How many items off of your grocery list are you willing to walk away without and still call it a successful shopping trip? Perhaps you have trouble finding the avocados, and so you leave the store missing one of your ten items that you set out to get. Likely not a colossal failure, given that you got 9/10 items, but now you’re going to need to stop by another store on the way home to make your guacamole. Now what if you only walked away with five of the ten items you set out to get? Or what if you only came away with two? I’m generally pretty optimistic, but I’d have to ask -- what are you really doing if your shopping trip is yielding such a low success rate?

I frequently observe a similar outcome in people’s training practices. In our Intro session that we require all incoming students to participate in, we spend a good chunk of time talking about goals. The basic question from the coach to the student is why are you here? What is it that you feel is missing from your current practices? And what do you hope to get out of becoming a student at our gym?

Answers vary, and include everything from improving sports performance, to increasing daily energy levels, to cutting some body fat, to being a part of a community of driven and motivated individuals. Generally, our conversation yields a handful of desired outcomes. This is our grocery list. And more often than not, this metaphorical grocery list serves as a good guide for a couple months. What happens, though, is that things at some point start to get hard. This is an inevitability, and we always make it a point to have this conversation at the get-go. Life gets busy, the workouts start to feel hard, you’re tired, you’re sore, and suddenly your efforts to get all of the items on your grocery list begin to drop off. You decide that you’ll show up, but that just half effort will be good enough, and that the extra work to really improve that skill or change that habit maybe isn’t worth the hassle after all. And so you walk into the store with your original list of ten items and walk away with only three or four in hand. Or perhaps you even decide to skip your trip to the grocery store all together.

This brings us back to our original question: how much are you willing to walk away without and still call it a success? And, to revisit our question that we pose to all students, why are you here? We all start out with good intentions and goals and a list of motivating items that we’re eager to pursue, but suddenly when things get hard and life gets weird we pretend that our shopping list doesn’t matter anymore -- we tell ourselves that we’re content with the same feelings of dissatisfaction or mediocrity that brought us to try on this movement and improvement practice in the first place.

So what’ll it be? Toss the grocery list out and peruse the aisles for whatever’s easy and convenient? Or, as our friends at Deuce Gym like to say, are you going to get what you came for?

- PS

10/5/17

• 3 attempts, for time:

• 100’ sled sprint (5 plates / 3 plates)

Then...

• 18 min AMRAP

• 30 DUs

• 12 box jumps (24”/20”)

• 12 pistols (6/leg)