This upcoming weekend is the Women's Pro-Am and my first pro meet.

One of my biggest goals during the meet cycle is to not mind fuck myself into oblivion. So my goals for this meet are twofold 1) don’t give a fuck about what is going on around me. 2) give less of a fuck in general.

Now, I know this sounds like the opposite of how I should feel going into a meet but let me tell you, I GIVE TOO MANY FUCKS and that is my greatest weakness. (and sweets).

Generally, starting about 5 weeks out, every night when I go to sleep, I think about the meet. I think about my lifts, the meet going well, the meet not going well, if I am going to be able to sleep the night before, how many times i am going to have to piss during my flight, how many raw people will out total me, etc.

Then I have nightmares about missing my flight and bombing out.

Oh then I will stress about not sleeping enough because I stayed awake thinking. Fucking cool.

I know none of this is beneficial for me. Losing sleep due to rumination does not help my total. It doesn’t help my recovery. It doesn’t help my training.

This time around, I noticed myself start to do that. And I fucking stopped doing it. That’s it. I get into bed and if I start thinking about the meet, I tell myself to think about it the next day. When I am actually awake. I spend enough time thinking about it during the day that I don’t need to keep thinking about it. I’ve been better at this because overall, I’ve gotten myself to give a few less fucks in general.

I fucking hate the feeling of going to a meet and knowing that I only have 9 attempts (attempts, not successful lifts) to get my best numbers which is a culmination of months of work. And if it’s fucked up, I have to wait until the next meet. I put so much mental energy into thinking about how important a meet is. This is a large contributing factor to my overall giving TOO MANY FUCKS.

Dave’s response to one of his Q&A’s helped put this into perspective for me a little more.  I've been searching for the screenshot of it on my phone and online for a long time and I can't find it but the gist was- he hated competing but liked getting stronger and just wanted to get back to the gym to get stronger.

I was like, fuck, he is right. (Damn you and your being right all the time).

I care about getting stronger. I hate competing but I have to do it to get a total. No matter what happens at a meet, I’m still getting stronger. After a meet, I don’t go back to square one. Yes, my strength will go down after a meet but I don’t lose everything I did in the months leading up to the meet. Each meet cycle, I built on what I did before. For some reason, this was hard for me to fully grasp before.  I still think my meets are the most important events of the year for me but I've managed to think about them as another part of getting stronger. Not the be all end all of it.

When I first started competing, I was acutely aware of everything going on around me at a meet. I knew who else I was competing against and there have been instances where I would see what they were up to on social media to see where I would be compared to them.

IT DOESN’T FUCKING MATTER. I’m not going to win the meet or my weight class, I just have to be stronger than I was last time around. The past few meets, I barely knew what people around me were doing at the meet. I only occasionally know what people are up to online ( I definitely don’t go searching for it). That’s good. I’m on the right track here. So hopefully I can carry that over into a meet where I will be out totaled by people half my weight.

It is a struggle for me each training cycle to not be my own worst enemy. I have minimal life stress (no kids, good job, I’m not dying, etc). Any stress that does come up, I do a pretty good job of dealing with it. I'm pretty good with break ups, getting locked out of my car and having my phone die in the country, and getting lost in foreign countries. But not meets. Fucking a. Each meet cycle I make incremental progress towards not creating a maelstrom of emotion that will take away from my ability to have a good meet.  The weights should be the hard part, not my inability to calm the fuck down. The day I can go to a meet and feel like it’s just another training day will be amazing. This weekend will probably not be that weekend but at least I’m done throwing up before meets so I have that going for me.