But Did You Do Your Best?

28 Mar But Did You Do Your Best?

The 2017 CrossFit Games Open is officially over.

And for 99% of you, the season has ended. Out of 354,966 adults, (not including teen or masters divisions) athletes who registered up for the RX division of the Open, only 2,2100 advance to Regionals as an individual or team member. That’s 0.6% of the total population.

You actually had a better chance of playing in the NFL if you played college football (1.6%) than you did of making the CrossFit Regionals. And that’s not even making it to the Games.

That percentage drops if you add in the almost 85,000 community members who competed scaled this year.

The Open is an opportunity for everyone in the CrossFit community to test how far they’ve come in the last 12 months as an athlete. It’s a five-week opportunity to get out of your comfort zone, see how much stronger you’ve gotten than last year, and even pick up a personal record or two.

But many athletes have spent the last year envisioning themselves qualifying for Regionals, and today marks the cold reality that their vision won’t come to life. It’s a disappointing day of what they believe to be a failure. It’s tough to come up short in the field of competition, but I have to know one thing:

Did you do your best?

I want to know if you spent the last year making sacrifices, adhering to your coach’s programming, and giving every ounce of energy the last five weeks in training and in your Open workouts. Did you end on empty after every Open workout – and if you didn’t, did you redo it to ensure you did?

Did you use every ounce of what you had in the pursuit of that goal?

If you didn’t reach your goal, I’m curious what more could you have done? Because if you did your best, then raise your head. Hold it high.

Competing every day means doing your best – in every moment, in every day. Some days our best is stronger than others, but if we did our best in the moment, there is no room for regret or for “what if.” We gave our best and left nothing to chance.

The one thing the Open does that I love is that it presents the opportunity to do your best – every workout. For many members of the CrossFit community, it becomes an opportunity to break through a mental barrier that had long held them captive. They did something during the last five weeks that previously, they’d believed themselves incapable of doing.

They did their best.

Being a Competitor doesn’t guarantee victory. You are not automatically given that goal. But it’s in these moments Competitors are defined, because great Competitors:

1. Do their best
2. End on empty
3. Rebound from failure

That third – rebounding from failure –  will now be one way you can use to define your 2017 if your placement in the final rankings was short of where you planned. You can sulk, get pissed, and let that setback define your 2017. Or, you can understand that you’re not even 90-days into the new year, get back up from that disappointment and let your comeback be what defines this year.

Disappointments happen on every journey – but how you respond to this disappointment will do more to influence those around you than anything else you could have done. This week is a chance to show others how you’ll respond to failure. How a setback does not define you. How not making Regionals doesn’t impact your self-worth.

And how you’ll compete even harder so that your capacity increases and this time next year, your best will be even better.

I don’t care if you made Regionals – I want to know if you did your best. Because in the grand scheme of things, that is what will truly matter in life outside the gym.

“Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment. Full effort is full victory.” -Mahatma Gandhi

Competitors do their best, every day.