NYT bestselling author. Coached CrossFit Games champions and Olympic athletes. Your body is the first thing you lead.
Joined April 2009
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I typed every word of Freestyle with three fingers.
What I remember most is not making the bestseller list. It is sitting across from @tonysherbondy at Coups Cafe in Palo Alto, going in circles for a year, trying to find the book inside everything we had recorded and written down.
Then Nick D’amico and Ryan Smith gave it a visual language. Erica P. made the chaos work.
The book carries all of us.
I was anxious about being at the @CrossFitGames . 11 years had passed, and I felt like I had walked out on that community. Then one of the judges reminded me of details from a seminar I had forgotten teaching. I thought the work was left when I did, but other people kept it alive. open.substack.com/pub/carlpa…
Effort and life are not the same thing. Ask the effort to stand in for your life, and the effort goes hollow, and your life gets smaller.
open.substack.com/pub/carlpa…
Insight is not the finish line. It is the start. A note is not the race. A conversation is not the race. The work has to hold when the pace changes. In the body. In the room. In the family. In the decision. In the return.
I am not trying to sound finished. I am trying to stay in relationship with what I am learning. Some of this will change. Some will get more precise. Some will become public language. Some will fall away. The work is alive because I am still inside it.
Competence is part of dignity. Not elite competence. Basic competence. Can you get up. Carry what matters. Move through the day without feeling like your body is something you have to negotiate with. The small things are not small when they give a person their life back.
I watched @IcelandAnnie get her first muscle-up at the 2009 @CrossFitGames
Then it became the movement she dreaded most. Her body had it, but it had turned into a mental obstacle, not a physical one. The beginning and the end were clear. The part between is where the work was.
Annie's memoir is out now. Iceland Annie: The Evolution of a CrossFit Games Legend: a.co/d/05Ca80ra
Attention is not the same as trust. You can get someone to look at you without helping them become clearer, safer, or more capable. A loud cue gets attention. A precise read builds trust. Those are different outcomes.
Leadership at home is harder to fake. Your partner knows. Your kids know. Your body knows. You can perform clarity in public and still leak pressure into the people closest to you. That is why the work has to transfer. Otherwise it is just performance.
Position. Movement. Purpose. Still the simplest way I know how to read a person. What position are you in. What change are you making. What purpose is organizing the effort. A lot of confusion clears when those things are named without drama.
I do not like watching people get made smaller. By age. Injury. Money pressure. Success. A shallow read of who they are. A lot of my work is refusing to let the first visible limitation become the whole story.