I went to Atlanta with my mom to visit family there. I took a full week off from everything: training, diet, even social media. The feelings of melancholy were ever present, but I still wasn’t ready to admit to myself that I wasn’t happy. I had learned a lot about myself, and I had been forced to face new challenges. I told myself this was reward enough, but I didn’t believe it.
In September, I returned to Iceland. I tried to get my groove back with training. I wasn’t doing anything too serious, just trying to reestablish a routine. The Games had ended more than a month earlier and I still wasn’t feeling great. In years past, I could talk myself out of the post-Games blues. Even after my failure to qualify in 2014, I had been hungry to return to training. In these moments, the hunger was nowhere to be found. In fact, I was making excuses to draw out my absence from training even further. I went so far as to verbalize my distaste for training. I didn’t recognize the person I was.
It wasn’t just that I wasn’t excited to train—it was way more than that. I would shudder at the thought of my programming when I saw it. It looked impossible and everything felt like a chore. I was tired, but not a sleepy tired—I felt like I was in a fog. I would wake up feeling tired. I also had physical symptoms—as if my body was fighting something off. I tried to have confidence that my systems would come back online, but it never happened. Instead, I continued to get more tired. When it persisted for another month, I became concerned.
Then I hit an athletic rock bottom of sorts. For the first time in my life, I quit a workout. It wasn’t a Games event or Regional preparation, but rather a run-of-the mill 5-rounder. In the third round, I got nauseous and thought I was going to pass out. I stopped. This wasn’t just abnormal, this was cause for major concern. Something might be seriously wrong here.
I searched my mind for answers, latching onto a remembered tick bite I had gotten during the Games. Is it possible I contracted Lyme disease? Maybe I have a thyroid problem? Anything was on the table. I went to get a blood test and felt a strange desperation for a positive result. I wanted to have something that I could point to and say, “Aha, I knew it.” I wanted something tangible to fight. I needed something I could fix.
At the time, I was staying with my mom, who knows me as well as anyone. She could tell I was unhappy. She tried to help.
“You know,” she began, “you don’t have to do this.”
I was offended she would even speak the words.
“You can take this year off and come back stronger.”
Another part of my brain considered what she was saying. I had always wanted to pursue other things. Maybe now was the time. Maybe a year off would be good for me. I had two championships and plenty of accolades I was proud of. Returning to school sounded nice, and I had aspirations to do public speaking. Whatever path I chose, I didn’t want to feel like I did at that moment. I just wanted to take a break from being Katrin Davidsdottir for a second.
The blood results came back later that week. They were clear.
“You’re fine,” the doctor told me.
He was baffled at my disappointment. After all, this was good news. To me it signaled that the healing would have to happen between my ears. I decided that time away was not what I needed. I returned to New England to work myself back into full-time training.
* * *
When I got back to Boston, Matt O’Keefe took me out to dinner to catch up. O’Keefe is my agent, but above everything he is one of my best and closest friends. He is a mentor and a pillar of my support system and I wouldn’t be where I am without him. His athletes affectionately refer to him as “Dad.” O’Keefe is an actual father of two amazing children, and he brings his best qualities from that role into our relationship. He has held my hand through everything from the simple—like navigating basic contracts—to the slightly more complex—like forgetting to cash my check for the 2015 Games.
O’Keefe knows our whole team and he understands all the angles. He is my most valued sounding board. Because of my respect for him, our relationship is unique. He can be more direct than anyone else besides my father or grandfather, and his counsel always resonates with me. We talk almost daily and after some quick catching up, it was clear O’Keefe came prepared to slap me with a strong dose of tough love.
“Look, I know this year didn’t go like you wanted it to,” he started. “You can be upset and unhappy about it. That’s your right. But it’s done. You can’t change it, so you have to accept it.”
I was a little embarrassed. I didn’t know where he was going with this.
“Let’s change the things you can control and forget about what you can’t. You need to remember that you are Katrin Friggin’ Davidsdottir. If you want to be a champion, you’ve got to start acting like one!”
His voice was calm but stern. His eyes were intense. His words hit me like ice water. O’Keefe and I had shared many deep conversations over the course of our friendship, but I could feel his heart oozing out into the words he was telling me.
“Start acting like one.”
I wasn’t mad, because he was right. I had been wallowing in a pity party for months, moping as if Dave Castro would show up with a participation medal if I acted pitiful enough. There was no Lyme disease, nothing physically wrong. I just felt sorry for myself. I had forgotten what being a champion looked like.
Being a champion is not about holding your hand in the air and accepting a medal, it’s about the way you carry yourself every second of every day. Where I stood on the leaderboard was a single measurement, from one competition. I was allowing my disappointment to negatively affect months of training and potentially the next competition if I didn’t snap out of it.
I knew it wouldn’t happen overnight, but after that conversation with O’Keefe, I committed to honoring myself with my actions. I focused on improving little things in all areas of my life by sheer force of will. I read and listened to more books on sports psychology. I sought out positive messaging and spent less time on social media. For a while, it felt like I was faking it. I started acting like I was happy and telling Ben I felt great when he asked me before training sessions. Sometimes I was lying through my teeth.
I’ve always relied heavily on my team. More than ever during this time, I recognized how much I depended on them. Each, in their own way, came to support me and lift me up.
At the suggestion of my nutrition coach, Adee, I added gratitude to my journaling. Adee is a guru at tweaking dietary intake to increase athletic output. Her work can be seen on the physiques and witnessed in the performances of her athletes. Adee’s most impactful work, however, cannot be seen, because it’s not about results between an athlete’s clothes, but rather what’s between their ears. She’s as much my life coach, confidant, and close friend as she is my nutrition coach.
Adee has a degree in psychology and an incredibly empathetic nature. Her husband, Michael, is a highly intelligent and well-established athlete in his own right and a former addict. They inject the knowledge gained through their studies and collective experience to add a mindfulness and self-study complement to their programming and nutrition coaching. My weekly check-ins and phone calls start with nutrition talk, but often stretch into deep dives into my mind-set and performance in all areas of my life.
She sent me a book called The Five-Minute Journal to track my gratitude. In addition to three things I was grateful for, the journal tracked three things I wanted to accomplish, a lesson I had learned that day, and a few things that could have gone better. The journal was just one of her prescriptions that worked perfectly. I’ve always tried to focus on gratitude. By adding it to my daily routine, it became a habit. I had been fearful I wouldn’t be able to think of three things. In reality, I have to battle myself mentally to prioritize and decide which three things I’m most grateful for. I was in a great place.
Afi would also take longer trips to keep me company when I was in Boston. We would spend mornings together and he would come to the gym to watch me train.
His presence alone made me happy. The icing on the cake was when he decided to start training himself! He took great joy in showing me his progress and all the new party tricks he was learning. His enthusiasm and energy at seventy-six years old were contagious and invigorated my training.
O’Keefe kept me in check with tough love. He would call me out with brutal honesty when I was avoiding things I didn’t want to do, but needed to. He would listen attentively when I needed to talk. He acted as a buffer to the world of contracts, obligations, and media that could potentially distract my attention.
The stage was nearly set for Ben and me to focus on what we do best: training our asses off. But first, we had to exorcise the demons of the previous year. We had difficult conversations. At CFNE it’s taken for granted that obstacles are placed in your path for a reason. They force you to grow. Most people make the mistake of avoiding them at all costs. Facing them is the only way to improve and grow. We made notes of what we considered to be wins at the Games and dug in hard on the places we had been weak.
More than anything else in 2017, my performance lacked the ferocity that won me championships. We both blamed this on an overly cautious approach to the previous training year. We had decreased my workload in favor of staying healthy. It may sound insane to not follow that guideline, but I’m best when I don’t.
Pulling back in training had created two major issues. The first was physical. I was simply missing a gear and the result was an inability to push further in critical scenarios. The CrossFit Games are more than a test of raw athleticism. They’re a test of preparation and that’s where we had come up short. In most of the 2017 events in which I had gambled and lost, I couldn’t make a final push. In the worst-case scenarios, like Amanda .45 and the Madison Triplet, I was just fighting to stay alive. My physical shortcomings weren’t products of the moment, but rather of the year.
The other issue was mental. I realized that the doubts I had flying into Madison would have been there in Los Angeles, too. Or any city, for that matter. I doubted myself because I knew in my heart that I was less prepared than in years past. Every champion knows what their edge is, and mine is outworking the competition. Knowing that I had trained harder and longer than the women on either side of my starting mat is like mental armor. It calms me down and lets me get out of my head. It allows me to stop thinking and start performing.
There were related problems as well. We had taken my endurance recovery for granted. If you took my top five finishes from the ’16 Games (Ranch Trail Run, Double DT, etc.), it’s an easy mistake to make. But it’s still a mistake. As a result we deprioritized these assets in order to focus on power, strength, and speed. Two-hundred-meter dashes and 1-rep maxes replaced barbell cycling and Hinshaw’s workouts. With the gift of hindsight, we now recognized that my proficiency was the result of training in borderline excessive quantities.
The most important part of the whole equation was my relationship with Ben. Ben has become the most highly sought-after coach in competitive CrossFit. His online training through CompTrain.co reaches thousands of athletes across the globe. Additionally, well-known athletes and up-and-comers will travel to Boston to train with him. I had felt like I had less access to him in 2017, and we agreed that I needed more attention and coaching directly from him. He assured me I wasn’t expecting too much. He said that making a champion takes the focus of the whole team. We put a premium on my coaching.
It was time to look ahead. I asked Ben to make me work harder than he ever had. It’s a funny thing because I wasn’t even sure it was possible. He made sure I understood what I was asking. This made me nervous. I could see in Ben’s eyes that we were going to go places we had never been. Of course, I knew exactly what I was asking for and we agreed that training from previous years was going to look pedestrian in comparison to what he had in store. It’s a good thing I love hard work.
* * *
By the new year, I felt like myself again. My confidence was also returning, which was a direct result of our training. I had gained a different perspective on the 2017 Games. It wasn’t the result I wanted, but in a strange way it was becoming my favorite CrossFit Games ever. The uphill battle had put everything I believe in to the test. I had to fight from behind when the deck was stacked against me. I had to find positivity when everything seemed to be going wrong.
I learned more that year than in either of the years that I won. We talk about competitive excellence all the time. About giving your best effort regardless of the circumstances. The year 2017 was the first time I had not ended up on top of the leaderboard since I started training with Ben full-time. It’s easy to stay positive when things are going your way. But 2017 showed me what it feels like when the going gets tough.
I no longer had regrets. Those had transformed into the drive to perform better. You can only regret something and truly call it a mistake if you don’t learn and grow from it. I had learned hard lessons my first year in Madison and we were going to great lengths to address them. The feeling of hearing someone else’s name at the end of the weekend still bothered me. All these feelings fueled my motivation. They made me train even harder.
The motivation was critical because Ben was delivering on his promise. To say that we took a different approach is the understatement of the century. I have never worked harder in my life. We did more of everything. There was so much to get done that I would get up extra early just to make sure I could fit it all in. Otherwise I would feel overwhelmed just looking at my programming for the day. The intensity was through the roof as well. I was trying things I couldn’t have dreamed up myself. I would do whatever was assigned for the day, trusting fully that my coach knew what was best for me.
A few times a week I would look at my programming and think it was a typo. Or a bad joke. The weights seemed astronomical and the rep scheme Ben wanted me to keep within each minute seemed like science fiction. It was often like that with paces on the rower and bike, too.
After Ben reassured me that it was not a typo at all, I would let it sink in, and then I’d do it without a second thought. When I completed these seemingly impossible tasks, it was one of the best things ever. I would think, Dang, I can do that?!, and the bar would be raised in my mind. This is all money in the bank when I arrive at competition.
I even benefited when I came up short on these efforts. An EMOM is a workout where the tasks must be completed in a minute or less, with no rest between. Early in the year Ben assigned a twenty-minute EMOM of 18 calories on the Assault Bike and 18 GHD sit-ups. If you train with CrossFit, then just reading that might make you sick to your stomach. That was my reaction, anyway, and I thought there was no way I could pull it off. I hung in there and took it minute by minute. I eventually died, but not until I had made it way further than I thought I would. It recalibrated my mental framework again. I knew that if I was that close on my first try, then I could get there soon. I believed I could do it.
I pushed myself so hard on a few occasions that I was unsure whether I could recover. As I writhed on the floor in pain, Ben would often have to settle my fears and tell me that I was okay. It may sound crazy, but I needed to make sure that I felt that level of pain and discomfort. I tried to visit those feelings frequently.
“Uncomfortable isn’t a choice in our sport, but where you experience it is,” Ben would often say before asking, “Where do you want to experience it?”
I answered with my effort. I wanted to experience it here, in practice, where the stakes were low. It was a safe place to fail and learn. By throttling myself in training I become intimate with my capabilities. Then I could show up when it counts—under the lights at the Games.
I would spend the afternoons focused on recovery. Even after hours of stretching, rolling, and breathing I could still hardly pull myself together to drive home most nights. My muscles ached and cramped. I was sore all the time. At night I would fall onto my bed, exhausted. I couldn’t even lift a finger. I loved it.
My progress was
a testament to Ben and to Chris Hinshaw. Great coaches make you believe you can achieve things you previously thought were impossible. Both men have a gift for assessing an athlete’s abilities and providing workouts that perfectly complement where they are in their progress. Having these two in my corner gave me true confidence. They made me feel like I was preparing myself as best I could. After the sessions, they wrote I would look at myself in the mirror and say, “We did everything we possibly could to be the best we can be at the CrossFit Games.”
* * *
The East Regional in Albany, New York, was our first real opportunity to test my progress in 2018 against competition. The competition was one week away and we would be traveling soon. After our final day of training before we left to compete, Ben sat me down to talk.
“It’s time to test this wall,” he said. “Some days you may not feel your best. Some days you may not enjoy training. But you have still continued to show up. You have worked hard and given it everything you’ve got. Every day you have walked out of here fitter than you walked in. Every day you have laid one brick extremely well. Now we’ve built a solid wall, and it’s time to test it out.”
The last time I had competed in Albany, I was uncomfortable and battling injury. Now I was healthy and motivated. I could not wait to get on the competition floor and display the hard work I had been doing. I expected to do well, but the actual results left me at a loss for words. In order to qualify for the Games, athletes need to place in the top five at Regionals. I made history instead by winning all but one of the events and taking first place by a historic point margin. Two of my scores were the best in world. I was over the moon, and I could tell that Ben was pleased also.
More exciting than the results was how I felt throughout the weekend. When the other girls were running, I was sprinting. I was on attack the entire time; it felt like I was on another level. Performing six workouts in a weekend felt like a vacation compared to the work we had been doing in Natick.
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