Embrace the Suck

by Stephen Madden

  I do CrossFit three or four times a week. And almost without fail, I find myself sprawled on the floor afterward. Some quick math shows that to be somewhere around two hundred opportunities to study the ceiling of the Annex in the past year, to learn its intricacies while life, in the form of precious oxygen, seeps back into me. I have noticed that as the year has progressed my sessions on the floor have gotten shorter, at least the ones at the end of the workout. That’s a sign that my body is adapting to the rigors of the workout. I’m getting in shape. Which is the point. But I’m rarely happy with my performance. I can almost always find something to tweak, someone to beat.

  In some ways, the warm-up is the worst part of the hour. Most mornings, not fifteen minutes before I start my routine on the floor, I am still in a perfectly warm bed. The alarm sends a staticky reminder to get up. I slump into shorts and a T-shirt, maybe a sweatshirt if it’s cold, and drive the 3.3 miles from my house to the Annex. I do not drink coffee beforehand, for almost certainly I’d puke it back up mid-workout, which I’d figured out the hard way. For most of the year, I drive Shunpike Road in darkness, greeted by the inkling of dawn only in summer. My muscles stiff from sleep, middle age, and the last workout, the warm-up serves as a way to gradually work out the kinks, raise my body’s internal temperature, and get my heart and lungs going. As such, I approach it very deliberately.

  There’s a digital clock at one end of the gym, one that dictates and defines everything that happens there. The fact that the clock is sold by a company called Again, Faster, speaks louder than anything what CrossFit is all about. Repeat it, and do it better this time. At 5:32, or 5:33, the coach will call out, “All right, guys, let’s get started,” and we’ll slowly put away the foam rollers and bands we were using to coax life into our muscles. We’ll gather at a small whiteboard near the turf and look at a list of exercises designed to get us moving, and ready to do the much harder work to come.

  First comes twenty yards of what someone, somewhere, decided was the World’s Greatest Stretch, or WGS. You toe the duct-taped mark at one end of the turf field, and lift one leg so you can hug that knee to your chest. Every muscle in that leg responds, sometimes groaning at the exertion, sometimes purring with the gentle call to life. You then shoot that leg forward into a long lunge, with the other leg splayed out behind you, and then twist gently at the waist to one side, then the other, loosening up your midsection and your hips. You take the elbow of the arm closest to your forward leg and try to touch it to the ground, down near that foot, and then reach the other hand to the sky, stretching every muscle in the body. Then you stand up, slowly, and repeat the process, all the way down to the other duct-taped mark, ten yards distant. You turn around, and you go back.

  There you pick up a four-foot section of white, narrow-gauge PVC pipe slightly thicker than a broom handle to do some pass-throughs and some overhead squats. You hold the pipe up over your head, arms spread wide. Shrug your shoulders, then rotate the pipe behind you, keeping your hands toward the ends of the pipe, toward your lower back so that your shoulders and chest open up wide. Pause for a second, then bring the pipe back over head and in front of you, toward your waist. Repeat this ten or fifteen times until your upper body is nice and loose.

  Then assume the overhead position again, but this time, with your feet planted shoulder width apart, squat down, weight on your heels, the pipe overhead and slightly behind your head so that someone standing next to you can see your ears jutting in front of your arms. Stay down in this squat so that your hips and shoulders loosen up. Don’t be afraid to hang out down there. Remember, you’re warming up, loosening up. Keep the weight on your heels so that you can easily wiggle your toes or slip a magazine under them. Then, weight still on your heels and your elbows locked overhead, stand up, nice and slowly. Repeat the whole thing ten times or so. Your hips will be opened up and loosened when you’re done.

  Go back to the duct tape and bend over and touch your toes. Slowly, slowly, slowly inch your fingertips forward, forward until you are flat out like a plank. Yes, your hamstrings will scream at first, but that pain will dissipate as your body weight shifts to your arms and shoulders, which will take up the screaming duties. Perform a push-up, then, with your weight on your hands, start slowly walking your feet toward your hands so that you feel your hamstrings stretching again. Walk them in until you get them as close to your hands as your hammies allow. Stand up, shake it out, and repeat until you reach the distant piece of duct tape, then turn around and do it again.

  All this is done to the sound of only music. Nobody is awake enough yet to carry on a cogent conversation besides assorted grunts of assertion that the warm-up hurts. The music playing at this point is usually something upbeat but not over-the-top hard-core—that comes later when the workout begins in earnest. If there is a conversation, it almost invariably is about a game from the night before. There are a few other Red Sox fans here, and one of them, JP, stays up to watch each Sox game. I don’t know when he sleeps. Anne tells me there’s more talking at later WODs. The 6:30 class has the benefit of an extra hour of sleep, and daylight, to stir conversation, and the 8:45 a.m. class, made up almost entirely of women, is noted for its chatty warm-ups. But at 5:30, we’re all grunts and groans.

  We’re not done. Head to the rubber mats, near the clock, which coach has set to count down from one minute. Pick up a jump rope and, as soon as the clock starts, commence bouncing up and over it like a boxer. You can probably get in 150 or so reps before the clock counts down. Miracle of miracle, it’s been set to immediately count down from ten seconds, just enough time for you to drop into the CrossFit sit-up position—flat on your back, soles of your feet butterflied near your crotch, arms stretched out on the floor behind you—so that you can snap out sit-ups for the next minute, bringing your hands from the floor behind you to the floor in front of your feet. The clock resets, and you move to the push-up position. Your body is a plank, and your nose and chest touch the ground before your arms shoot up and your elbows straighten. “All the way up, all the way down,” coach murmurs. One minute of push-ups is way harder than a minute of sit-ups. You then head to the pull-up bar, and do as many pull-ups as you can in a minute. That’s not many for me, but I can get in ten good ones as long as I jump up to the bar each time.

  Congratulations. It’s been fifteen minutes, and you’re sweating mildly, your breath a little hurried but not uncomfortably so. You’re warmed up. You’re ready to start your WOD, or Workout of the Day.

  But first, grab the PVC pipe again and form a circle. It’s time to go over the weightlifting move at the heart of the strength portion of the WOD. We do this before every weightlifting session, which take place four days a week. If there is one consistent and persistent complaint about CrossFit, it is that the complex Olympic weight moves that form the basis of the regimen’s strength exercises are simply too difficult to master properly, are not coached properly, and that too many people are trying to push too much weight too soon and are at risk of getting seriously hurt. It’s a tough impulse to control. At the Annex, the coaches try to do so by stressing the importance of proper form, and by constantly preaching the mantra “master the move and the weight will follow.” It’s easy to say but hard to enforce when your pupils are aggressive middle-aged men, most of them titans of Wall Street who didn’t achieve their posts in life by listening to people.

  Yet here we are, with the plastic PVC pipes laid across our shoulders, as coach talks us then walks us through the fundamentals of a proper back squat. Feet shoulder width apart. Stand up straight. Chest and shoulders upright, like a proud gorilla. Weight on the heels so you can wiggle your toes; head and chest and shoulders up; don’t let the knees go ahead of your toes. Squat all the way down so that the crease formed by your hip and leg is below your knee. Then stand back up, all the way up, so that you can push your hips forward by squeezing your butt cheeks together. That’s a proper back squat.

  So we move over to the weight racks, and som
e of us buddy up with guys who are doing similar weights. I work with Joe and Leo; Steve Gephart works with Gerry on massive amounts of weight done with flawless form; the Twins, Martin and Edwin, work together; and some of the new guys work alone or in pairs. We use empty 45-pound bars laid across our backs to continue the warm-up, getting used to the movement performed with a little bit of weight. Someone turns up the music and puts it on a slightly more aggressive, or at least upbeat, channel, like the Foo Fighters or AC/DC channels on Pandora. There’s more talking now as everyone comes alive and wakes up, and more ball-busting mixed in with the shouts of encouragement as the loads increase. Five reps at 135 pounds, another five at 155 pounds, the clanks of the bars as the lifters resettle them on the stanchions, the exhalations of guys pushing up, straining, against the loads as “There Goes My Hero” blares and someone puffs “Fuckfuckfuckfuck” like the little engine that could. Then it’s on to three sets of three, adding a little bit of weight each time. Sometimes a guy will rack the load and smile dreamily as stars fill the fringes of his field of vision, as if he had just taken a very, very big hit off a spliff. Sometimes a guy will drop down and rise, slowly, like a foal standing up for the first time just seconds after being born, his legs shaking and the bar tipping crazily to one side. And sometimes, but not very often, a guy will go down with a load and not be able to get back up without the help of his friends rushing to his aid to help him finish the lift.

  Depending on the weight move, the load, and the weather, lifting can be a gross, sweaty mess of caked chalk and slippery bars and mats. And even though some guys were squatting well over their body weights today, nobody seems too messed up by the lifting, just energized and ready to move on to the last part of the hour: the WOD.

  One of the founding precepts of CrossFit is that the workouts should be constantly varied. So you’ll never do the same exercises, let alone the same routine, in a given week. That means that one day, the WOD could take the average athlete 20 minutes or so to complete, while another day it could take 7 minutes, and on a third, 45 minutes. That continuous variation, combined with always trying to go as fast and hard as you possibly can, is the thing that drives such quick and profound results. Yesterday the WOD took around 20 minutes, and the day before, 13.5 minutes.

  Today, we are to do as many rounds as we can in fifteen minutes of box jumps, kettle bell swings, and burpees. Box jumps require you to stand still, feet hip width apart, and to vault onto a two-foot wooden box, landing squarely and as silently as possible on the top. You then hop back to the ground. That’s one rep. To complete a kettle bell swing, you stand with the bell dangling between your legs. By thrusting your hips as licentiously as possible, the bell will swing up and over your head until its bottom faces the ceiling before dropping back down near your crotch. Burpees, which got their name from their tendency to make people vomit, are familiar to anyone who took a middle school gym class in the 1970s: stand up straight, drop to the ground so that your chest hits the deck and your legs are straight out behind you, stand back up as quickly as possible, and jump up in the air and clap your hands over your head. A Google search of “burpees suck” returns 125,000 results; “I hate burpees” returns 215,000. Surprisingly low, actually. They are a foundation move of CrossFit and the single exercise I hate most.

  But here we go, the clock set to count down from fifteen minutes, and the eight of us prepared to do ten reps of the three exercises—the thirty reps making one round—as many times as possible in that time. For some of us, it’s a race. Steve Gephart, Joe, Leo, and Dave, who have known each other for years and were founding members of CrossFit Annex, will watch each other with guard-dog eyes and do everything they can to beat one another. Gerry, a former Ivy League champion shot putter, is, at six foot five and 220 pounds, the strongest of us but not the most fleet. The Twins are relatively new and will drown in their own sweat before they quit but are no match for the first four. I try to stay within myself, not watching the others or worrying about my place relative to everyone else, and yet I can’t stand to lose, or to shake the feeling that if I am not in the lead, I am failing. I am never in the lead. Hence every morning, despite the visible and quantifiable improvement in my results over the years, at some point in the workout I will feel as if I am failing.

  Tony, the coach today, turns up the music as he switches to a Metallica station at Gephart’s request. He points the remote control timer at the clock and counts down. “In three, two, one, GO!” at which point we all begin bounding from the turf to the top of the boxes. Some land silently and stand up straight, hips fully extended, before stepping back down, one rep complete. Some bound as if they were jumping rope, the tips of their toes kissing the edge of the box before they hop down only to bounce up again, immediately. I am more deliberate, depending more on a vigorous arm swing and a “thumbs … UP!” mantra to propel myself squarely onto the box top before stepping down, trying to remember to alternate legs when I initiate the dismount.

  The first ten are a breeze, as are the kettle bell swings. They look like an arm exercise, but the key to getting the weight squarely up and over your head is to squat down, weight dangling pendulously like a distended testicle, and to thrust your hips forward as if you were making extremely vigorous love, squeezing your butt cheeks when the weight reaches the top. (There is a lot of butt-clenching in CrossFit.) The arms and wrists control the weight, and the momentum.

  Burpees are a different story. Such a seemingly mundane exercise takes up an awful lot of space in my head, and I approach them with dread. One of the truisms of CrossFit is that you should do the thing you hate most, because it’s only in mastery that the hate will dissipate. I’d like to say I was fully in touch with my inner Shaolin priest, but I’d hate to lie. I throw myself on the ground, trying to not waste my arm and chest energy by lowering myself. I then push up, bring my knees up to my chest, stand up, do a slight hop, and clap my hands over my head. Positively awful. Ten times, and the first round is done.

  By the time the second round starts, I’m warmed up nicely, feeling pretty good and noticing out the corner of my eye that Joe, Dave, and Leo are already on to kettle bell swings. I bound up and down, lactic acid starting to make its presence known in my calves and quads. Whenever I do box jumps, I stare warily at the rough edge of the box. It’s a mark of honor among CrossFitters to have angry scabs on your shins, either from barking them against that edge when the jumping gets hard, or by scraping barbells against them during dead lifts. Chicks may dig scars, as the saying goes, but they hurt, so I take my time and reset to make sure I clear the landing.

  By the time I move on to the kettle bells, my breath is coming in ragged bursts, so I put my hand on my knees and exhale hard three times before grabbing the bell and humping it for all it’s worth—sharp exhalations get rid of the carbon dioxide rapidly building up in my system and help me gain my breath. Then I fall into the burpees, which are nothing but shittiness. I have yet to learn a mind trick that helps me endure these things, which cause my shoulders, deltoids, and abs to scream in fatigue.

  Two rounds down, nine minutes to go.

  At the box, I take a step up to start the first one. Technically, this is cheating. I am now performing a step-up, not a box jump, but I’d rather keep moving than stop to catch my breath. So much of CrossFit is a giant calculus problem in which you try to figure out the precise rate of movement or amount of weight so that you can perform as much work as quickly as possible. I might not even be aware of the fact that I’m performing the calculations, but I am, like a race car driver unwittingly solving complex equations as he figures out the fastest line through a turn. I resume the jumps on the third rep, and they are starting to get harder. I use a more aggressive arm swing now, spraying sweat from my arms as I swing them forward, painting the wall with a Pollock plume of briny drops of perspiraton. When I grab the kettle bell, the handle is slick with my sweat, so I pause to rub gymnastic chalk on my hands, as Leo has done before me. When I move from the swi
ngs to the burpees, my hands leave a telltale white paw print on the turf.

  Each round gets a little slower than the last; each box jump requires a deeper lean and harder swing. The kettle bells don’t seem harder, and I’m able to do them without pausing—“unbroken,” in CrossFit parlance, a point of pride. The burpees become slower and more miserable, my jump microscopic, my clap barely audible, until Tony, whose exhortations have been lost on me all this time, says the words we all want to hear.

  “Three, two, one, TIME!”

  At which point I sprawl on the floor, five rounds complete, sweat searing my eyes, lactic acid burning my entire body, eyes sealed shut.

  Slowly they open.

  And there, on the ceiling, is a wire, copper jutting from its end. Going nowhere. A new detail on the tapestry of the ceiling. My chest heaves. My mind wanders. Most guys my age are still in bed at this time of day. Maybe they’re snoring. Maybe they’re pressing into their wife’s back, hoping she’ll wake up with the same thought he has. That’s where I should be. But I’m here.

  Slowly, we recover and walk to the whiteboard, where we write down our names and the number of rounds and reps we completed. Gephart, Joe, and Leo are way ahead of me. Gerry and I have tied. Only the Twins and a new guy are behind me. I didn’t fail, but I didn’t win.