The better you get the more it hurts. In the case of CrossFit, it hurts more because you’re doing the movements correctly. The bar – even if it’s weighted PVC initially – stays as close to your body as possible. You learn to keep your weight planted in your heels and to use a hook grip. You focus on the form that will produce the most energy not so that you can lift the bar but so that you can get underneath it before gravity has its way. You begin to focus on not only form and power but also speed and mobility.
Eventually, you begin to add weight as you progress. You do so because you have hit that first limit. To surpass it, you have to add weight. You have to make the exercise more challenging. You go home from the class and are rusting by bedtime and altogether rusty by morning. This is what happens when you get better: it hurts, but it’s a necessary and welcomed hurt.
It also hurts because you learn to recognize when you don’t keep the form; that is, you identify when you make a mistake. You correct your mistakes, but you know that the inevitable result of correction is more pain. You accept this fact. You bear it gladly even. You want to get better, and the path to getting better often is pain.
The writing life is no different. To get better, to improve, pain is required: the pain of critiques, the pain of reviewing rules, the pain of working with an editor, and the pain of actually sitting at the table or wherever you work and writing. All those things hurt. They aren’t easy, and you begin to realize you don’t actually outgrow any of those things. It’s still going to hurt some days when you have to sit down and write. It’s going to hurt to have your writing reviewed by an editor or critiqued in a workshop. It will do so because the better you get the more it hurts.
Image: Crossfit Kandahar (CC BY SA 2.0)