“This feels like a thousand pounds.”
The woman next to me in class actually said that yesterday, right in the middle of a 7-round mindfuck metcon. Somewhere in the haze of Round 3, I heard those defeatist words as I was struggling to come up from the bottom of a full snatch, after a round of power snatches, with some ring rows still to go. It was like she suddenly added 90 pounds to my bar, or hit the Boost button on Earth’s gravity.
“This feels like a thousand pounds.”
I almost committed manslaughter right then and there in the 6am, wearing my Lulus. Bloody barbell, shocked onlookers, jail time, and even worse: DNF on the WOD.
See, I don’t mind if you’re a defeatist. Be negative to yourself. It’s not good for you, but that’s your life. But when your downer words come into my brain in the middle of my struggle? Yeah, that’s when I want to go all Dexter on your whiny ass. Life is hard enough. There are weights on each of us that no one else can even see. Don’t add to my burden, and I’ll try to do the same for you.
On the good side, I didn’t kill that woman in class. It was just one rough moment from a gal who normally picks us all up when we’re down. She was just having a tough morning. So, I throttled back and said something really caring like “Shut up! I’m going to beat you! And I don’t mean beat you!” (Read that again, you’ll get it.) We all chuckled in the middle of our pain and life went on.
But she says it again and I’m going to need bail money.
