Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

Key Takeaways

Key Takeaways

• You don’t have to earn your way into being chosen; the right things in your life won’t ask you to become someone else first.
• Showing up when it’s uncomfortable will teach you more about yourself than waiting until you feel ready ever will.
• Humility isn’t weakness; it’s the moment you stop lying to yourself about what’s actually in front of you.
• When something is off, you can feel it; you don’t need to overthink it, justify it, or force it to work.
• You don’t lower the standard just because you’re tired of waiting; you hold it because you finally understand what it cost you to build it.

losing my own standard

Before CrossFit ever taught me how to hold a standard, I spent a solid decade getting really good at abandoning my own.

I was in an eleven-year relationship that, on the surface, looked like it was moving in the right direction. Somewhere around the two-year mark, I sat down and asked the question you’re supposed to ask when you think you’re building a future with someone. I wanted to know where we were going. His answer was calm, almost reasonable, which made it easier to swallow at the time.

He told me he wouldn’t marry me until I got down to a size 12. That was the condition. And I agreed to it.

I didn’t push back. I told myself it wasn’t a big deal because I was already working on my health and we were both busy in grad and law school. What was the hurry? What I didn’t understand then was that a condition like that doesn’t just sit there, it takes root and grows. It quietly rewired how I saw myself until I realized I had spent years walking around believing I had to be perfect before I was allowed to be chosen.

eleven years and a breaking point

By year nine we got engaged, but not the way a girl would want. It was an ultimatum. He said the condition was gone and I got my ring, but I had spent a ridiculously long time trying to earn my place in something that was supposed to want me freely. I moved forward anyway because I had invested so much of my identity into the version of the life we had built together. I planned the wedding for two full years, but instead of feeling like a dream, it felt like a slow leak I couldn’t find.

Three months before the wedding, I called it off. It was painful and messy and disruptive in every way you’d expect. I was standing at a fork between a life that looked right and a life that actually felt right. And for the first time, I knew those weren’t the same road.

starting over

I moved to Minnesota and started over. Not the romantic kind of starting over where you cut your hair and drink wine in a new place and suddenly you’re fine. It was the really ugly kind. The kind that meant therapy, where I actually had to dig into the childhood stuff I’d been carefully stepping around for years.

It took seven years before I even turned my attention to the physical side of my wellness. Seven years. During that time I built a life on my own terms. I bought a home, created stability, and started doing things I loved. I didn’t date because I thought I had to become acceptable first.

What I didn’t see, what took me an embarrassingly long time to see, was that the belief from that relationship had followed me right into my fresh start and unpacked its bags without telling me.

I was still living like I had to earn my space.

enter CrossFit

Walking into CrossFit at 500 pounds on two canes was one of the hardest things I have ever done.

The fear was immediate and physical. There is no hiding in that environment. You walk in exactly as you are, and every insecurity you carry walks in right behind you, but I stayed anyway.

CrossFit didn’t just teach me random lessons. It changed how I see and feel what’s actually happening in front of me.

It taught me to show up, and I don’t mean the version of showing up when you feel ready or motivated. I mean the kind where the hardest part of the workout is just getting out of your car and walking through the door. The kind where everything in you wants to go home, and you stay anyway. That’s where it starts, not when it’s convenient, but right there in the resistance.

It taught me humility, too. You spend enough time in a CrossFit gym and you will be wrong about what you think you can do, repeatedly. You’ll load a bar you’re sure you have, and then you won’t. You’ll watch someone half your size move something you can’t budge, and you’ll have a choice in that moment. You can let it mess with you, or you can let it teach you. That’s when I realized humility isn’t a weakness, it’s accuracy. It’s seeing things for what they are instead of what your ego wants them to be.

And somewhere in all of that, it taught me to pay attention. Not just to the obvious things, but to what’s actually happening underneath the surface. Your body tells you things. The movement tells you things. The way something feels when it’s right versus when it’s off matters. The people who improve are the ones who listen. They tell themselves the truth, even when it’s not flattering.

And if you really listen, people will tell you everything too. Not always directly, not always in obvious ways, but it’s there. In what they say, in what they avoid, in how they show up and how they don’t. They reveal things they don’t even realize they’re revealing.

It taught me to love myself, not as a reward for finally hitting some metric someone else handed me, but as a practice, a daily, unglamorous, imperfect practice.

the contradiction i missed

I was learning all of this in the gym, training my body and my mind simultaneously, and still, I was telling myself I wasn’t allowed to want a partner until I crossed some invisible finish line I couldn’t even define.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to notice the contradiction.

I had spent all those years telling myself I wasn’t ready yet, that I needed to finish becoming someone more acceptable first. What I didn’t see was that I wasn’t being disciplined. I was punishing myself.

the moment it broke open

It was during a fast when it finally cracked open. In that stillness, I saw clearly, for the first time how long I had been withholding from myself something I genuinely longed for. Not because I wasn’t worthy of it. But because somewhere along the way, I had decided I had to earn it first.

I sat with that and cried. Hard. How long are you going to keep doing this to yourself?

I didn’t have a good answer. So I stopped waiting for one.

crossfit meets the dating inbox

At some point, I told my community I was putting myself back out there. That I was on the apps, figuring it out like a normal human being in the twenty-first century.

And then…. a DM.

“Aren’t you embarrassed to tell people you’re on a dating app?”

I actually laughed out loud. Like, genuinely laughed. Because let me remind you of the perspective here. I had walked into a CrossFit gym at 500 pounds on two canes. No version of that moment involves blending in. You are seen completely. Every fear you’ve ever had about your body, your ability, your worthiness, all of it walks in the door with you, and there is nowhere to put it. I had to scale movements that other people did without thinking about it and work twice as hard just to achieve a baseline that everyone else started from. I had to show up in that room, in that body, and do it anyway.

And you mean to tell me that a dating app was going to embarrass me?

Embarrassed for what, exactly? For being single and willing to meet someone? Every married person you know was single once. Every one of them had to put themselves out there in some form. The medium changes, the vulnerability doesn’t.

the inbox was an experience

Some messages read like LinkedIn profiles submitted to the wrong portal. Some felt copied and pasted to forty-seven women simultaneously, which is efficient, but also no. The messages rolled in, leading with lake houses, what kind of car they drove, job titles, and one man led with his credit score. His actual credit score. Listen Peter… a 720 is ok but I’ve seen way better *smirk*.

At first it was frustrating and it was making me absolutely miserable, but then I started looking at it differently. Because once you’ve spent years learning what real effort actually looks like, you can’t unsee low effort when it shows up, and that’s what most of it was. Low effort acting like it should be enough.

There were empty profiles with no substance and no thought, just pictures and the expectation that you’re supposed to fill in the gaps. I hear the rebuttal all the time that people don’t know what to say about themselves, but that’s not an excuse, that’s the entire point. It is exactly like someone skipping the warmup entirely and expecting to hit a PR. If you expect the reward without doing the foundational work to show someone who you are, well then it’s a no rep.

Then there are the ones who skip right past that and go straight to sexualizing everything, with no conversation and no curiosity. It’s not just unattractive, it’s lazy, and it feels exactly like what it is, someone just trying to shortcut something they haven’t earned. It’s not confidence, it’s a lack of depth, a lack of awareness, and a complete absence of restraint. Hard no rep.

And then there’s the version that makes me laugh the most. The ones who see CrossFit in my profile and decide that must mean I’m looking for a body, so the entire profile turns into a parade of flexed muscles and mirror shots like that’s supposed to tell me something meaningful. I’ve spent enough time in the CrossFit space to know better than that. A strong body tells me you’ve trained your body, and that’s it. It doesn’t tell me how you treat people, it doesn’t tell me how you think, and it definitely doesn’t tell me if there’s any depth there at all.

I’ve met more than a few people who have spent years building their body and almost no time building anything else, and it shows in how they communicate, in what they value, and in what they think is enough. It is effort that looks good on the surface but falls apart the second you look at the details. It is exactly like the guy who loads up a barbell he has no business lifting just to look good for the room, only to dump it the second it gets heavy. The mechanics are shit, the foundation isn’t there, and the whole thing only works if you don’t look too closely.

And that’s when it clicked for me. You don’t reward any of this in the gym, so why would you do that here? A bad message in my inbox looks exactly like a bad lift in the gym. I can tell the moment it starts because the form is off, the mechanics don’t hold, and the weight is wrong. It’s not something I take personally, and I don’t get angry about it. I just see it for what it is and move on.

crossfit built the standard

I have spent years learning what real effort and consistency actually feel like. You can see when someone is grounded in who they are versus when they’re trying to sell you a version of themselves.

I decided to treat my dating inbox the same way I treat the gym. Pay attention, hold the standard, and don’t celebrate substandard movement. CrossFit taught me something else too. You don’t lower the bar just because you’re having a bad day, and you don’t call a lift good when it’s not or ignore the form just because the effort was there. Deep down, you know when something is working and when it isn’t.

never lower the bar

I looked around over the last week at the life I have fought, bled, and worked to build. When you’ve spent years rebuilding your body and your soul from the ashes, you don’t just let anyone walk into a fortress like that. Holding that standard for myself is what protects my peace. I’m protecting the work.

So no, I’m not lowering the bar. Not in the gym, not in my life, and certainly not in my dating inbox.

CrossFit taught me that bar is going to stay right where it is. And I’m finally the woman who can leave it there