Sunday Run

Frank and I flew back to Atlanta yesterday and got home a little before 2 PM. It was good to be back home and we spent some quality time on the couch. I knew I wasn't going to hit my step goal by lying on the couch and was facing a $10 fee for my Pact app if I didn't get moving, so I went for a quick run on the Beltline at 6 PM. The nice thing about living this far west is that the sun still sets at 7 PM this late into the fall.

Atlanta, I love you.

Trevor

The world lost a truly beautiful person last week. My friend Trevor passed away and I am heartbroken. Trevor taught me so much about friendship. His love for others was genuine, and he had an almost incredible ability to read and connect with people. I attended his funeral on Friday. Five hundred people showed up, and hundreds more expressed their desire to be there in person. If you knew Trevor, you'd easily understand why so many people came to celebrate his life.

River North CrossFit and HeritageBBQ Chicago

I flew to Chicago last Wednesday for stop 3 on the HeritageBBQ by COCHON555 tour. (Fun fact, we're supposed to write Cochon555 when it's found in the middle of a sentence, but I think it looks better always capitalized and since this is my blog, I'm going to be a rebel and do what I want.) I overslept and had to take a later flight, but it worked out for the best because I got on the same flight with two of my coworkers. We had so much luggage because we had to bring a bunch of stuff from Toronto and it really helped to have all three of us. We landed at ORD and then took a shuttle to the rental car place. I was able to put my functional fitness to use by throwing a 79# bag of pop-up banners on my back and dragging it to the shuttle stop. The driver made some cute comment about how I must workout and then tried to take the bag from me. His tone changed after that.

By the grace of God, my schedule permitted me to drop in at River North CrossFit for the 8 AM class on Friday. I felt like such shit from San Francisco and Toronto - exhausted, hungry, bloated, dehydrated, and just plain frustrated. Getting an hour to myself to do what I love made all the difference. My only complaint about tour is not really having the space to recharge - both in time and physical space.

CrossFit Golden Gate and the Start of the HeritageBBQ Tour

This past month has been a whirlwind. I left Atlanta on September 11 for the first stop of Cochon555's HeritageBBQ tour in San Francisco. Our event was held at Magnolia Brewing in Dogpatch and the light of my life Colton came to help us sell merchandise. 

I fucking love this kid.

We had incredible dinners at The Battery, Dirty Habit, and at our own event. By Tuesday I was dying to do a WOD and was able to drop in at CrossFit Golden Gate for the noon class before my redeye to Toronto for stop two.

Confidence, Humility, and Being a Girl

I was born in 1986, and as a girl born in the 80s, I grew up being told I could be anything I wanted to be and that I am just as good as any boy. But then I was also told that my teachers were more likely to call on boys than the girls in class, that I wasn't a good math student because girls were better at things like reading and writing, and that I needed to prove myself every day to be seen as smart.

Once out of school, I kept being told how women have to act confident and work to be taken seriously in a workplace full of men, especially white straight men. I think there were maybe 8 white straight men in all 53 offices over at TFA, but dammit, I needed to learn to hold my own and be taken seriously by them. Every other Facebook post is about leaning in, conveying confidence, and the double standard of women being seen as bitches at work while men get seen as bosses for the same behavior. I still long for the days when Facebook was full of pictures of you making duck faces with your sorority sisters while your boyfriend threw up in the lefthand corner in a delightfully fucked up photobomb. Now between engagement rings, sonograms, and new houses, I have to be told how to function in the workplace as a woman and in the world as a woman, and oh wait, now you think I've gotten too muscular and I no longer look like a woman.

So this morning my shrink informs me that his hypothesis on why I suck at dating is that my confidence is too threatening and I need to tone it down so others can feel more comfortable being themselves around me while they get to know me. 

I'm just going to let that marinate for a moment.

(My hypothesis is that I go on dates with people I meet on the internet and I sleep with my neighbors. Now who has that degree is psychology?)

Now I know he can't have possibly meant that I need to make myself less than so that a man will like me more. Apparently he thinks this will help women to like me more too. I politely told him what I think of his hypothesis and limited myself to two f-bombs and only one you've got to be kidding me.

I was ticked off but I'm usually good at receiving feedback, so I reached out to the person I guess I'm kind of dating to ask his opinion. Bless his heart, he answered candidly.

Bless your heart is fuck you in Southern.

Addicted to CrossFit

I really didn't think that I was going to make it to 5:30 AM CrossFit today.

But then I couldn't sleep.

5:30 Club - So Blessed

I was in class with Gina Gallo at Bikram Yoga Roslyn in June, and she closed out the 90 minutes by sharing a little wisdom about being busy. She told us that when our days are really full and we have so many things we need to do and want to do, we should be thankful to have such rich lives and feel grateful for the opportunities instead of stressed out or resentful. At that point I was being paid to not really have a job, no one was offering me a job I actually wanted, and I was so exhausted from not sleeping that I acted like a zombie with an exceptionally short fuse. I swore I would be so grateful the next time I had a rich full life.

Well guys, I am super fucking thankful.

So fucking thankful that I had to start working out at 5:30 in the morning.

Rivka and I so happy after 3 RFT 100 doubleunders, 20 sumo deadlift high pulls @65#

A Fantastic Week

So last Thursday I went on a date with this guy I met on Tinder. I'm terrible at dating because if given too much time (aka any more than 20 minutes from the start of the date), I start coming up with excuses not to go. It was raining, and I was tired from work, and I was hungry and we were supposed to have drinks and then I was trying to eat while simultaneously putting on makeup, and I was totally going to bail. I am so incredibly happy that I did not. We had the best time. And one week later, we've had six dates.

Pure Barre Bingo

Pure Barre Virginia Highland is playing bingo until August 16. Since we know that I am incredibly competitive, I am already strategizing how to win. Today we used a double-tube in Katy's class so that's one box down.

Functional Fitness

Last week I started my awesome new job at COCHON 555 and I flew out to Napa on Thursday for our Heritage Fire event. It was FANTASTIC! Honestly, I've never been to a cooler event. I'm extremely excited for the Heritage BBQ tour to start in September. If you're in San Francisco, Chicago, Toronto, Austin, or D.C., you should buy tickets. I promise it will be a great time.

So a major component of event production is setting up for the events. Thank you Captain Obvious. Since we know I love lifting and carrying heavy things, setting up for events is kind of like a CrossFit Christmas for me. Clearly I am in the correct line of work.

I would like to report that my CrossFit membership totally paid off this weekend when my new bff Matt and I headed to the storage unit with the U-Haul van. We needed to pack up the rest of the items in storage so that they could be properly inventoried on site. This included a 23" Saffire kamado grill (think the red version of a Big Green Egg) and a gigantic plastic pallet.

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I almost lost an ear when I accidentally trapped my head between the egg and the back door latch on the van, BUT we didn't drop it.

I am extremely proud of figuring out how to get this pallet into the back of the van. It wouldn't fit into the side entrance and we couldn't get it high enough to clear the back. Then I realized that it would flip exactly like a tire, so we put it down on the ground and flipped it right into the truck. Strongman training for the win!

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