Overcoming the Mountain
I'm sure you've heard that quote "When you feel like giving up, remember why you held on for so long in the first place." And,so, the question I've been asking myself lately is "Why did you do it? Why did you stay if this doesn't make you happy? And if it did make you happy, what changed?" And the honest answer may be "because I was doing it for someone else."
There were such few things that I was naturally good at that when I found them, I clung to them with a passion. I think I may have actually stayed in powerlifting to impress a guy (y i k e s). But powerlifting had been good for me. With this sport, I had learned to cultivate discipline. I was working 20 hours a week, took 15 hours worth of classes, was an officer for a professional organization, and still had to find time to study, sleep, and go to the gym. I learned to wake up at 8am on the weekends to finish all my assignments due for the week and study ahead of time for exams I had (actually, this paid off really well...I actually learned the material and didn't have to stress out or cram the night of the exam and started getting high grades in subjects I'd always done poorly in). More importantly, I learned to do my work first at work and then work on homework because I knew I wouldn't once I went home. Then, I would take a short nap and go to the gym. Sometimes, if I had to, I would take my homework with me to the gym. And I definitely had the results to show for it. I was so fucking determined that even after ending up in the ER in November, just two weeks before my next meet, I still managed to win that meet. But that in itself was a terrible low for me. I had worked so hard to come back from that disastrous last cycle that ending up in the ER robbed of all my strength struck me hard. It took me a full week to be able to eat solid food again and 1.5 weeks before I could set foot in the gym again. Naturally, I missed all of peaking. And I cannot tell you how much it sucks to head into a meet that all of your closest friends and family have turned up for, hear "Riti Santra, Texas A&M, All-American, Collegiate National Champion, and Southern Regionals Champion" and miss a lift you've never missed before because you physically didn't have that strength in you. Coming back from that was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do because I had to retrain my body to compete at a lower weight, start a completely new diet and lift on less calories, and come to terms with the fact that I could be dealing with IBS for an indefinite amount of time because the doctors didn't actually know what was wrong with me. But still, I persevered.
When the same problems hit me that I dealt with the last cycle, I stepped up to the plate. I took the lower weight with humility and regained confidence as I lifted with lower weight than I warmed up with. When I realized that I was squatting sideways, I did all the hip exercises my coach gave me and started warming up for a full hour before I started until I was squatting normally again. And when my deadlifts, my pride and joy, fell apart, I took the lower weight, and worked on form and patience till I worked my way back up to my regular weight. But my proudest accomplishment to date has been switching to hook grip. Hook grip is difficult for most lifters to lift with because it entails deadening the nerves in your thumbs in order to be able to grip it with two fingers. As a tiny lifter, obviously I struggled with it the most because my hands barely wrapped around the bar. But my coach told me that I had to make a choice with which group to use and that there was no going back. So, I took a deep breath and decided to commit to hook grip and was actually surprised by how well I did. In one day, I jumped from 175 to 245 with hook grip, despite not even being able to lift past 150lb with that grip the previous summer. And in six or seven weeks, ya girl deadlifted 290 with hook grip while fatigued and sore :') Also, I learned to lift conventional, too! Even though that process was truly painful and there were some weeks that went worse than others, I learned to pull conventional and even got up to 245 when I'd never been able to do higher than 155 previously.
So, maybe my reasons for pursuing powerlifting weren't completely inane. As Maltz once said, as humans we're only truly happy when we're chasing a goal, when we have a greater sense of purpose that we're trying to accomplish. And when we don't have something we're trying to attain, we feel lost and hopeless. I think you'd agree that that's true. We feel happy and a sense of pride when we set goals and then set off to achieve them, hitting obstacles and overcoming them along the way. Why? Because this increases our self-esteem and self-confidence. We accept whatever is coming our way because we know that we'll be able to rise to whatever the occasion warrants and face adversity head-on. Instead of running from obstacles, we rise to the challenge and find with surprise that we CAN actually conquer whatever seeks to defeat us. When we rise to the challenge, we forget to be fearful because we choose to embrace the uncertainty of the outcome we face and innately understand that no matter what the outcome may be, we will see it through.
So maybe it didn't matter that I hadn't had a reason to start powerlifting when I did. Maybe it was more important that I had stuck with it because I felt like it helped to bring out the best in me, because it made me feel unstoppable every time I overcame a weight I thought I'd never be able to, and because you can't fully love and accept yourself until you faced adversity and chased after your dreams. And, honestly, I feel like that's the purpose of life as well. Why do they say that happiness is what we should all aspire to? Because when we're truly happy and accept ourselves, then we know that we have finally come into our own and have lived life the way it was meant to be lived. We have experienced the most unthinkable (both good and bad) situations because they were in line with OUR goals. We understand that our self-worth comes from the fact that we are all children of God and therefore have heavenly light within us, not that we have to go out and achieve arbitrary distinctions of success so that others can be in admiration and awe of us.
There were such few things that I was naturally good at that when I found them, I clung to them with a passion. I think I may have actually stayed in powerlifting to impress a guy (y i k e s). But powerlifting had been good for me. With this sport, I had learned to cultivate discipline. I was working 20 hours a week, took 15 hours worth of classes, was an officer for a professional organization, and still had to find time to study, sleep, and go to the gym. I learned to wake up at 8am on the weekends to finish all my assignments due for the week and study ahead of time for exams I had (actually, this paid off really well...I actually learned the material and didn't have to stress out or cram the night of the exam and started getting high grades in subjects I'd always done poorly in). More importantly, I learned to do my work first at work and then work on homework because I knew I wouldn't once I went home. Then, I would take a short nap and go to the gym. Sometimes, if I had to, I would take my homework with me to the gym. And I definitely had the results to show for it. I was so fucking determined that even after ending up in the ER in November, just two weeks before my next meet, I still managed to win that meet. But that in itself was a terrible low for me. I had worked so hard to come back from that disastrous last cycle that ending up in the ER robbed of all my strength struck me hard. It took me a full week to be able to eat solid food again and 1.5 weeks before I could set foot in the gym again. Naturally, I missed all of peaking. And I cannot tell you how much it sucks to head into a meet that all of your closest friends and family have turned up for, hear "Riti Santra, Texas A&M, All-American, Collegiate National Champion, and Southern Regionals Champion" and miss a lift you've never missed before because you physically didn't have that strength in you. Coming back from that was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do because I had to retrain my body to compete at a lower weight, start a completely new diet and lift on less calories, and come to terms with the fact that I could be dealing with IBS for an indefinite amount of time because the doctors didn't actually know what was wrong with me. But still, I persevered.
When the same problems hit me that I dealt with the last cycle, I stepped up to the plate. I took the lower weight with humility and regained confidence as I lifted with lower weight than I warmed up with. When I realized that I was squatting sideways, I did all the hip exercises my coach gave me and started warming up for a full hour before I started until I was squatting normally again. And when my deadlifts, my pride and joy, fell apart, I took the lower weight, and worked on form and patience till I worked my way back up to my regular weight. But my proudest accomplishment to date has been switching to hook grip. Hook grip is difficult for most lifters to lift with because it entails deadening the nerves in your thumbs in order to be able to grip it with two fingers. As a tiny lifter, obviously I struggled with it the most because my hands barely wrapped around the bar. But my coach told me that I had to make a choice with which group to use and that there was no going back. So, I took a deep breath and decided to commit to hook grip and was actually surprised by how well I did. In one day, I jumped from 175 to 245 with hook grip, despite not even being able to lift past 150lb with that grip the previous summer. And in six or seven weeks, ya girl deadlifted 290 with hook grip while fatigued and sore :') Also, I learned to lift conventional, too! Even though that process was truly painful and there were some weeks that went worse than others, I learned to pull conventional and even got up to 245 when I'd never been able to do higher than 155 previously.
So, maybe my reasons for pursuing powerlifting weren't completely inane. As Maltz once said, as humans we're only truly happy when we're chasing a goal, when we have a greater sense of purpose that we're trying to accomplish. And when we don't have something we're trying to attain, we feel lost and hopeless. I think you'd agree that that's true. We feel happy and a sense of pride when we set goals and then set off to achieve them, hitting obstacles and overcoming them along the way. Why? Because this increases our self-esteem and self-confidence. We accept whatever is coming our way because we know that we'll be able to rise to whatever the occasion warrants and face adversity head-on. Instead of running from obstacles, we rise to the challenge and find with surprise that we CAN actually conquer whatever seeks to defeat us. When we rise to the challenge, we forget to be fearful because we choose to embrace the uncertainty of the outcome we face and innately understand that no matter what the outcome may be, we will see it through.
So maybe it didn't matter that I hadn't had a reason to start powerlifting when I did. Maybe it was more important that I had stuck with it because I felt like it helped to bring out the best in me, because it made me feel unstoppable every time I overcame a weight I thought I'd never be able to, and because you can't fully love and accept yourself until you faced adversity and chased after your dreams. And, honestly, I feel like that's the purpose of life as well. Why do they say that happiness is what we should all aspire to? Because when we're truly happy and accept ourselves, then we know that we have finally come into our own and have lived life the way it was meant to be lived. We have experienced the most unthinkable (both good and bad) situations because they were in line with OUR goals. We understand that our self-worth comes from the fact that we are all children of God and therefore have heavenly light within us, not that we have to go out and achieve arbitrary distinctions of success so that others can be in admiration and awe of us.
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