Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Turns out the hardest part wasn’t the material.

I woke up this morning tired as hell. I cleared my schedule for the next two days just to give myself some breathing room, but the first thing I saw was that study block notification lighting up my phone. The alarm went off, and my immediate thought was just, f*** you. That is the deeply unglamorous reality of being thirty days out from the CrossFit L3 exam.

thirty days out

My calendar looks like a rainbow mess right now, which sounds super cute, but it is not. It’s all these color-coded time blocks, overlapping alarms, and study windows crammed into every open space because without that much structure, I’ll absolutely find a hundred perfectly logical reasons to do something (anything) else.

“Damn, those baseboards need cleaning.”

“Oh shit, that herb cupboard needs organizing”.

My brain gets really creative when it’s trying to protect me from discomfort.

why I kept moving the goalpost

I first picked up the L3 material back in 2023 while I was knee deep building the Working With Larger Bodies seminar, and at the time, I told myself I did not have the bandwidth for both. That was true, at least partially, but it was also a really convenient place to hide because somewhere underneath the busyness, I had made a quiet little deal with myself that I didn’t fully understand until recently.

I had convinced myself that I needed to arrive first…. that I needed to hit my first big goal first. I kept treating the test like it belonged to some future version of me. Every time I got close to committing to it, I would quietly move the goalpost again. I would study hard for a couple of weeks, convince myself I was making progress, then slowly drift away from the material. The problem was that nobody else was blocking the door. I was the asshole standing there with my arms crossed the entire time.

coaching outside the average

The cruel part is that I have been living this material for years. Every coaching session, scaling decision, cue, every conversation about movement, breathing, mechanics, intensity, and safety has all been rooted in methodology. I did not drift away from CrossFit. If anything, I planted myself deeper inside it than ever before. The difference is that most of my coaching life doesn’t happen in averages. I don’t spend my days coaching RX athletes trying to shave thirty seconds off Fran times. Most of the athletes I coach arrive below baseline, and my entire lens has been built from the bottom up for years now.

I spend most of my time helping people who don’t walk into the gym having anything close to “average” capabilities. I’m teaching people how to breathe without panicking, how to move in bodies that change every balance and gravity point, or how to build enough trust in themselves to keep coming back tomorrow. Most of the athletes I work with transition out before I ever see what the broader CrossFit space would consider even “baseline”. Scaled Nation has operated more like a bridge for years, and coaching in that space has shaped how I see movement and progress.

the podcast moment

A few weeks ago, I was on a podcast, and one of the hosts playfully asked me to guess a finish time for the workout we were watching. Internally I was panicking because I didn’t know who the athlete was, hadn’t seen him move, and didn’t have the answer. It was uncomfortable as hell, and I laughed it off in the moment. But later that night, I sat staring at the wall way longer than I’d like to admit.

It wasn’t because I suddenly thought I was a bad coach; it’s because that moment exposed the exact place where my coaching lens naturally gets more narrow. I’ve spent so much time coaching from the bottom up that getting pulled back into the center lane of RX athletes and average standards felt strangely exposing. Just unfamiliar in the way something can feel when you have spent years solving a completely different set of problems than the vast majority of the room.

the decision to delay

The Crossfit L3 exam doesn’t give a shit about your niche specialty or the corner of the methodology you have spent years mastering. It asks you to stand dead center in the middle of the room and prove you understand (at least on a broad level) the full spectrum: RX, average, baseline, all of it. If you’ve spent years doing deeply specific work in the margins, work that most people never even see, stepping back into the center of the room can make you feel weirdly vulnerable, even when you know damn well you belong there.

About two weeks, the anxiety finally got loud enough that I made the call to push my exam date forward a month because I don’t want to take this test more than once if I can help it, and I knew I wasn’t ready yet. I wasn’t scared. or incapable, just honestly not ready. There’s a difference between nerves and unpreparedness, and the second I moved the test date, I knew I’d made the right decision because the relief hit almost immediately. I don’t know that I will walk into that room feeling confident in the movie montage kind of way. Honestly, I’ll probably walk in carrying caffeine, and approximately fourteen tabs open in my brain at the same time. But I’m hoping I will feel prepared.

just get through the first block

So now we’re thirty days out. I am tired, anxious, overwhelmed, and fully aware that my Google Calendar currently looks like the operations board, but I’m setting the damn alarms anyway.

Some old ghosts will probably walk into that room with me when I sit for this exam. Old stories, old shame, old moments that taught painful lessons. They are living in and out of me right now. I’ve made peace with most of that history, or at least enough peace to move forward, but I know those voices will still be sitting beside me. Which is fine because I’ve fought harder things than ghosts.

Today, I don’t need to conquer all of them; every day it’s just a matter of geting through the first block.