Crossfit Thoughts
In the summer of 2010, I was a mess: heartbroken and barely functional. Various advice-givers recommended fitness as a great way to recover from being really sad. I tried to take up running, but it turned out that running made me both really sad and really tired. I’d heard that Crossfit involved jumping on boxes, and I liked jumping and was desperate for distraction, so I Googled “crossfit philadelphia” and signed up for an intro class at Crossfit South Philly, just a few blocks from my apartment.
I was weak. Weaker than everyone else in my on-ramp class. I couldn’t lift a 35-pound bar over my head. I couldn’t do a pushup. I certainly couldn’t do a pull-up. The first week was miserable–not because they pushed me particularly hard (we did mostly bodyweight exercises), but because I hadn’t been using my muscles for years. My “fitness regimen” until that point had been the typical “don’t-get-fat” routine prescribed by women’s health magazines: elliptical, Pilates, high reps of low weights on the machines.
I improved slowly. Very slowly. In fact, if I did some massive data entry, I could tell you exactly how slowly, because in Crossfit you compulsively track your progress. I recorded how much I lifted, how fast I ran, how many pushups I could do. Eventually I could lift the 35 pound bar, then then the 45 pound bar, then–miraculously–even more. Getting stronger felt amazing, especially for someone who’d never thought of themselves as athletic. I think that tracking is a key to Crossfit’s success because you can see yourself improving. My friends who run say that there’s a similar aspect to running: measurable progress that will happen inevitably as long as you keep showing up and doing what you’re supposed to do. I got my first unassisted pull-up on March 3, 2011, nine months after I started Crossfit.
Joining Crossfit was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life. I didn’t lose weight, I didn’t make lots of new Crossfit friends, I didn’t start eating strict Paleo. But as cliched as it sounds, Crossfit made me respect my body. I’d always been indifferent-to-negative towards my body: on good days I felt not-fat, on bad days I felt shaped-wrong. Now, though, I understand that the ways my body is different from Society’s Ideal Lady Body aren’t problems, they are BONUSES. Because my quads are bigger-than-normal, I am really good at squatting. It turns out I just needed to figure out what my body was good at. And that’s ultimately why Crossfit is so awesome. You do so many things (“constantly varied functional fitness”) that everyone is good at something. Maybe it’s sprinting, maybe it’s ring dips, maybe it’s deadlifts, but at some point in your time at Crossfit you will have this moment of “Shit! I am killing this!” And for me, an unheralded but fantastic aspect of Crossfit is that how good someone is at a given skill has no relation to how thin they are. It has to do with body composition, fitness background, coordination–but absolutely nothing to do with the presence or absence of a visible six-pack. For an hour each day, I got to watch a huge range of woman-shapes and woman-sizes being awesome at working out. And seeing that over and over again finally broke my knee-jerk association between “being healthy” and “being skinny.”
Epilogue: I was a member of Crossfit South Philly (later rebranded to Fearless Athletics) for exactly three years. In July of 2013, I moved to DC and joined the closest Crossfit gym. Maybe I’d gotten spoiled at CFSP, but I hated it. Very little Olympic lifting, the coaching was sub-par, and nobody there made any real effort to talk to me. Going made me sad, so I stopped, because another thing Crossfit taught me was that working out should be fun. Since March, I’ve been lifting on my own at Balance Gym in Thomas Circle. Well, sort of on my own: I pay one of my former trainers at Crossfit South Philly to write me a 5x-a-week training program that involves mostly lifting and some short (under 10 minutes) high-intensity training. I love it–I like focusing on strength, I like working out on my own time, and to be totally honest I like being one of the only women on the Olympic platform. It feels awesome to be strong.
