Being My Best Was Never Enough

I can't say that I haven't always been competitive. Looking back, that streak seems to run from my early childhood straight through to my adult life.

I can't tell you whether everybody has a competitive side. There are countless reasons why people take up a sport or walk into a gym. I can only tell you about my own experience and what I have gradually come to realise about myself.

Figure Skating Wasn't Even the Plan

I have ADHD, so when I was young my parents thought it would be a good idea to channel some of that energy into a sport. They asked me what I wanted to do, and I chose ice hockey.

Off we went to the ice rink. Before I could start hockey, I had to complete the basic skating lessons: forwards, backwards and learning how to control myself on the ice. But before I ever made it into hockey, one of the figure-skating coaches noticed me and thought I could become a good figure skater.

That was how the journey started. It wasn't really the world I had chosen, but suddenly I had been thrust into it.

I progressed exceptionally quickly. Within roughly two years, I had passed the group lessons, moved into private coaching, developed my own routine and become part of NISA, the National Ice Skating Association.

I think this was where something started in me. I didn't just want to improve. I had to be the best. I became completely focused on outdoing and outperforming the other skaters around me.

Eventually, after around nine years of consistent effort, I worked my way up to championship level. I was genuinely very good at that point in my life. Nine years of commitment will usually do that.

But something strange happened once I reached that level. As soon as I felt there was nobody around me who was as good as I was, the passion disappeared.

One day, I finished a figure-skating lesson, sat down and untied my boots. I put them inside my bag exactly as I had done hundreds of times before. Then I left, and I never walked through those doors again.

Looking back, that leaves me with an uncomfortable question: did I love figure skating, or did I love having people to surpass?

Losing the Structure

After skating, I had no real direction. I was young, I had ADHD and a lot of energy, but the thing that had given all that energy somewhere to go had disappeared. For a while, life became exactly what you might expect: directionless and chaotic.

Then I found the gym.

I still remember the first day I stepped inside one. I saw a group of muscular men standing together, laughing and chatting. They were all wearing vests, they all had tattoos and, from where I was standing, they looked as though they had their lives planned out. I knew nothing about them, but that was how they appeared to me. At that exact moment, I knew I wanted that.

The sport had changed, but my mentality hadn't. Once again, I didn't only want to take part. I wanted to become the best. I wanted to prove something, although I probably couldn't have explained exactly what. I wanted to reach a point where I could look at myself and think, Yeah, I did that.

The gym demanded something simple from me: I had to turn up. So that is what I did. I trained consistently, tried different methods and carried on through stress, grief, heartbreak and some of the hardest periods of my life.

There is something about the gym that works particularly well for my mind. It gives me one objective to focus on. The weights are measurable, the environment is structured and the result usually reflects the work you have put in. Whatever else is happening outside, the bar still weighs what it weighs.

When Strong Still Wasn't Strong Enough

For years, my idea of being the best revolved around strength. At around 94 kg bodyweight, I built a 170 kg bench press, a 230 kg squat and a 250 kg deadlift.

I am not pretending those are world-record numbers. I am not a national-level powerlifter, and there are people far stronger than me. But compared with the general population and the average commercial gym, those are strong lifts. In most ordinary gyms, there probably aren't many people moving the same numbers.

The problem was that reaching them never produced a lasting feeling of being strong enough. Rather than stopping to appreciate what I had achieved, my mind immediately moved to the next question: how much stronger could I become?

Then the standard changed. Being the strongest was no longer enough; I wanted to look the best as well. I went through extreme weight cuts trying to become lean enough that I could take my top off in a room and everybody would immediately know that I trained.

Even when I achieved that look, it still didn't settle anything. The finish line had simply moved again.

Comparing Myself With the Exceptional

Constant exposure to elite lifters and elite physiques has played a part in that. This didn't begin with Instagram. When I was younger, I watched people such as Brian Shaw and Arnold Schwarzenegger and thought, That is what I want to be.

Watch Brian Shaw competing alongside other huge strongmen and you can lose all sense of how enormous he really is. Everybody around him is exceptional, so exceptional starts to look normal. Arnold represents something different again: shape, muscularity and one of the most famous physiques ever built. One moment I could be comparing my strength with Brian Shaw, the next my physique with Arnold, and then my body fat with somebody photographed under perfect lighting in competition condition.

Those aren't even the same destination. I was taking the best individual quality from different elite people and using each one as the standard for a different part of myself. No single person could win that competition.

Social media has intensified it. We have all seen the reels describing a 100 kg bench press as light weight, even though that lift would stand out in most ordinary gyms. I am not blaming athletes or influencers for my decisions, but when the people on your screen become your reference group, exceptional achievement begins to look average.

That may be why strength training never ended for me in the way figure skating did. Figure skating eventually ran out of people around me to beat. Social media makes sure the gym never does.

Productive and Destructive at the Same Time

This mentality can be extremely productive and destructive at exactly the same time, which is the irony of it.

When I have one clear objective, I can focus all my attention on it. That focus helped me train consistently for years, transform my body and build legitimate strength. When I reached a plateau, I didn't automatically quit. I changed my routine, studied different methods and tried to understand what I was doing wrong.

Reading Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, 3rd Edition was a godsend. It taught me a huge amount of new material and showed me that progress wasn't always about blindly doing more. Sometimes I needed better information and a more intelligent approach.

But when a goal started slipping away, that same focus could push me towards extremes. I spent hours in the gym, forced extreme weight cuts and weight gains, and eventually experimented with PEDs. Ordinary progress didn't always feel fast enough because ordinary progress wasn't being compared with an ordinary standard.

I have seen the same reaction outside the gym. When a former partner asked for space, my mind treated that distance like another problem I could solve: turn up, call and try harder. But another person isn't a training programme, and their decision isn't a plateau for me to overcome. It helped me recognise the wider pattern. When things are progressing, my intensity looks like discipline. When I feel control slipping away, discipline can become desperation.

The gym taught me that persistence solves a lot of problems. Growing older has taught me that persistence isn't always the answer. Sometimes strength means pushing harder. Sometimes it means adapting, stepping back or accepting that greater effort could cause greater damage.

So, Did Anything Change?

As I have grown older, I have realised that I can't continue progressing by endlessly measuring myself against exceptional people. The competitive streak is still there. I still chase numbers in the gym, and part of me probably always will want to be the best. But another number on the bar has never permanently removed the feeling of not being enough.

What needs to change isn't necessarily my ambition. It is what I compare my best against.

These days, I measure my best by what I am genuinely capable of giving at that particular time. That doesn't always mean beating an old personal record. Sometimes it means training intelligently around an injury, remaining consistent through a difficult period or refusing to take an extreme route simply because progress feels slow.

I still start little projects and become curious about how far I can take them. In complete honesty, this entire website began as one of those projects. I had an idea, focused my attention on it and wanted to see what I could build. That same competitive energy that once carried me through figure skating and into strength training is now helping me build Kravix.

I don't think I would want to lose that part of myself. It helped me reach championship level in skating, build a strong body and continue moving during periods when other areas of my life felt chaotic. But being my best and being the best are not the same thing.

Some days my best might mean chasing another kilogram in the gym. On another day, it might mean writing an article, developing this website or simply giving what I can when I don't feel at my strongest.

I will probably always look at something difficult and wonder how far I could take it. The difference now is that I am trying to stop using somebody else's best as evidence that mine isn't enough.

My competitive nature was never the enemy. The problem was measuring myself against contests I could never win.