Celebrating Failure

1) Tell us about a time this past semester that you failed -- whether in this class, or outside of this class. Don't spare any details! It'd be even better if there was something you tried several times this semester, and failed each time. 

I failed at losing weight, and it is something I keep failing at because I keep boomeranging back to where I started. 

By April 1, when I left my job at the country club, I was 205lbs, a personal high. At 5'7" and 28 years old, this is not a healthy weight, and in addition to the health risk I was upset I couldn't fit into my clothes anymore. I was convinced it was my schedule, work kept adding more hours and any free time went to finishing up schoolwork. I simply didn't have time to cook, workout or lead a healthy, balanced life.

When I left the club, I purposely didn't take a new job right away. My new job was my body and starting on April 2, I was eating vegan and working out daily at orange theory, an intense 1-hour workout class. I was also taking supplements to curb my appetite. I was going from zero to sixty to make as much difference as I could as soon as possible.

At first, it was working and I lost 20 pounds in the first two months. I saw 185 on the scale and was fitting into a size 12, down from 14. I was doing it! For the first time in my life, this was going to be permanent, I promised myself. I meant it. Even though I'd failed over and over, this time would be different. This was my lifestyle change.

Then in June I was studying at home for a week, cramming in the schoolwork in preparation for a week of vacation. In order to save time, my boyfriend and I decided to do the P90X videos at home, instead of going to the gym or orange theory. About the third or fourth day is the Plyo day. I'd never done a Plyo workout, but it turns out it's a lot of jumping around on one leg and then the other, and we have a tile floor.

I woke up the next morning with terrible pain in my knee and a clicking sound when I bent the knee. The knee hurt all the time for weeks, going up or down the stairs of my home hurt. Walking the dog hurt. Everything hurt, and working out definitely hurt. The doctor took an x-ray, ordered an MRI and told me no squats, lunges, stairs, working out, etc. for now and probably ever, expecting I had a torn meniscus.

I felt my world crumble down. Without exercise, I had no way to fight off the heavy foods of my European vacation and worse (or better?) the buffet and endless party that is a tropical cruise. I saw the weight gain looming, and it did.

The weight returned, slowly, like usual, and I was back where I started. Except now, working out to burn off the weight isn't the same kind of option. Thankfully, the MRI report indicates its likely an MCL sprain and the doctor says to go easy on my knee for three months and it will heal. But what will happen to my weight in those three months?

2) Tell us what you learned from it. 

I wish I could say I learned how to succeed at it, identified whatever it is I've been doing wrong. I didn't. But I did learn a lot about the anatomy of the knee, and I'm continuing to learn about it. And I learned that if it had been a torn meniscus, that doesn't exactly heal, and might have required surgery or some level of "just living with it." A sprained MCL is much better problem to have because it will heal and I can have a normal activity level again. I do however need to be careful of the existing wear and tear on my cartilage if I want to keep using that cartilage for the rest of my life. So it could have been much worse, I need to be thankful for that. And I should have stayed positive! Until we got the MRI we assumed the worse and took it easy on my knee, which is the right thing to do physically but I should have had a positive attitude. No harm would have come of it and I could have avoided being heartbroken that my fledging running hobby was over faster than it begun.

I'm meeting with a physical therapist this week to come up with activities I can do to keep my cardio going - likely swimming - and what exercises will strengthen the supporting muscles around my cartilage to help it out during the rest of my lifetime.

I learned the importance of a mentality of focusing on what you can do, not what you can't do.

3) Reflect, in general, on what you think about failure. Failure is hard, isn't it? It's embarrassing, sure, but it also means that we have to change something about ourselves. Talk about how you handle failure (emotionally, behaviorally). Finally, talk about how this class has changed your perspective on failure -- are you more likely to take a risk now than you were four months ago? 

Although my philosophy on failure is "learn from failures and celebrate failures and successes" it is harder said than done. Especially for us "high achiever" types who are very self-critical. In reality, failure feels like a dark, dark, cold place. It's probably somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, where things are eerily perfectly quiet and pitch black.

But you don't get to stay there forever swimming in self-pity. A little light comes along and distracts you and leads you away, and next thing you know you're not in that sad place. You're somewhere else having a grand old time and you look back at the failure place and see it's not at the bottom of the ocean, but in a beautiful reef and you were just being silly not realizing how well off you were when you thought it was the end of the world. Silly me!

I don't know that this class helped me with my perspective about failure, it affected more my "get 'er done" mentality of tackling the assignments and pushing my comfort zone.  This might be because work was not graded on quality, but instead bravery (i.e. how many assignments you took on). In the past I've failed math quizzes or the everest expedition and sulked for a few days, feeling like a failure, and then ramped up speed to make sure I finished on top, but that was in reaction to the traditional grading model or even performance reviews at work.