SPUR LEADERSHIP | macrichard.com

One of the bedrock principles of Crossfit is high intensity training over a short duration. Toward the end of one of my early workouts, I was doing pushups with a weighted vest on after flipping a tractor tire multiple times (Don’t ask—these people do some weird stuff). As I was nearing the last push of the session, I was hating life and Web, grinding through some pushups when he got on the floor and asked very directly but quietly,

C’mon, Mac…How many can you do when you’re tired?

Within the same week, I saw an ESPN special, All Access: Alabama that spotlighted Alabama Head Football Coach, Nick Saban. One day toward the end of practice, Saban was, um…encouraging his players to stay focused even though they were exhausted. And he told them that the first half of practice was just to get them to this point so they could learn to focus, execute, and perform when they were tired.

How many can you do when you’re tired? That’s really what separates average from excellent, good from great, and getting by to taking flight. It became such a mantra for me in Crossfit that it began seeping into other areas of my life:

• When Julie needed help with something around the house, but I was “off the clock”
• When I felt like I had done “enough” message prep
•  When my son wanted to play 1-on-1 in the driveway 
• When I needed to return phone calls/emails
• When I wanted to sleep in instead of get up and get quality time with God
• When my daughter wanted to download her day at 10:30 at night and I was falling asleep

So many areas of my life grew and improved because of that one question: How many can you do when you’re tired? So much of the good stuff lies just outside of my comfort zone. When I get tired, when I feel like “that’s enough,” is exactly the time to push through and keep going to see what God has just on the other side.

Because of Web Smith (@CrossfitChron) and what he taught me training, pushing, mocking (in love, I think!), mentoring, and teaching, I’ve got a deeper, clearer understanding of how God grows us. One day at a time. One step at a time.

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Once I started getting comfortable with being uncomfortable, I noticed something else was going on:

Incremental choices created monumental changes.

Certainly not in and of themselves. But, just the simple decision to train—no matter what—on days when I didn’t feel like it, when I was stressed or distracted, when it was too cold, or any other host of excuses led to noticeable and sustained changes. Some days, I’d come home and my bride Julie would ask, “How was your workout?” and all I could say was, “It wasn’t pretty, but it happened.”

The workouts themselves were so intense that I had to think about what I was eating the day of and the day before if I had any hope of finishing the session. And those incremental choices about what to eat, when to eat, and what not to eat led to monumental changes in how I viewed food—as fuel and setup for the workout to come (and how much I enjoyed my cheat day when it rolled around each week), as well as how I performed in the workouts.

Yet again, as in Crossfit, so in life: Incremental choices about setting aside time to pray, hacking a night out of our crazy schedule to date Julie, talking to my kids about their basketball games, spending another hour in message prep…all of these “little decisions” add up to the sum total of who I am and what I do with the life I’ve been given.

There is no such thing as a little choice.

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2011 will forever be remembered as the year I met Crossfit. Under the able coaching and frequent harangue of Web Smith (@CrossfitChron), who also redesigned my blog, I discovered a whole new world of training that I’d never known before. In discovering Crossfit, I also discovered some immutable laws of life that transcend working out and strengthen performance as a husband, a dad, a pastor, and life in general.

The first Crossfit Law I learned laid the foundation for all the others. After one of my first workouts, as I was huffing and puffing, thinking I had really worked hard, Web grinned his big gap-toothed grin and said,

I gotta get you comfortable with being uncomfortable.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t working. It was this: I wasn’t working hard enough at the right things. And, if it hadn’t been for his accountability, I never would’ve made the gains that I did.

Comfort crushes growth. Every time. Everywhere. In my faith, marriage, work, training, parenting—Comfort crushes growth and feeds mediocrity. When I broke through the comfort ceiling in working out, I started noticing little pockets of comfort I had allowed to sprout in other areas of my life. And I started rooting them out because mediocrity scares me more than failure. With failure, at least something is attempted.