Embrace the Suck

by Stephen Madden

  That’s what I’ll remember for the rest of the day.

  2

  How and Why It Works

  The principles and the movements that form the basis of CrossFit certainly aren’t new. As long as people have been interested in the benefits of physical fitness, we have had sit-ups, push-ups, weightlifting, and running among us. And as long as high school wrestlers have struggled to make weight, high-protein, zero-carb diets have been shown to work.

  What CrossFit has done in a novel way is to combine the various exercise disciplines into a single workout regimen that delivers tremendous results if done properly. Arguments about who is the fittest athlete of all are boring beyond all belief, even for those of us who have occasionally engaged in them. What often gets lost in the kung fu movie-style “my workout is harder than yours” debates is the fact that most people eventually find activities they like, and they stick with them because they get some kind of pleasure from them, whether it’s the camaraderie of a golf game, the endorphin buzz of a run, the admiring glances that can result from weightlifting, or the sheer pleasure of bombing down a hill on a bike. If you like it, or like how it feels, you’re more likely to stick with it.

  But at some point in nearly every exercise routine, boredom sets in, usually around the same time that improvement seems to plateau. Such was my case in 2005. As the editor of Bicycling magazine, I had a duty to ride as many bikes as much as I possibly could. Sometimes this required riding them in far-off and very pleasant locales, like Italy and France. Sometimes it meant riding bikes so expensive, so evolved, and so precise that I, a dedicated but aggressively untalented recreational cyclist, had no right planting my fat ass on them. Sometimes it meant transporting bikes for testing purposes, meaning that the sum worth of the bikes on the roof of my car was double the sticker price of the little Mazda. I rode about four thousand miles a year, in all kinds of weather.

  I loved it, for all the same reasons I had loved playing hockey as a kid. I felt free, and even if other riders were faster than I was, I still felt fast. I loved it so much in fact that despite the fact that the magazine regularly wrote about the benefits of cross training and weightlifting, I seldom did either, preferring a ride in the cold rain or a boring indoor trainer session to an hour of planks and stretching. I was one of the few people in the world—messengers, pro racers, rickshaw drivers—who could say with a straight face, “I get paid to ride a bike,” and I was going to take full advantage.

  But right after Christmas that year, I was lying on the couch, watching some meaningless college football bowl game and enjoying a bottle of Tapestry when I tried to get up to answer the phone. I couldn’t do the simple sit-up required to get off the couch. So I used my arms and pushed myself up. Later, in bed, I mentioned the physical lapse to Anne. “You should read about this crazy new workout that was in the paper last week,” she said, adding that it sounded really tough but that the people who did it swore by its results.

  So I read “Getting Fit, Even if It Kills You” in the New York Times the next morning, and was intrigued.

  Over the years I had flirted with various forms of what the article described. In the late 1990s, I had worked out once a week with the actor-turned-trainer Terry Londeree, who combined weightlifting, plyometrics, and ballet movement into a workout so rigorous I was once unable to get off a plane after a New York to Phoenix flight, so stiff and sore had he left me. And about the time our son, Luke, was born, in 2000, I was a regular at a Monday night class in our hometown, called “Boot Camp” and run by a trainer named Ron who told us he had been to BUDS, the brutal weeks-long screening tryout for would-be Navy SEALs. Of course, Ron was also unable to tell the difference between a lie and the truth, as he demonstrated time and again with his wife and various female clients of this particular gym, but he sure knew how to put together an hour of calisthenics and dumbbell exercises that would leave most of us so depleted we were unable to take our car keys out of our pockets. And I was the organizer of a lunchtime workout for my coworkers, the Power Hour, designed to get them doing new movements, beside the usual running and cycling.

  I knew this stuff, loved it even, but I had never stuck with it. Something new always seemed to come along, something that I wanted to try. Like CrossFit.

  I was also familiar enough with exercise and my own disposition to know that I wasn’t in any danger of driving myself to rhabdomyolosis, the condition in which people work out so hard they break down their muscles so fast they end up in the hospital. I like to work hard, to bring the hurt, but I know the difference between the hurt of “Wow, I’m working really hard but when I stop this will go away” and the hurt of “Holy shit, my muscles are breaking down and I need to go to the ER now.” But the workouts, which the Times described as “a high-intensity mix [of] gymnastics, track and field skills and bodybuilding, resting very little between movements,” seemed liked an ideal complement to my regime.

  So I decided I would mix some CrossFit in with my regular rides, most of which were taking place on indoor trainers that time of year. I went to Crossfit.com, which listed the daily workouts in a jargon I didn’t understand, but which was easy to navigate and had a stunning library of video clips in which insanely fit and beautiful people demonstrated the exercises. My thought was that I could watch the videos and do the workouts in the meager gym I was building in my garage, or in the gym at work. Many of the exercises were easy enough in principle: sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups, squats, bench presses. But some of them were Olympic weight moves, the kind most of us see only for twenty minutes or so every four years when, in between gymnastics and swimming, the Olympic broadcasters deign to show some tiny Turkish guy or massive Russian in an embarrassingly small unitard screaming and throwing kilograms (kilograms! how much is that in pounds?) around in some cool but absurdly hard-looking maneuver. The folks demonstrating the moves on the CrossFit videos, most of which seemed to be shot in someone’s garage and which were narrated by an unseen man with a cowboy voice like the stereotypical airplane pilot, made the lifts seem easy. Effortless, even.

  I figured I’d play to my strength and start with an overhead squat, taking advantage of the leg strength cycling had given me. In our garage, I picked up an empty 45-pound Olympic bar and hoisted it over my head, arms spread wide, feet slightly more than shoulder width apart, chest and shoulders up, just like the video said, and tried to squat down. But I didn’t move. I spread my feet wider and tried again. This time I was able to move my butt a tiny way down toward the floor, maybe an inch or two. But the bar started to slip. I simply didn’t have the overhead strength to keep the bar up, the core stability to keep the whole of my midsection intact, nor the flexibility in my hips to allow my butt to drop. I let go of the bar and bailed out.

  So I moved on to the dead lift, which various websites told me should be of a weight equal to my body weight. I warmed up with a plain bar, squatting down and keeping—I thought—my lower back flat, not rounded, and lifted with my legs, then my back, then shoulders, just like they did in the online videos. No problem. So I slowly added weight, until I actually was able to lift two hundred pounds or so, right around my body weight.

  The next day, prone in bed with a back that would not move, I vowed to learn the proper ways to do the Olympic moves, perhaps this time from a coach, but to adapt the other CrossFit workouts, the ones that didn’t require much technique, and use them to become a stronger cyclist.

  Slowly, over time, my garage began to look less like a bike shop and more like a gym. I bought weight plates and another big bar, friends gave me kettle bells, Anne bought a jump rope, and we began. The Power Hour became a twice-weekly workout that was an amalgam of things I picked up off Crossfit.com and exercises I had learned from various trainers like Ron, and Terry Londeree. Friends and friends of friends, notified by word of mouth, joined us in the garage as we did the Power Hour in all sorts of weather; we rang in New Year’s 2006 with a workout that added up to 2,006 reps of twenty different exercises.
It was 16 degrees. In summer, we took it to the pool, where we would swim fifty yards at a pop and then do push-ups on the deck.

  And I noticed an improvement in my cycling. I was able to stay hunched over the handlebars longer now, thanks to my newly strengthened back. I had a little more pop in my legs when I wanted to sprint, and my shoulders didn’t ache from leaning on the bars. And yes, I could get off the couch without using my hands.

  But we weren’t doing the Olympic moves, which were in some manner or form on the site every day. And the Power Hour lasted just that, an hour, when most of the workouts on Crossfit.com seemed to average around fifteen minutes. I knew by now that whoever was putting the workouts together knew what he or she was doing, but I couldn’t figure out why they thought you could get in shape—real shape—if you worked out for only twenty minutes. If there had been a CrossFit gym near me, I would have started going, to learn more about the right way to do all this. But there wasn’t.

  So I decided to attend a two-day CrossFit certification class, to learn the theory and practice behind the workout. Or, more to the point, I talked about doing it, but Anne actually signed me up and gave me a piece of paper on Christmas morning 2007, telling me I was going to Malvern, Pennsylvania, for a weekend in February to become a CrossFit-certified trainer.

  The group of thirty or so people that gathered at Malvern Prep, a private boys school in suburban Philadelphia, early that cold Saturday morning was a mirror-accurate reflection of the types of people pictured on Crossfit.com at the time. Mostly thirty-year-old men, with a few women scattered in. Lots of tattoos and heads that were either shaved or sporting a neat number-two crew cut. Tshirts with skulls and crossbones and mantras about going hard or going home, socks pulled high up to the knees, baggy shorts. We went around and introduced ourselves to the group. There were a lot of engineers, some teachers, and a professional squash player and a professional racquetball player. There were a few trainers, too. At forty-four, I was one of the three oldest people there, and was absolutely mortified at having to do a workout, let alone demonstrate a lift, in front of any of these people, who almost all looked rabidly fit. But that wasn’t really the point, I told myself. I was there to learn how to do this stuff right, and to finally learn some of the underlying theory behind it all. I told myself as the class started: This is about you, not them. It’s not a competition. Get the benefit of it. Stay focused on yourself.

  The class was taught by Tony Budding, straight from CrossFit headquarters in Santa Cruz, California. Budding looked like most of the guys sitting around me, but was far more physically imposing, even in a dark hoodie. He started by giving us a little bit of the history of CrossFit: Founded in 1995 by Greg Glassman, a former gymnast and trainer in Santa Cruz, as a counterintuitive way to train the county’s sheriffs. At a time when everyone else in the “fitness industry”—a phrase Budding practically spat—was preaching the value and virtue of long bouts of “aerobic” exercise, “core” workouts, and calorie counting, Glassman was combining weightlifting and gymnastics moves with gym-class oldies like push-ups, squats, and sit-ups, forcing the body to use large muscle groups in concert, the way you would in real life. He urged people to go hard, all out, and that the workouts almost always be timed to take advantage of the competitiveness most people drawn to such a workout would naturally bring with them. In 2000, Glassman launched Crossfit.com, posting the workouts for free and widening the size of his flock as adherents looked up the workout of the day, posted each night at midnight Pacific time, then posted their performance stats in the comment sections after completing the WOD.

  All of which had led us here, to Malvern. This was just one of more than ten certification classes (“certs” in CF parlance) taking place around the country this weekend, he told us. When we were done, we would understand a few truths, at least as CrossFit saw them: “You’ll see that the fitness industry in this country is full of shit,” Budding said. “Isolating a single muscle is bullshit. Biceps curls are bullshit.” We would understand that it is better to train your weaknesses than it is to develop your strengths. We would understand that we were not training to become fitness specialists, more like jacks of all trade. And finally, Budding said, we would learn what CrossFit was trying to achieve: to prepare us all for whatever life asked of us.

  I’m pretty sure he meant that in the physical sense. That if we were walking down the street and saw flames leaping from the windows of the top floor of a building, we’d be able to sprint up the fire escape, kick down the door, drag the obese man who had been overcome by the smoke to the door, throw him over our shoulders, and carry him to safety on the sidewalk. Or cradle one twin baby in each arm while descending to the cellar laundry room. Or do one power snatch every minute on the minute for forty-five minutes.

  But I took it in a much more metaphysical way. That by working hard to eliminate my weaknesses, by pushing through a perceived barrier, by simply showing up and chipping away at the task, I could finish things and achieve my goals. And that if I could do it in a gym, I’d be able to do it at work, and at home, where three little kids demanded a constant stream of attention and work, and where Anne and I often felt overwhelmed by, well, everything. And maybe it would allow me to once and for all vanquish the voices in my head, telling me I wasn’t good enough.

  Budding explained a few things in what struck me as precise, if not stilted, language, some of which required some decoding on my part:

  “CrossFit is based on the principles of constantly varied functional movements done at high intensity.” (Translation: We will always mix up the exercises and you will always go as hard as you can.)

  “Functional movements are natural, essential, elemental, safe, and efficient and effective.” (Translation: They are not done on Nautilus machines; they allow you to live independently; they can’t be broken down further; you won’t get hurt; and you’ll get shit done.)

  “Movement categories include body weight control through space, external object manipulation, and monostructural activity.” (Calisthenics and gymnastics; weightlifting; running, swimming, cycling.)

  “Fitness is an increased work capacity across broad time, mode, and age domains.” (Translation: You can do more faster.)

  “Workouts fall into two categories: task workout, and time workout.” (Translation: Do a certain workout and time yourself or do as much as you can in a given period of time.)

  “Strength workouts should be scary and hard. If you’ve done them right, you shouldn’t be able to do a single rep more.” (Translation: Lift until your muscles scream.)

  “Mechanics must be consistently good before they can be intense.” (Translation: Learn how to do this shit right or you may get hurt trying to go hard.)

  “If you can’t move the next day, you’ve done too much work.” (No translation required.)

  Budding delivered this information in a straightforward, no-nonsense way that made it very clear he had no doubt that he was right, and every other trainer in the world, the ones who would have you do twenty minutes on a treadmill, twenty minutes of crunches, and a few leg extensions while chatting to you about your upcoming vacation, was not only wrong, but was leading you down the path to morbid obesity, a depleted bank account, and an early death. And we took notes as if he were reading off the winning numbers in various state lotteries to be held in two weeks’ time. (Had I paid such careful attention in college I wouldn’t be writing for a living.) We were going to be fit, and healthy and happy. This guy had the answers.

  I certainly was happy with the way they taught us the Olympic moves. We gathered in circles of ten or so in Malvern’s gym, each of us equipped with a PVC pipe or broomstick. The instructors—one of whom had been an Olympic rower—would describe the movement to us, then demonstrate it very slowly, using the PVC as a standin for the weighted bar as he or she described it again. He’d then break the movement down into its constituent parts, citing mantras like “pop the pockets” or “weighted heels” or “dip and drive.�
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  What became immediately apparent was that not only did I lack the strength to do some of these moves, but I also suffered from an appalling lack of flexibility. I had always prided myself on the flexibility in my lower body—I could bend over, straight-kneed, and easily put my fingertips and eventually my palms on the floor. But when it came time to put my two bended elbows straight in front of me, with the triceps parallel to the ground and my hands up by my face, I was useless.

  Which led to another CrossFit truism: “Stretching is good. Do it.” Something else to work on.

  The moves actually got a little easier to perform when we put down the PVCs and broomsticks and used real weights; gravity, in some motions, was a big benefit. Only when deadlifting real weight—in which you go into a semi-squat with your hands on the bar in front of you and hips tucked under before standing and unfolding until you are upright and the bar and its load dangles mid-thigh—do you understand the true importance of good form. One bad lift, one misfire, and your back will let go in a second. “As a rule, your technique needs to be good, not great,” Budding said. “B-plus, A-minus form is good enough. But you need to always be working toward A-plus form. It’s the only way you’ll get it, and the only way you’ll get better.”

  I was just happy that I had enough information to do three basic lifts—the dead lift, the clean, and the push press—properly. Budding and other coaches went over the fundamentals of some of the more complicated exercises, like the glute-ham sit-up, which required a specialized piece of equipment that held the athlete’s feet while she bent backward from the waist to touch the ground behind her before sitting back up. We also covered the wall ball shot, in which an athlete stands facing a wall with a medicine ball by his chest, squats down, then leaps up to throw the ball at a mark ten feet up the wall before catching it and dropping back into the squat. We learned about L sit-ups and the Holy Grail of CrossFit, the muscle-up.