The Sweet Pain

Elite performance in CrossFit requires a state of mind, the ability to enter place where your relationship with pain and discomfort mingle amongst conflicting feelings of fear, excitement, exhilaration, pleasure, and addiction. You can't ignore the pain ... if you can you aren't working hard enough. You can't enjoy the pain, not in any healthy way. As your vision blurs and you taste your lunch in the back of your throat, you are not enjoying yourself.



"What's in the Box?"
"Pain."


There was a great article that explored this on the CF Affiliate page that is worth a read.

There is something nuanced at work. You fear the pain but you can't let your fear control you. You don't ignore it, you acknowledge it's presence and stare at it. It doesn't pass around you it passes through you. Lance Armstrong called this the "Sweet Pain." It's a way to be in touch with your body on a very intimate basis and that is the pleasure. To know your body, to know yourself.





I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.

This is the pleasure we discuss. The pain is vicious but it lays us bare. Scream, grunt, cry, puke, expose feelings and abilities you never knew you had until the pain uncovered it. Stripped of pretension and superficiality, only the true you remains.

I don't care what a great number of the CrossFit community think about extreme endurance athletes. I still think Lance Armstrong is one cool dude. He wasn't a CrossFitter, so many will dismiss his accomplishments as those of a freak operating on the margins of the fitness spectrum. But I would venture a prediction: if he WERE a CrossFitter, he would be a monster.