“LET’S GO MAKE SOME BAD DECISIONS”

The title for this post is a quote I said to my wife right before we ran her first Murph workout together.  She had been training in prep for it for a few months, coming in as a half marathon runner, so the run was no concern.  We had been building up her pull ups in prep, and had spent time drilling the SSB squat just to help learn to overcome some misery, which became pretty critical in gritting out the workout.  After the first mile run, she sure did make a bad decision, because she hit 10 solid (band assisted) pull ups in the first set and said “I’m going to keep that up and get the 100 done in 10 sets”.  I’ve been there: I knew exactly how that was going to go.  Next set was something like 8, then 6, and now we were at 3s and 5s.  But hey: now it was done, and all we had left was 200 push ups and 300 squats and another mile run…yay. 

To drive the point home, we listened to this album the whole time.  It's a great one too: go get it.

This is just becoming storytime now, but let’s keep that going.  Some of my readers out there might be going “Dude, you’ve done Murph before, you were training your wife, you know her capabilities: WHY didn’t you tell her that 10x10 was a bad strategy?  Why didn’t you coach her to go submax and not burn out early?”  Because bad decisions are how we GROW: literally and otherwise.  Look, maybe the rest of you are super smart and mature, but I’m basically a child in a 30+ year old body, and if I just hear not to do something, that doesn’t register, but when I DO the thing I’m not supposed to do and I find out WHY, I LEARN that lesson for sure.  Because I knew not to burnout on Murph before the first time I did it…and I still burned out.  Because I needed to MAKE that bad decisions to learn the lesson of it.  And if I just told my wife “hey, no, that’s a bad idea: don’t do that”, MAYBE she woulda listened to me.  But if she did, I KNOW she woudla resented me for it (rightfully so), because I had robbed her of an opportunity to learn.  She woudla spent the rest of the workout thinking “Man, I HAD that 10x10.  Why wouldn’t he let me do it.”  Instead, she got to learn her limitations and find out what happens when you burn out on pull ups in Murph: a rite of passage, as far as the workout goes.

But that’s also why I love the woman, because she’s an athlete and will rush right into those bad decisions.  Because there’s a lot of folks out there that are so paralyzed with fear of making a bad decision that they refuse to make ANY decision.  Wanna know the worse decision you can make?  None.  At least a bad decision has you moving in A direction.  Even if it’s not the right one, it’s STILL movement, and sometimes we need to move backwards or sideways before we can move forward, but staying still is certainly NOT getting us somewhere.  There’s nothing wrong with making a bad decision, as long as we treat it as a learning opportunity.

What have we learned?

But therein lies the issue: our ego.  And it works in two different ways (before I go any further, I just wanna say that one of the little joys I get out of writing a blog is that I get to start sentences and paragraphs with “and” and “but” as much as I want and no one can stop me).  First, people can have such a low opinion of their intelligence that they doubt their ability to even make a GOOD decision, and assume all of their decisions will be bad or wrong.  These people, in turn, refuse to make ANY decision.  Dude, give yourself SOME credit.  You made it THIS far in life: clearly you can make a good decision every once in a while.  But then, there are those that suffer from the opposite issue: they refuse to acknowledge WHEN they made a bad decision.  The action is made, it was a total bust, but to spare their egos the ache of failure, they blame everyone BUT themselves.  In turn, they miss the value of the lesson.  Learning opportunity wasted.

This is why I say “let’s go make some bad decisions”.  Cut to the chase and declare the decision a bad one BEFORE you set out.  Because you know what happens when you f**k up a bad decision?  It accidentally becomes a GOOD one.  Sunuvabitch, I was trying to get rhabdomyolysis and all that happened was my conditioning shot through the roof!  I was trying to overtrain and instead I just got bigger and stronger than I ever thought possible.  But meanwhile, if it turns out your bad decision WAS a bad decision, acknowledging it at the start saves your ego and you get to right away benefit from the lesson contained IN that decision.  You don’t have to save it, you don’t have to defend it, you don’t have to damage control or spin it: you KNEW, from the start, that this was a bad decision: now we just have to get the benefit from it.

Who DIDN'T know this was a bad decision at the start?

And to end the story that I started: once my wife and I were no longer laying on the floor staring into space questioning ourselves, so told me that me saying “Let’s go make some bad decisions” motivated her through the workout.  There were times where she was questioning if she could actually make it through, but she pushed all the way through because she no longer needed to worry if she was making the right choice: she KNEW it was a bad one, so that’s one less thing to worry about.  She thanked me for not talking her out of the 10x10 pull ups, and definitely learned the lesson and will apply it to Murph next yet (another bad decision made already!)  And, as she discovered by not being able to straighten her arms for a week, it was DEFINITELY a bad decision, and a good lesson learned.