Embrace the Suck

by Stephen Madden

  A seemingly simple exercise, the muscle-up is a gymnastics move in which you reach up and grab a ring in each hand. You pull yourself up so your chin is above the rings, then work your hips and arms to drive yourself farther upward into a ring-dip position, with the upper half of your body above the rings, the rings down by your waist. Done properly, it is a display of mastery of everything CrossFit is trying to teach you: strength, coordination, agility, flexibility, endurance, speed. Get a muscle up and you have snatched the pebble from Master Po’s hand; it is time to leave the Shaolin Temple. Until then, you work on it.

  I was also happy that Budding talked a little bit about why going as hard as you can all the time leads to improved fitness. Most trainers and coaches would have you believe that athletes fall into one of two camps, aerobic or anaerobic. Or, distance guys and sprinters. And while it’s true that people do have either predominantly fast-twitch muscles, the kind that make better sprinters, or slow-twitch, seen more in athletes with better endurance and less speed, very few adults train the sprinter muscles.

  For one thing, going fast is hard, and it hurts. For another, according to Budding, the public has been brainwashed by the “fitness industry” and by doctors to believe that only a five-mile run or twenty-mile bike ride or half-hour continuous swim will produce health benefits, maintain healthy weight, or stimulate weight loss. Third, It had long been thought that an athlete was predestined by his biology to one kind of fitness or another.

  But a body of research conducted by the Japanese physiologist Izumi Tabata has found that athletes who perform high-intensity interval workouts develop both their anaerobic and aerobic systems and burn fat, while those who train merely their aerobic systems develop only the aerobic system and can actually maintain or gain fat. So central is Tabata’s research to CrossFit that Tabata has a WOD named after him, Tabata Something Else, in which athletes go as hard as they can at a particular exercise, say, squats, for twenty seconds, then rest for ten seconds for a total of four minutes, before performing the same routine with three more exercises. Done properly, it can be crippling, in a good way, as we learned when we did Tabata Something Else as one of the four WODs the instructors had us do over the course of the weekend. The last time something so brief had hurt so much was in eighth grade, when Ella Michaelson told me before school one day that she’d be my girlfriend but broke up with me at lunch.

  Now, you can’t go as hard as you can for four minutes over a period of twenty minutes, but the benefits still accrue. But form will suffer, and with bad form comes the possibility of injury. So with a few exceptions, most CrossFit workouts don’t last more than forty minutes, and most coaches will have an athlete stop if they haven’t finished the work within that time. (“Murph” is a notable exception, see chapter 7.)

  Over time, I would notice an additional benefit. When I came back from a long bike ride or run, or even a hike, I would be famished. The computer on my bike would tell me I had burned 1,500 calories, but if I wasn’t careful, I could replace those calories and then some with a single sandwich and a handful of cookies. But the intensity of CrossFit not only placed a damper on my appetite; it brought, almost every time, an exercise-induced near-nausea that left me close to retching.

  Budding spent a lot of time on nutrition, too. I wasn’t approaching CrossFit as a means to weight loss, but it was becoming very clear that all this pulling up and running was going to be a hell of a lot easier at 180 pounds than at 200. And if I was going to sprout all these muscles, like the instructors, I might as well shed at least one of my layers of fat to show them off. As usual, Budding was very direct, starting his diet talk this way: “CrossFit has no commercial stake in nutrition. We don’t benefit from trying to sell you anything.” He added that CrossFit recommended the Zone Diet, Barry Sears’s program, which dictates people eat a diet composed of 40 percent carbohydrate, 30 percent lean protein, and 30 percent “healthy” fat. “I guarantee obvious, fast, and dramatic results on the Zone,” he said, before explaining how Zone Dieters weighed their food and apportioned it into blocks of each of the three nutrient groups. All the food was clean and unprocessed, and simple. But weighing food? I was neither a cheerleader nor Lance Armstrong, both of whom had been known to carry scales in their travels.

  Rather, I decided to stick with the credo that had served me pretty well for many years: don’t eat shitty food. What’s shitty food? If it comes in a box, has a commercial, or is made in a plant, chances are it’s shitty. (If it’s advertised during the Super Bowl, it’s really shitty.) If it just fell off a tree or was pulled from the sea, chances are it’s not shitty.

  At the end of the weekend, I sat in a corner and studied my notes. If I was reading this right, I would be able to spend less time working out, and possibly lose weight, all while getting muscles that had eluded me most of my life. I just needed to give it a try, and to stick with it. But in order to do that, I needed to find a box. My garage was great, but if this was going to work, I needed to find a proper CrossFit gym.

  3

  That Fleeting Feeling

  Two humid nights in August 1977, the month Elvis died, have defined my entire life. On the first night, on a weedy practice field in suburban Canton, Massachusetts, I discovered something about myself, in the process running away from a past that had identified me as someone I didn’t want to be. On the second, on a football field in Norwood, Massachusetts, I announced who I now was, and what I would spend the rest of my life trying to be.

  I am the youngest of six children. My parents, Bob Madden and Winifred Shannon Madden, married in 1949 and by 1953 had three children: Maryellen, Bob, and Dick. After a couple of miscarriages, they had Tim and Paul within fourteen months of each other in the late 1950s, then took another break before they had me in October 1963. We lived in the house my grandfather, an immigrant from County Sligo, Ireland, built on Templeton Street in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester, in St. Mark’s Parish. My earliest memories are of three college-age siblings so much older than I that they seemed more like an aunt and uncles, and of the two brothers with whom I shared a room who were willing to throw batting practice to me for hours on end and to play basketball in the narrow driveway court wedged between our house and the Grahams’ house, as long as the dribbling of the ball didn’t disturb Jack Graham’s sleep, because he was a farebooth attendant for the MBTA and worked odd hours.

  There was a gang of kids my age in the neighborhood, and we played games incessantly. Not just sports like street hockey and Wiffle ball, but games like hide-and-seek, manhunt, Simon Says, and red rover. They all involved movement and physicality and play.

  And I sucked at them, just like I sucked at baseball, basketball, swimming, tree climbing, and jumping the backyard fences that delineated our neighborhood. I was the fat kid. I would much rather stay inside and play with my Lincoln Logs, my Matchbox cars, or my Legos, patiently building cities with shoe boxes and cylindrical Quaker Oats containers on our living room floor, implausibly wearing grooves in my dad’s LP copy of Stan Getz’s Jazz Samba and then destroying the cities with an epic and purely imaginary windstorm delivered with a sweep of my arm.

  My mother would urge me to go outside and play with the other kids in the neighborhood. When I resisted, she’d throw me out and tell me to not come home until dinner. So I’d go out—and play with my Lincoln Logs, Matchbox cars, and Legos in the dirt strip between the cool concrete of the driveway. I wouldn’t say I was lonely. It was hard to live in a house with that many people and ever be alone, and I liked my brothers, who were genuinely good big brothers to me. But they were just that much older than me, tweens when I was in grade school, and not that interested in always palling around with the baby. And the other kids? They were running around, chasing each other, and playing games and sports, and I sucked at them. The way my eight-year-old mind saw it, why would I do something I sucked at? The cities I built with Lincoln Logs and Legos were huge, sprawling, complex affairs, a masterpiece of the child planner’
s art. When I played with my cities, there was nobody to keep up with, nobody to measure myself against, nobody to tell me I was fat and slow. And I liked it that way.

  But my mother didn’t. And unknown to me, she and my dad were fighting about me.

  My mother, tired of having to buy my clothes in the Husky Boy section of Jordan Marsh, wanted to sign me up for youth hockey. My father didn’t want to. He didn’t want the expense. He didn’t want the pain in the ass of having to drive me to the rink every Saturday. And he didn’t want me to get hurt. My father was an only child, and as my mother told me when I was in high school and all this came to light, a real “momma’s boy,” who ran track but wasn’t allowed to play football or hockey. He was an enthusiastic spectator, but he never got in the game, something that I now realize carried over to every aspect of his life. He was content to watch other people live.

  My mother wasn’t. She had been an open-water swimmer as a teenager, an Irish-American Gertrude Ederle, pulling on an itchy black wool bathing suit, coating her skin with a layer of lanolin, and wading into the frigid water of Boston Harbor to swim a couple of miles. Her sisters, happy to sit on the beach and smoke cigarettes, made fun of her big shoulders. She didn’t care. Later, I remember her pulling on a black leotard and riding the Red Line to Cambridge to do a ballet class called the Joy of Movement taught by a Russian émigré named Mrs. Spora. She reveled in the physical at a time when women, especially in our working-class Irish neighborhood, were supposed to stay home and be den mothers to Cub Scouts. Had Jane Fonda released her exercise videos ten years before she did, I’m sure Ma would have worn leg warmers. And I’m sure my father would have mocked her. And I’m sure she would have worn them anyway.

  In short, Ma was a badass and Dad wasn’t. And she was damned if she was going to let her overly cautious husband blow this, her last chance, to have a kid who really got in the game. Not that my siblings didn’t play sports, but my dad steadfastly refused to let my brothers play football or hockey or to swim, in short, to do anything that would require his participation, either financial or temporal, despite the fact that he was burstingly proud that a high school teacher had once remarked that Bob had a great pair of hands, after watching him play an intramural game.

  That all changed one day when I was in third grade and Ma announced that she had signed me up for hockey. It was a problem. I couldn’t skate, and we had no equipment. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “You have to start somewhere.”

  Somewhere turned out to be on my ass on the ice at a rink in Squantum, Massachusetts, that was housed in an old airplane hangar. I would struggle to do a lap, using my stick as a tripod as the other guys zoomed around me. That the sessions were at noon on Saturday meant we could stop by McDonald’s for lunch afterward, and was a big inducement, but I also just plain enjoyed it. Little by little, week by week, I got better, and had a huge breakthrough when my brother Bob and his fiancée, Beth, took me to a frozen golf course pond and showed me ice-skating was more about gliding on the blades than walking.

  I played in the Neponset Youth Hockey League’s house league for the next five years. The house league was the province of kids who just wanted to play but weren’t good enough to compete. The travel teams, A and B, were reserved for the studs, whose flashy uniforms and new skates we hand-me-downers eyed with envy. The kids on the travel teams seemed to even have better hair than us scrubs in the house league. We skated once a week, usually Sunday mornings at six in a searingly cold open-air rink in Dorchester. As soon as I would come off my shift, I wanted to go back on. It was all explosive movement and speed, a speed I lacked when I tried to run. Games were an hour. I loved them, and lived for them.

  Because when I skated, really and truly skated the way Bob and Beth had taught me to on that pond, all of a sudden I wasn’t slow, and being fat didn’t matter. Something alchemic happened when the blades of my skates played over the ice. Whatever combination of musculature, bone structure, and physics that made me slow and awkward on grass or pavement disappeared when I was on ice. In fact, I was one of the fastest in the house league. I scored goals. I blocked shots. And the weight that drove me to the Husky Boy shop was now ballast I could combine with my speed to pin kids against the boards. Nobody was inviting me to play for the travel team, but it almost didn’t matter. I was, compared to the other kids in the house league anyway, fast.

  But on Templeton Street, nobody else played ice hockey, so nobody could see the new me. Especially the Hatfield brothers, Billy and Bobby, my new friends from up the street but also, in the way of boyhood friendships, my rivals. The Hatfields were almost feral in their athleticism. They could climb higher than anybody else in the huge tree in Eddie Beal’s backyard, swinging from limb to limb to the ground like urban Tarzans. Their snowballs, thrown with deadly accuracy and adult velocity, hurt more than anybody else’s. They could get over fences simply by placing a hand on the tops and vaulting over. They were wild and funny and fun to be around, and I did everything I could to get them to play cards or Monopoly or Matchbox cars, because when we did that, I wasn’t slow and awkward and left standing at the base of the tree, staring up at them in the far branches. I could win at Monopoly.

  The Hatfields’ parents were divorced. Bobby and Billy lived with their mom and two sisters, and their dad was never around. But their uncle Paul, a single guy in his twenties, would come every weekend and take them to the suburbs, pitching batting practice or throwing long bombs to them on the carefully groomed fields of Milton Academy, a prep school about five miles from Templeton Street that may as well have been on the other side of the world. Sometimes I got to go with them, and the three of them would reinforce—with every pitch blown by me, or every pass I couldn’t haul in—just how bad I was at sports.

  Until it got cold. Then the activity switched to pond hockey, and our roles reversed. The Hatfields were slow and uncoordinated and weak-ankled on skates, while I poked the puck between their legs only to retrieve it behind them after I had skated casually around them to head up the ice and score. I could skate backward on defense and break up their passes, then rush the length of the small pond to lay the puck between the two shoes we had set up as a goal. And when I did, I saw the look on their faces—frustration, anger, dismay, and maybe some despair—that I recognized from my own face almost every afternoon on Templeton Street. I was careful to never rub in the fact that I was better at ice hockey than they were. I didn’t have to. They knew. And so did I.

  Now I knew what it felt like to be good at something. To win. I had never known it before, and I wanted to feel it all the time, in everything I did.

  Just after I completed seventh grade, we moved. My parents, especially Ma, despaired as our neighborhood decayed around us. Part a victim of 1970s white flight, part a victim of the court-ordered school desegregation plan that turned Boston’s streets into rock-and broken-glass strewn battlefields, our once staunchly blue-collar Irish neighborhood was being taken over by what my siblings called another colored group: white trash. I had never heard the phrase before, but took it to mean the Hells Angels who got drunk on hot summer nights and waved their pistols from the roofs of the three-deckers across the street from us.

  My parents sold the house for what I’m sure was a loss and bought another one on a busy street in Canton, a suburb about ten miles from Dorchester. We moved a couple of days after Star Wars debuted. There were no kids my age in the new neighborhood; there wasn’t much of a neighborhood at all. I was bored. This time, I was lonely. I was angry at my parents for making me move, for leaving a school I loved. For leaving kids whose every physical action may have made me feel inferior, but who were still the only kids my own age I had ever known.

  But it turned out to be a blessing. With nobody to hang with—and nobody to measure myself against or to lose to—I started running. The jogging boom was in full swing, so I borrowed a pair of my brother’s old sneakers and went to the track (a seemingly suburban invention because I had never seen a 440-yard
oval) at Blue Hills Regional Technical School, just up the street from our new house. Sometimes I ran a mile. Sometimes I would run the length of the straightaway a couple of times. Sometimes I’d just walk. But I moved. In the absurd heat of late mornings in July and the humidity of August, almost every day for two months. There was no training, no goal. I was looking for something to do, and this suited me. I had found something that suited me. Alone, there was nobody to lose to. I didn’t feel slow, or fast. I just felt the pleasure of movement, and the weird pleasure in the pain of going hard, a pain/pleasure ratio I would spend the rest of my life trying to understand, but always enjoy, as I did on those hot solo days on the track. Access to this maroon oval opened up something in me that was as valuable, and as elemental to me, as learning how to read.

  I made my poor parents’ lives miserable as I alternately pined for “home,” as I thought of Dorchester, and pouted silently behind the closed door of my new room. One night I saw an ad in the Canton Journal for Canton Youth Football tryouts. I wasn’t interested in playing football—the thought of being hit, repeatedly and on purpose, by another kid was actually terrifying. But I figured it would be a good way to meet some other boys before school started so that I didn’t walk into the William H. Galvin Middle School on day one of eighth grade without some sort of wingman. I declared my intention to play football.

  It was the first time I ever saw my parents fight. I had heard them fight before, from behind the closed door of their bedroom, where they conducted all of their business, but this was out in the open, around a new kitchen table. It was both fascinating and horrible to see my parents fight, and to know that I was the spark that had ignited the tinder that had gathered in the stress of the move from Dorchester. My mother was adamant that they should let me sign up. My father was equally set that I should not. In a futile effort to convince my mother, he played all his cards at once: time crunch caused by a longer commute into the city; expense; travel to games on weekends, which was his only time to relax; my health and safety. It was ugly. But my father, who could bend his sons to his will with a single look over the top of a newspaper or a reach for his belt buckle, caved to Ma’s cold stare. I was playing.