Broadened Horizons

As a young lifter one of the best things that ever happened to me was stepping outside of my high school gym. When I first started lifting, we were one of the first high school programs in the state to use the snatch and clean and jerk in training. Therefore we really had no people and nobody to compare ourselves to. Even in the state of Georgia, there were really no guys my size and age lifting heavy loads. My very first weightlifting competition, in which I lifted a grand total of 152kg, I got first place. Training every day in our high school gym, I was one of the strongest especially considering bodyweight. When I went to college, I trained amongst people with the same limited capability. My very first American Open, I watched guys like Derrick Johnson and Aaron Adams lift and for some reason they were almost too far out of my reach to believe what they were doing was achievable AND I hadn’t seen their daily grind. I didn’t see them play sports and I didn’t see them train inside of the same environment as me. Because of my inability to connect to them, much of what they did on the platform I almost saw as mythical.
It wasn’t until I put myself in environments like CrossFit Deep Ellum with Eric Rosenstock or Spoon Barbell with Jose Carranza or Black Box Fort Worth with Dutch Lowy, that my horizons were broadened. I saw, for the first time, people in my stage of life and in similar situations lift decent weight. I wasn’t an anomaly. If you look at my event results following that time, my numbers skyrocketed. Inhad begun to see what was possible.nI can’t imagine how it would have felt to walk into a gym with Chad Vaughn or Caleb Williams. Guys in my walk of life lifting weights in my weight class that were competitive! Training with talent like that opens your eyes in a different way than ONLY competing against them.
This stroke of luck was pivotal for opening my eyes to see day in and day out what was possible.
My encouragement to y’all is to do the same. Every now and then, get out of your own training environment and go see what’s possible. Broaden your horizons. Seeing others similar to you, in the grimy, dark, daily grind of training, can be a massive catalyst for you to reach what you’re capable of. Get out of your comfort zone and see what’s out there! It may be the spark that causes you to see what’s possible.