This is Crystal and today she got her bar muscle ups!!
This is so totally inspiring and amazing because, as many of you know, Crystal suffered a full achilles rupture while competing in the Bridge City Beat Down back in September. She had surgery and has been living the boot life ever since. This is undoubtedly a situation that sucks. Injuries are shitty and unfair. But once they've happened, what can you do now?
Instead of letting it get her down, Crystal chose to control the only thing she could control - herself. She could not change the fact that she was injured, but she could change her reaction to it.
Crystal seriously doubled down on her fitness in the past 2 months. She upped her focus on her nutrition, soliciting the help of Coach Rana at Idealistic Isabel. Making the right food choices allowed her to recover better, stay strong, and even lean out while her movement was limited.
She also got herself to the gym a total of 42 times since the surgery. On crutches, in a boot, through snow/ice, AND with a 1 year old in tow, she got it done.
No excuses.
She worked her ass off through a LOT of modified versions of workouts. Modifying workouts isn't fun. For most of us, CrossFit is the fun part of our day and when all of a sudden the fun gets sucked out of it, it's very tempting to throw in the towel. It's a bummer not getting to do what everyone else is doing and there are absolutely moments of feeling defeated and frustrated. But when your choices are do something or do nothing, you are definitely better off doing something.
While a defeatist, pity-party attitude obviously isn't going to be the winner, it should be noted here that a bullshit positive attitude isn't necessary either. It's ok for things to be not ok for a while. But while things are not ok, we may as well get some work done. The best attitude is the straightforward workhorse approach, the one that says "here we are. Lets get to work" and doesn't mess around with being overly negative or positive.
Not necessary.
While living the boot life, Crystal got to do a lot of upper body work. Sure, her back squat 1RM probably isn't looking so impressive right now, but there were plenty of other areas where she was able to get much stronger than before. The silver lining to an injury is that while you are taking time off of one area, you will automatically be dedicating attention to another area that probably needed that attention in the first place.
So today, not only did the physio say she can take her boot off (yay!) but she was also able to get her bar muscle ups! ... and went on to get 24 of them in the workout!! She got better at a time when it would have been so much easier to get worse.