001 || Diaries of a Coach
Oh, hello.
Welcome to… (queue drumroll)
Diaries of a Coach!
Erica here, hopefully I have met most of you but those I haven’t, nice to meet you and welcome to my diary! I have to say, I am incredibly excited about this opportunity. Writing has been an outlet for me for awhile now and when this idea was thrown out, I knew in my gut I needed to say yes. (Ever get that oh-crap-I-know-I’m-supposed-
Anyways, this is the new place to be. Right here, on my public diary! My hope is simply this: I want to make you laugh, bring a smile to your face. I want to tell you some stories, let you in on the life of a coach. I want to be real. I don’t know about you, but a big ol’ dose of realness in my day is always good for the soul. While my life and experience will be far from perfect, let’s connect over the struggles, the pains, the joys, the laughs, the highs and the lows that we all experience in this crazy CrossFit world we share.
So post numero uno commences… Right. Now.
A few months ago, Coach Jared and I did a video on our “why”. If you haven’t seen that, you should probably check it out (What’s your why)! If you watched that video, a huge part of the reason I train and am so passionate about coaching others comes from my own experience, growing up immersed in a lifestyle that very minimally valued proper nutrition and adequate movement, if at all. As I got older and realized the unhealthy and deeply rooted habits I had adopted, it became clear to me that I was to change a very prominent generational pattern in my family, or else I was headed down a slippery slope toward countless health risks and limitations.
Fast forward to the present, living in a city where health and fitness are cultural norms, working in an industry that is inundating me with new training methodologies daily and being borderline addicted to my own training and progress, people from my past stepping into this world might not even recognize me. So when my family came to visit last week, this was in many ways the case. My life is centered around something that lives on the very outskirts of theirs at best. So over the course of the last week, I found myself asking, “How do I encourage those around me to move, to take ownership of what and how and why they eat, to care about their health with the decisions they make daily?”
Odds are, if you’re reading this, you are engaged in a training program, hopefully here at CFA with me. (If not, holla at ya girl! erica@crossfitaustin.com) So more than likely I don’t need to encourage you to move consistently. But maybe, like me, you care deeply about someone, or multiple someones, that haven’t tasted the goodness of pushing physical limits, of eating a meal with the sole purpose of fueling the body for work, of gaining confidence from achieving a long term goal in the gym. This is my heart for most of my family. I want them to not only live long and healthy lives, I want them to have the ability to do the things they love, I want them to live pain free, and I want them to accomplish things they never thought possible.
Here’s what I would say after a week of contemplating all of this, of encouraging and sometimes violently pushing the people I care most about (let’s be honest, sometimes we all need a loving but violent push). Keep loving what you do, who you are and how you feel when you finish a workout every day. Aren’t you so glad to have a community of people in it with you? But let’s also invite people in. Let’s talk about it like we adore it, because we really do. It gives us life, literally. So many haven’t found something that keeps them going, that challenges them, that provokes healthy change both physically and mentally, and people to do it with. Maybe it’s simply initiating a conversation about the struggles of fitness and nutrition, or inviting someone on a walk, or bringing them to CFA (shameless plug, nailed it). How can you, today, share your fitness? Y’all, someone’s life might depend on it!
-Coach E