Embrace the Suck

by Stephen Madden

  Whatever your morphology, though, if you want to do CrossFit you are going to do pull-ups. They are an elemental move, and come in a couple of varieties. There are strict pull-ups, which require you to hang from the bar and pull yourself up until your chin is above the bar, then to lower yourself until you hang from fully extended arms and pause before you pull yourself up again. You may not rock your hips or legs at all while performing a strict pull-up. (If there is anything in the world to make you want to lose twenty pounds, short of a TV appearance in a swimsuit, it’s the experience of hanging from a pull-up bar and trying to get just one more rep. You will feel every Dorito and pint of Sam Adams you ever drank while you try to get your head up over the bar.)

  There are chest-to-bar pull-ups, in which you bring your chest, rather than your chin, to the bar. There are jumping pull-ups, in which you stand on the ground, jump up to grab the bar, and pull yourself up before letting go and dropping to the ground before repeating. There are burpee pull-ups, in which you perform a burpee under the bar and rather than simply jumping up to clap your hands above your head, you jump up and grab the bar to finish with a pull-up.

  And there are kipping pull-ups. Reminiscent of a routine on a gymnastics high bar, kipping pull-ups are part regular pull-up, part hip drive, and part kick, all in the name of getting the chin above the bar while maintaining enough momentum to do the next one and the next one and the next one. While strictly speaking it isn’t really a pull-up, the kip requires a high degree of strength and coordination. It also requires a flexibility and power in the hips that I didn’t have. Some people can watch an instructor rip out a few kips then step right up and do them. Every one of the core group of the 5:30 class could kip like an Olympic gymnast.

  Not me.

  When I first tried to kip, under Mickey’s direction, I hung from a bar and rocked my hips.

  “Not your knees,” Mickey said. “Start from the hips.”

  “I am.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  I’d never felt like more of a motor moron than I did flailing on that bar. He had me jump down, lie on the floor, and initiate a hip thrust. This was at 5:45 a.m., with other grown men watching. I looked more like I was gatoring at a fraternity brother’s wedding than seriously training. I wanted to get up. Mickey wouldn’t let me until I had flopped in a way that he—and only he—seemed to think was close to a kip.

  It’s a central tenet of CrossFit that you are to leave your ego at the door when you enter a box. There is simply too much to master for any one person to think he can do everything. It’s the sort of thing I had hoped I would have accepted, especially after grappling with my own subparness for a lifetime. But even though I knew I needed coaching—had, in fact, sought it out and was paying for it—I still felt like I had been called in front of the class to solve a particularly easy math problem on the chalkboard, one that everyone else had got on the first try and I alone couldn’t do.

  Back on the bar, Mickey’s instructions weren’t taking. “Push back from the bar!” Leo yelled.

  “Get horizontal!” yelled Dave.

  I jumped down and grabbed a giant white rubber band, knotted it over the bar, and put my foot through. Like a slingshot, it rocketed me up until my chin was over the bar.

  “That’s not a kip,” Mickey said.

  “You’re cheating,” said Leo.

  Dave said nothing.

  I had work to do. Every time I went to the Annex, regardless of the workout, I would try to end my session with ten pull-ups. I installed a Stud Bar in my garage so I could practice at home, bought my own rubber bands, and did everything I could to chip away. I worked on climbing the ten-foot ropes that dangled from the Annex’s ten-foot ceiling, mastering the wrapping of the rope around my right leg and foot so I could stand on it with my left foot, inchworming my way to the ceiling, developing upper body strength I prayed would help my pull-ups. I got marginally better.

  If only I were lighter, I thought. They’d come to me. If only I weren’t the fat kid.

  I faced the same issue with the muscle-up. I knew from my time at the cert that a strict muscle-up was out of the question. I lacked the upper body strength and hip drive to simply stand on the ground, pull myself up, and drive through into a ring dip. But if I jumped, vaulting up as forcefully as I could with a ring in each hand, I was able to at least pull myself up so my hands were at chest level.

  Mickey agreed it was a good start, and decided we would break down the muscle-up into its component parts—starting with the pull-ups. Awesome. Muscle-ups are made more difficult by the fact that they’re done on rings dangling from straps rather than a fixed bar. The fact that the rings move independently means that you can apply more force to your stronger, more dominant side. But it also means that the ring on your weaker side can squirt away from you, leaving you hanging in midair from one ring.

  After watching a few of these, Mickey had another idea: he moved the rings to waist height and stretched the thick rubber band, the kind I had used for pull-ups, between the two.

  “Grip it between your fingers, then press down on it with the heel of your hand against the ring,” he said, showing me. I did as he said. The band, now stretched taut between the two rings, made a playground swing of the apparatus.

  “Now hop up and sit on the band,” he said. I did. The band sagged a bit under the load of my ass.

  “Now lean back so you’re lying flat.” I did that, too.

  “Okay, I want you to snap your hips really fast so that you’re sitting up, and as you do, drive through the straps and down on the rings so you come into a dip position,” he instructed.

  It was the first time that a relatively difficult CrossFit move—even a scaled one—came to me right off the bat. I laughed with glee, the way I’d seen some people do when they get their first double under or rope climb. And I immediately wanted to do it again. And again. And again. Like I was twelve years old and playing hockey. All I wanted to do was move on to the real rings, to try a real muscle-up. A real muscle-up was the equivalent of making the travel team.

  But real muscle-ups were as hard for me to get as a kip, and I soon figured out it was because of a lack of coordination—“putting it all together,” as Mickey said. I had all the component parts, more or less: the pull-up, the drive, the dip. It was just a matter of getting them to work together. Something else to practice, another bogeyman to drive away. Another thing to watch the other guys do. Another thing to chip away at.

  The Olympic weight moves proved to be less problematic, and of all the things I learned in CrossFit, the Oly lifts were the most satisfying, the most fun, and the most gratifying. Because when done properly, nothing makes the entire body feel like a glowing torch quite like a hanging snatch.

  Why? Because it takes your entire body to perform the lifts. You might get bigger by isolating a certain muscle with an exercise like a biceps curl, but when in real life do you ever make the same motion as a biceps curl, at least outside of a pub? You don’t.

  The Olympic moves, on the other hand, require a progressive involvement of all the body’s major muscle groups. You may be particularly sore in your shoulders and lats after a hard round of cleans, but you can be sure that if you’re doing them properly, your legs will get a good workout, too.

  And Mickey was all about doing the moves right, telling us to use low weights, or even just bars with no weights on them, to make sure we had good form before trying to lift a heavy load.

  Telling a bunch of competitive men, most of whom make their living on Wall Street or as salesmen, to scale back their loads, focus on form, and not pay any attention at all to how much the other guys were lifting is like telling Cub Scouts to not laugh at a fart joke. It simply doesn’t work. It got pretty funny at times to see Dave looking over at Leo’s bar before a workout, noticing that Leo had twenty pounds more on than Dave did, and scrambling to add two ten-pound bumper plates to his own. And if doing a lift with less than perfect technique was the only wa
y they could move the weight, well, then what difference did it make. They still got the weights up over their heads, right?

  The truth was that I didn’t care how much those guys were lifting. I cared only that I was able to do it properly, and that I didn’t hurt myself. The fear of injury haunted me, not because I felt that lifting was inherently dangerous, but because, as the months went by, I came to look forward to it more than any other part of the WOD. Being injured would mean I wouldn’t be able to lift, and that simply wasn’t an option. My father-in-law says he could never be an alcoholic because he likes drinking too much to ever give it up. I felt that way about lifting. The fifteen minutes or so we spent lifting, from 5:40 a.m. or so until 5:55 or 6 came to be my turn to shine. My focus on the form meant that my weights were increasing quickly. It became a self-fulfilling cycle. The more weight I lifted, the more I wanted to lift. And the more I lifted, the better I felt. While some of the other guys nursed injuries brought on by bad form, I stayed healthy. Sore, yes, but healthy. And although my personal bests on the lifts weren’t the highest ones on the massive “best board” that loomed over the Annex floor, they were pretty high up there. I was still playing in the house league, but when it came to lifting, the other guys were the Hatfields on ice skates.

  My body adapted. As I warmed up one morning in front of the Annex’s mirrors, it dawned on me: I had muscles. I had always had strong legs from cycling, but the lifting had given me bulk where I had never had it: my shoulders, my chest, my arms. I wasn’t carved, or ripped, but I was beefy. Favorite Tshirts no longer fit me; after another few months, it became embarrassing to be seen in my Timberland Mountain Athletics large T-shirt, a sentimental old favorite, or a “Got Mana?” tee I had picked up in Hawaii and become attached to over the years because washing still couldn’t remove the lovely smell of sunscreen, as evocative a scent as I know. For the first time, my eyes weren’t drawn immediately to my midsection to see just how husky I was. My eyes would eventually get there, but only after I had looked at my upper body first and approved.

  So I bought new, extra-large Tshirts, and preened a little when people told me I was looking buff. It was one thing to hear it from a neighbor, at a college reunion, or from someone at work, but it meant a whole lot more to hear it from the 5:30 guys. One morning, after he had been trotting the globe for his job, Dave walked in and looked at me doing overhead presses. “Holy shit you’re getting big, bro,” he said. It should have been as simple as a nice thing to hear from another middle-aged man. But it may as well have been Billy Hatfield admitting I could skate better than he could. And if Dave thought I was getting bigger, could a muscle-up or a kip be far behind?

  Still, the early-morning workouts were killing me. They required me to go to bed before my three school-age kids, and the early hour left me so tired when I got home after work it was hard to stay awake to help with homework. Training is a supremely selfish act. If there were a way to train and make it a little easier on everyone at home, I needed to look for it.

  So when an “official” CrossFit box opened in Morristown, slightly farther away than the Annex, but offering evening and weekend classes, I reluctantly switched boxes. It didn’t bother me at all that the Annex wasn’t a CrossFit affiliate. Mickey had multiple degrees in training and kinesiology and I knew from my own experience that the cert course, while informative, wasn’t exactly rigorous. There was no test to certify that we had paid attention, and a couple of weeks later I received my CrossFit Level 1 certification in the mail. (CrossFit has since changed the requirements for Level 1 certification. In order to be certified, coaches have to pass a 55-question written test, and be recertified every five years. So while I officially attended the cert, I am no longer a certified Level 1 trainer.)

  CrossFit Morristown was just a few miles from the Morristown National Historic Park, which commemorates the 1779–80 winter encampment of the Continental Army. Detailed records aren’t available, but some climatologists will tell you that 1779–80 was the coldest winter ever recorded in New Jersey. CrossFit Morristown seemed like a good place to suffer.

  Built in what looked to be a former automobile dealership, the box was filled with weights, tires for flipping, and bars for pulling up. Stairs just inside the sliding garage-style door led to a loft with couches and a big TV. It felt cool, kind of like a clubhouse. More like a purely CrossFit gym and less like a general training facility, the way the Annex did.

  It was also populated almost entirely with people way, way younger than me. Nobody else at the box had gray hair, and as far as I could tell, nobody else was ever in a rush to get out of the WOD to get home to help the kids with their social studies homework. I was used to working out with guys my own age. They could kick my ass just as well as the youngsters at CrossFit Morristown. But my peers never called me sir, the way the young woman behind the counter often did when I’d check in.

  Still, there was an enthusiasm and vibrancy to the place at 6 p.m. on a weeknight or 10 a.m. on Saturday that the Annex lacked at 5:30 in the morning. The music had been recorded after 1985, for one thing, and ran the spectrum from rap to metal to ska and Celtic punk like the Dropkick Murphys; the Annex’s music selection, early in the morning at least, was frozen in the Reagan administration. And there was far more chatter at these classes than there ever was predawn at the Annex. For another, the athletes at Morristown were always talking about their social lives, which seemed to revolve around the box. During warm-ups, there was always a lot of talk about who was hooking up with whom, as well as what kind of booze you could have while still on the Paleo Diet.

  It helped also that the owner and head instructor was drop-dead gorgeous and the most complete CrossFit athlete I’d ever seen. Karianne could do things on pull-up bars, with rings, and with Olympic weight bars that I’d never seen anybody do, not even the hardbodies at the cert. She had also assembled a cast of coaches—Mike, Leo, Jared—who made getting your ass kicked seem like the most fun thing in the world. I was a regular at CrossFit Morristown for a few months, but I never truly felt a part of the community. Rather, I felt like the uncle who had dropped in on a favorite nephew at college for a visit. It was fun, but I knew I didn’t really belong there. I went back to the Annex, and I stayed there. For good.

  5

  A Few Words About Pain, Fatigue, and Nausea

  The great American marathoner Bill Rodgers, who won both the New York City Marathon as well as the Boston Marathon four times each between 1975 and 1980, was a regular on the pre-race pasta dinner circuit, and had a well-deserved reputation as a man of the people for patiently signing autographs and answering training questions. His routine was as well oiled as a Borscht Belt comic’s. When someone would come up to him at, for example, the carbo-loading dinner before the Utica Boilermaker 15K and say, “Bill, I don’t know if you remember me, but we met a couple of years ago before the Wallingford Jingle Bell Run,” Rodgers had his answer ready. “Sure, sure,” he’d say. “How’s the injury?” For no other answer could be as correct as “How’s the injury?” It was axiomatic at the dawn of the running boom and remains axiomatic today, some forty years later, that if you run often enough, you will eventually get an injury that affects your performance.

  Rodgers’s device works equally well for CrossFit. As I write this, I am aware of a pain and fatigue in my arms and deltoids brought on by, in general, five consecutive days of WODs and, in particular, by yesterday’s Olympic weightlifting session featuring bent-over rows. I am also aware and perhaps slightly alarmed by a persistent and long-running dull ache in both knees that I can’t help but think has something to do with an activity as benign as jumping rope.

  Oh, and right above my left elbow, something is really sore. It hurts like hell, a sharp, what-the-fuck kind of pain that shoots like electricity as soon as I grab a rope to climb or grip a bar to do a pull-up. This pain is different from the pain of muscular soreness, which you have to expect with training like CrossFit. This pain means something is way wrong a
nd needs to be addressed. Knowing the difference is a key to survival in this world. I need to get it checked.

  Pain, soreness, fatigue, and even nausea are a regular part of any type of intense athletic training. In a weird way, pain and fatigue are signs that the training is working, that muscles and lung capacity are growing as you push yourself. But they are so central to the culture of CrossFit that when Uncle Pukie appears at a WOD, it is generally taken as a good sign, a sign that an athlete is working so damn hard that she has driven herself to exercise-induced nausea, puking outside the door of the box or into a strategically placed trash can.

  Unless you’re the puker. Then all it does is suck.

  Another favorite T-shirt character, the short-armed T. Rex, celebrates the fact that athletes have pushed themselves so far that their arms feel as if they have become the tiny appendages the most fearsome of creatures is destined to not be able to use in his effort to rule the jungle.

  This, to me, is the characteristic that best defines CrossFit. I’ve been part of a lot of different athletic subcultures, from swimming to cycling to mountaineering. They all in one way or another celebrate the fact that they train hard, and long, and challenge themselves with crazy races and events and stunts. Climb every peak over ten thousand feet in the Lower 48? Sure. Ride from Boston to Montreal and back without stopping for sleep? Of course. I know people who, if their houses were on fire, would on the way to the door grab their “I Survived the Shawangunks” T-shirt so that the world knew they had finished a particularly grueling triathlon, rather than take treasured family heirlooms like photo albums or Grandpa’s framed citizenship documents.

  But none wear pushing yourself to the point of puking, then going back to finish the workout, with the same pride as CrossFit athletes. What seems just plain fucking crazy to the rest of the world is a huge badge of honor to CrossFitters. Exercise-induced nausea has a variety of causes, and, according to experts, has nothing to do with what kind of shape you’re in. An athlete training for the Olympics can be just as susceptible to hurling during a hard workout as a suburban dad trying to get back into shape after five years of couch surfing. Causes vary, from starting the workout with low blood sugar, as is often the case during early morning workouts, to motion sickness from all the contents of your belly being jostled around, to nerves, to restricted blood flow to the stomach to dehydration to overhydration.