else would see my numbers, made me push less. The funny thing is, I knew the whole time that I was doing it, and I didn’t change my mentality. I easily could have told myself to switch my mindset, but it seemed so simple to me: not on the board, hold back.

So this got me thinking, what can I do to compete with myself, to push myself when no one is around? This feeds into my running too. When I run with someone I’ll push my pace up to an 8:30 mile, and when I’m alone it’s usually around 9:00. This is something I need to fix, after all, I’m not doing this for anyone else but me! So why should I be so reliant on others for competition, I should compete with me.

I kind of think this need for competition goes back to the fact that the times in my life when I was most in shape prior to this were when I was on a team. In high school and college I was in great shape from Colorguard (more about that here) and prior to that I was a dancer. Other then having those two highly competitive activities in my life, I never went out of my way to exercise. Maybe if i had been someone who always exercised or who took up going to the gym in college it would be different, but here I am, craving competition to promote success.

As 2013 comes to a close and a new year begins I think it is going to be very important for me to find new ways to compete with myself. Things like pushing race times, trying to improve my flywheel numbers, among other things will have to motivate me. As I’m writing this, I’m thinking that maybe it would be good if I didn’t put myself on the board at flywheel for the entire month of December and try to get my best numbers to date. 312 is my best number at flywheel to this point. I will check in at the end of December to let you know if I beat it! There’s also another number that I be been wanting to reach in December, something I promised myself I would try to accomplish a while ago, and it includes the 6 mile loop in Central Park. I talked about this goal in my second post back in September.

There we go, two reasons to compete with myself, two huge goals to achieve in December. Look for the check in about all of these goals by the end of the month!

Crystal

@Fitcrys

#FITJ