Skillet Steak with Spring Vegetables and Mint Chimichurri

Well…it has been 6 (and a half) months folks.  6 months with no blog posts whatsoever.  I know.  Shame on me.  I SWEAR I’ve had several good reasons.  Without making excuses (because what good does that do anyone?), it’s obviously about time I get my a$$ back into gear and get back on my blogging train.  I’ve actually missed it so much.

The past 6 months for me have been a little insane (long days filled with several panic attacks or meltdowns which the BF can attest to).  Six months where no matter how many times I said I would sit down and blog (and even took several foodo shoots hoping to be able to find the time to edit my photos), the rest of what was on my plate just took over.

Things like studying for four of those months for a Manual Therapy (i.e. physio) course that I took and had no idea would be so time consuming.

Or, the fact that since I’ve started working as a physio, I have been just a little stressed…as in more so than usual.

Imagine being the newbie physio in a clinic famous for hiring ‘magicians’, surrounded by others far more experienced than yourself, and you have a patient sitting in front of you who has paid quite a bit of money to see you saying that they’ve come to the clinic because they’ve heard of its reputation.  Or, worse, imagine them telling you that they’re seeing YOU because they’ve been told by someone that you’re the best.  Nope. No pressure at all.

Seven months in, and I have to be honest that I’m still struggling.  But that’s also because I have yet to see two patients come in with exactly the same issues.  Yes, two people may have the same condition/syndrome on paper, but how they got that injury and how it’s affecting their movement now will be different based on, amongst several things, their habits, relevant health conditions, lifestyle, and various motor patterns that have been engrained in them their entire lives.  In other words, every case is different and therefore warrants being treated as such.

Everyone says that new jobs come with a learning curve.  This is true.  But the issue I’ve been struggling with is, how can you say that there is a learning curve to a job where every patient seems to present as a curve ball?

Add to that the fact that most clinics operate on a 60-minute eval, 30-minute follow-up treatment model which REALLY doesn’t give a physio (of any skill level) a lot of time to come up with a complete strategy.  Imagine doing that alone for 8+ hours a day.  Then you add the pressure imposed by the patients’ expectations and you have a snippet of what the past 7 months has been like for me.

Thankfully (I guess) based on what I’ve heard from my fellow physios, this is par for the course.  From where I’m sitting right now, I’m not sure that feeling will ever go away.  I also have a feeling that if I’m doing my job right, it shouldn’t entirely go away.  The difference is that now, I’m actually ok with that!  With the number of patients that have come back saying that I have not only hit the bullseye but reduced their pain significantly within a couple of treatments, I’m starting to trust my intuition when it comes to treating patients.  And (dare I say), I may actually be starting to truly enjoy my job!  Woot woot!

There was also the inextricably entwined stressful joy that comes with competing in the CrossFit Open.  I love competing in the Open every year.  The workouts are gruelling (because it wouldn’t be a competition if they weren’t) in a fun kind of way, but they also come with the reward of showing you how much you’ve improved fitness-wise, as well as test your grit/mental fortitude.  And if you’re really lucky (or just observant) they will teach you several lessons at the same time.   This year, I didn’t finish any ‘fitter’ than I did last year (in fact, I finished worse in my region), but I (re-)learned two major lessons.

My first lesson was a personal one and is one of which I think we often need to be reminded.  Namely, surround yourself ONLY with those who bring you up.  I had been working with a coach all year who ultimately decided on his own that my lifestyle didn’t suit what he thought it needed to be, and as a result, benched me (without telling me) in terms of prepping for the Open.  When I finally realized his game and confronted him about it (on several occasions), he would tell me my lifestyle was built to fail.  Stupidly, I let him tell me that for several months, all the while feeling worse and worse about myself and my abilities (which unfortunately also bled over into the serious ‘imposter syndrome’ I mentioned above).

After the first Open workout, he reminded me of his opinions re: my lifestyle and told me I should accept whatever scores I get in this year’s Open and not to expect better of myself.  That was enough for me.  Every day, I set out to be better in some way than I was the day before.  I believe in doing this so much that I actually have it tattooed on my forearm.  Having someone tell me not to follow my ‘why’ was not someone I could keep in my life.

It may have taken me 4 months, but I suddenly realized that SO MUCH of my overall stress and shitty lifestyle was also coming from trying to bend to the will of my coach and not making my life work for me.  Furthermore, I had had enough of having someone else in my life telling me how I should live, think, and act in order to get their support (particularly when that person’s role IS to be supportive). So we parted ways; amicably.

And let me tell you, going through the Open with no programming, no plan, and no coach (even if I am one myself) sucked and made it even more stressful than it usually is.  Thankfully, I had my CrossFit Westmount crew (and the BF) to cheer me on and keep me afloat, because I actually spent most of the Open feeling a little lost.

I’ve since found myself a new set of (utterly positive, flexible, and open-minded) coaches at Brute Strength who bring the whole package; excellent, well-rounded CrossFit programming provided by leading experts in the sport, injury prevention training, mindset coaching, mobility training, and, if I wanted/needed it, access to nutrition guidance or even physio advice.  I am now having more fun in the gym than I’ve had in YEARS, and am hitting PRs left, right, and centre.

So like I said, surround yourself with those who bring you up and perhaps, in a birds-of-a-feather-like way, you too will find yourself soaring higher.

The other lesson I learned is that ‘Never’ is a powerfully limiting word.  Each year that I’ve competed in the Open, I’ve struggled with the Chest-to-Bar workout.  And each year, the Chest-to-Bar workout is the one that I would repeat, with disappointing results.  True to form this year, I walked away from the Chest-to-Bar workout feeling as if I was capable of so much more, and struggling with whether or not I should repeat it.  I found myself saying defeatedly, “Every year I repeat the workout and I never do better”.  When I heard myself saying that ‘never’ for the third or fourth time, I decided no more and went to the gym to re-do it.  I dug deep and I kicked that ‘Never’ to the curb.  Not only did I beat my previous score, but I added a further 17 repetitions.

For most of you reading this, you probably think I’m crazy to care this much about my sport. (Rest assured, I am. But what athlete isn’t crazy; even an amateur-ish one like myself?)

Some of you may have no idea what I’m talking about when it comes to the Open or Chest-to-Bar pull ups, etc.  (And that’s totally ok.)

Many of you probably think the life lessons in the story are completely cliché.  (Quite frankly, they probably are.)  But I’m sharing the story anyway just on the off chance that some of you may need a reminder…

In any case…besides the Manual Therapy course, a touch of new-career jitters, and the Open, the other things I’ve been up to the past few months have been teensy things like…:

• Setting up my own physio business within my gym, CrossFit Westmount
• Running a 7-Week Nutrition Challenge for my gym
• A subsequent Nutrition coaching project at CrossFit Westmount which we are JUST getting off the ground
• A different physio course to learn a European fascial release technique (SO cool btw)
• AND…(possibly best of all) scoring the amazing opportunity teaching physio assistant students at Dawson college here in MTL.

And, somehow, I managed to do all of this while training 8-10 hours a week (most weeks), coaching, cooking, and working a full-time physio job (oh! and sleeping 6-8 hours a night). Lol.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m still busy as all hell.  I pretty much don’t know how to sit still.  Blogging is actually my budgeted ‘sitting still’ time, and since I haven’t been blogging for 6 months, you probably have a really good idea of how much time I’ve spent on my couch lately.  (Though, I have to say that the stress that I was dealing with for the past 6 months pretty much killed any creative spark I may have had.)

But now that I’ve finished my Manual Therapy course, and have had a couple of weeks to decompress and get my life back into a regular rhythm, I can begin to imagine blogging again on a (slightly) more regular basis!  More to the point, my stress levels have fallen from critical to my normal moderately-high, which means my creative side is dying to be nurtured!

So…without further ado (and I promise future posts will not be NEARLY as heartfelt or long…I hope)…the following recipe is one that I’ve been saving since last year!  I took the photos during the last BBQ I managed to have in my garden last fall, and saved it JUST for this time of year when the asparagus is popping out the ground and peas are every where in the farmer’s markets (and when we can all dream of BBQ-ing again)!

This recipe for Skillet Steak with Spring Vegetables and Mint Chimichurri is a dead simple recipe that can be cooked in your kitchen or, if you’re like me and love BBQs, can also be grilled on the ‘Q’.  Hope you enjoy folks!

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And that is that folks!  Am hoping to get posts out on a semi-regular basis now.  I’ve even been recipe-testing a few things the past couple of weeks so stay tuned!

Per usual, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, leave them below in the comments section, or feel free to email me!  I would love to hear from you!

Ciao for now!