Even Champions Doubt



This is Tia-Clair Toomey, the 2017 CrossFit Female Champion, "The Fittest Woman on Earth."  She is cleaning 235 pounds which has got to be almost double her body weight and she did it on the third day of competition after having completed eight other events.  Her lift was almost perfect and she finished first in the event.  She is AMAZING.

 Tia-Clair Toomey is my spirit animal.

 She's an athlete who combines tremendous athleticism with kindness, openness and vulnerability and it's her vulnerability I most admire.  Tia-Clair had appeared in two previous CrossFit Games, 2015 and 2016 and she came in second in both of them.  For a time on Sunday it looked like she might finish in second place once again, but she didn't.  When asked about her previous second place finishes and what changed for her this year she said it was her confidence, that this was the year she came to believe she could win it all.

 If Tia-Clair had doubts about her abilities and whether she belonged up at the top of the podium, what does that mean for the rest of us?  For me it means a couple of things ...

 It means that even champions have doubts but they treat them the same way they treat all their weaknesses, they work on them.  I don't know how Tia-Clair flipped her confidence switch but you could see it had been flipped right from Day One of this year's Games. She's obviously spent quite a bit of her off-season working her mental game just as hard, if not harder, than her physical game.

 I think it also means that doubts are OK, normal and to be expected.  Just as we fail lifts, score poorly on a benchmark WOD or wake up in the dark dreading an early morning run, we all struggle.  The difference between a champion with doubts and most of us is that the doubts, the negative voices, the tapes that run whenever we let ourselves down don't stick in a champions mind.  They exist but don't run the show. 

 It's not the same as cockiness or self-aggrandizement or hubris though because a true champion marries confidence with humility, and that, my friends, is a tough marriage.

 So, Tia-Clair Toomey is my spirit animal, not because she can clean and jerk 235 pounds (although that is wicked cool), it's because she struggled, found her confidence, kept her humility and won. I am going to be channeling my inner TCT whenever I go to the gym and whenever I doubt, feel fear, or shy away from something hard I'll be asking myself ...

 WWTCTD -- What Would Tia-Clair Toomey Do?

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