By Coki Cruz
Hello again! You may know me from my blogs of “My Journey to the Arnold” and if you’ve read those you know I’m an avid weightlifter. I’d like to add to the resume that I placed 3rd at the Arnold’s Nationals and I’m in the top 5% of the country for my weight class! You could say I know a thing or two about diligence, tenacity, and perseverance. But also the monotony of training, the seeming lack of progress, even depression from failure.
What I’ve come to understand is that these feelings come from an area of my heart that seeks to control the end result forgetting that, ultimately, I’m not in control. That’s what I want to talk about today, how to let God handle the results despite our failures.
LIFTING CAN GET REPETITIVE AND YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS: BORING.
Weightlifting is a bar sport, as in we use barbells to compete. Most people go to a gym and use barbells to lose weight, get bigger, “tone.” We go into the gym to lift weights to be better at lifting weights. Training, of course, gets monotonous. I mean how many times will I snatch in any given week, month, training cycle? A lot. Please do NOT get me started on squatting. But we have to. How else can we get better at weightlifting if we don’t practice it?
IS FAILURE STILL CONSIDERED PROGRESS? (ASKING FOR A FRIEND)
Unfortunately, the end result of a weightlifter’s training only happens 3-5x a year. Could you imagine dedicating 12-14 weeks of day after day preparation for everything you have worked towards to potentially fail? Well it happens in this sport! Even more, we don’t get the luxury of the old baseball adage, “just get ‘em tomorrow,” for our competition days. Our bad days have to happen throughout our training cycles. At this point in my career it should be expected, but I still get frustrated when, after several good days or weeks, I come across a bad training day.
WHY, MY SOUL, ARE YOU DOWNCAST? – Psalm 42:5
Days like that can really depress me. You see, you come to a point where you feel like things are really clicking: you’re in sync with your lifts; you’re eating, hydrating, sleeping well. And always in the back of your mind you have these major goals you want to accomplish and you have a timeline you want to hit them at. It all crashes because you’ve built this ego of “nothing can stop me,” “I’m killing it!” It’s a humbling experience like no other because these days remind me that my successes and failures are not all in my control, even yet to God be the Glory. I’m thankful that I have a wonderful wife who supports me in the midst of those days. In her own way she reminds me that no worthwhile pursuit doesn’t come with bumps in the road and, at the end of the day, God’s got this.
“Loosen that grip, Coki.”
I don’t know where my life will go with weightlifting, if you’ll see me internationally, or if my road stops here soon. The one thing I do know is God has put me in this position, and if He has put me here then He is also handling it.
