Embrace the Suck

by Stephen Madden

  I wear my Pukie the Clown T-shirt with excellent pride.

  But I’m a puker from way back. When my eighth-grade gym class ran a mile every Friday immediately after a lunch of half-cooked pepperoni pizza and grape-ade, I would typically finish in the top three, then promptly step to the side of the instructor and deposit that lunch on the weed-choked grass of the William J. Galvin Middle School’s lawn. I figured it was a small price to pay for being fast. I had been slow for so long that I would have given blood to finish in the top three. For four years as a high school sprinter, I deposited the slim remains of my high school lunch on the grass infields of tracks all across eastern Massachusetts after running for less than a minute in the 440-yard dash. One particular trash can at Boston’s Commonwealth Armory was my go-to stop after the 300-yard dash during indoor track season. My teammates were so accustomed—and unalarmed—to seeing me heave and heave again after the races that they’d pat me on the back, mid-barf, with a “Nice race, Steve-o.” It didn’t matter. I could routinely finish in the top three in these races, and sometimes even win.

  These incidents all occurred right after races, though, which means that nerves probably played a large part. I wrapped myself up so tight getting ready to run that it was a wonder I didn’t puke before the race, as lots of athletes are known to do. Eliminating the contents of my gut before a race didn’t help. I tried it once and ended up dry-heaving over the barrel. Skipping lunch on the day of meets didn’t help, and would only leave me weak with hunger. Still, to this day, I associate the smell of puke with track meets just as closely as I do Ben-Gay and body funk.

  Once I grew up, though, I figured my puking days were over. As an adult, I no longer worked my anaerobic system so hard that lunch would want to come up, I could pretty much work out when I wanted to, and I had ceased to get very nervous about how I was going to do in a race, knowing that the mantle of champion of the Chatham Fishawack Festival four-miler was beyond my grasp. (Of course, there was the time I ran it with a bottle and a half of excellent Oregon pinot noir still being filtered by my kidneys, and I deposited it so violently by the side of the road just fifty yards from the finish line that the Chatham Emergency Squad came running with oxygen and a stretcher, as if my ego needed oxygen and a ride. But that was an aberration.)

  Then I started CrossFit.

  The first time I booted should not have come as a surprise, for I had been forewarned, although that didn’t occur to me until later. It was during my time among the youth at CrossFit Morristown. It was the day after Christmas, a Christmas I had spent enjoying some good wine and a lot of good food. The WOD was planned almost as if the coaches had known we had been bad the day before and were due for some penance. They delivered. Immediately across the street from the box was a steep hill, up which ran Ann Street. We were each to pair up with an athlete of similar weight, and we were to take turns carrying each other up and down the hill, all the way to the traffic light at the top, a total of ten times. I paired up with Brian, the only other guy in the place who looked to be over thirty-five. (I was wrong; he was thirty-two, but had a one-month-old at home, which would age anyone prematurely.)

  Then we talked, awkwardly, about how we were going to do this. For someone who’s in decent shape, carrying an adult, who in this case said he was a 180-pound man and a total stranger, is an act whose intimacy far outweighs its intensity. There’s no way to do it, no hold, no grip, that doesn’t present—especially to a sophomoric mind like mine—some sort of sexual overtone. Care to hop on my back? How about my shoulders, so I can have your junk pressed against the back of my head? In my arms, like I’m carrying you newlywed-style across a threshold?

  We settled on the classic firemen’s carry, in which I would squat down in front of Brian, he would drape himself across me with his belly pressed squarely into my right shoulder. He’d wrap one arm around my left side and I’d grab his wrist with my left hand and balance him with my right.

  I was in trouble from the start. Everything was conspiring against me. Plain and simple, I was hungover as hell. A couple of pre-WOD espressos hadn’t helped, a lesson it would take me years to learn. Brian’s claim to weigh 180 was as much of a whopper as his sweaty ass, which was way too close to my face for comfort. And holy shit was Ann Street steep.

  But we made it to the top, each of us huffing, me from the exertion and Brian from the jostling against my shoulder, which forced air from his lungs as if he were a bellows. We got back down much more quickly, of course, despite the icy footing.

  “Sorry for the bouncing, dude,” I said as I put him down on Bank Street. “Only nineteen more to go.” A wave of nausea was starting to rise. Not just in my stomach, but in my legs and arms, as if the acid churning in my belly had somehow found its way into my muscles. This isn’t good, I thought, trying to think good thoughts, of fresh breezes and clean air and cute puppies… .

  “Get on,” Brian commanded, squatting down so I could lower myself. As I did, he rose, eager to get up the hill, and driving his shoulder into my rigorously ambiguous stomach. With each step he took up the hill, his shoulder drove into my belly, compressing my stomach and sending the acid farther out into the distant outposts of my body. The breezes I was thinking of started to blow, fetid and stinky. The air, no longer clean, had blown all the way from a third-world city, and the puppy had diarrhea. It took a lot of thought about not puking to keep it in. But I did.

  Up and down. Two down. Brian was eager to hop back on but I asked for a minute to compose myself as I breathed out as hard as I could. One of the keys to beating exercise-induced nausea is to rid the body of as much carbon dioxide, a by-product of exertion, by exhaling as hard as you can by blowing out of your mouth. (It’s an old trick used by mountaineers, called pressure breathing, in which they force themselves to exhale rather than gulp air, which every cell in the body is screaming for.) I pushed breath out, steam rising in the cold air as I tried to think of something besides the bile rising in my throat. Brian stood by, watching the other teams get ahead of us, then lap us. He looked down at the ice, hands on hips, idly kicking at a piece of ice.

  “Get on,” I said, then hoisted him up as I lurched up the hill. His weight had doubled since the last trip and my legs seemed to have lost their communication link with the rest of my body. While other teams buzzed around us, up and down the hill, I started up at a lurch, a slow walk. Brian talked me through it, urging me through my pauses. I would look up the hill and choose a marker, like a light post, and make it a goal to reach it without stopping. It worked a couple of times, but as I struggled to keep up with the other teams, my efforts resulted in more feelings of nausea rather than any forward progress. Sweat burst from my forehead, my scalp, my chest. I tried to suck in the cold air to dowse the fire burning in my gut, but the fire was spreading too quickly. I put Brian down about ten yards from the top. I moved off into a small parking alcove, and I retched. And retched. And sweat. But mostly I retched. Brian stood by, embarrassed, it would seem, not that his lame partner was booting into the dirty snow and ice in a Morristown parking lot, but more because this loser was causing him to miss his workout.

  I was done for the day. There was no amount of scaling down or substituting another WOD that could make me keep going. Disgusted with myself, I shuffled back to the box and ascended the stairs to a small lair that housed a few beat-up sofas and chairs in front of a giant TV. I plopped down and thought about a conversation I had had in this very spot with a guy who had just finished his WOD. He was raving about the benefits and effects of CrossFit. “I’ve lost fifteen fucking pounds!” he crowed. “My shirts don’t fit me anymore. I’m crushing my pickup basketball game.”

  “Awesome,” I said, looking over his shoulder as if I had been trapped at a party by a Ben Franklin impersonator.

  “There’s just one thing. Never, ever drink the night before a workout.”

  That got my attention. “Never? Nothing? Not even a beer?”

  “Well, if you can stop at o
ne beer, you should be fine. But don’t ever come here hungover.”

  I wished I had remembered this conversation about an hour ago. Lesson learned.

  Add to that list: never come caffeinated. I’ve never had a problem dropping a double shot of espresso before hopping on my bike or heading to the pool. In fact, coffee is so engrained in cycling culture that most cycling clubs feature “coffee shop rides,” routes that begin, end, and pause at coffee shops or cafés for refueling. So I figured that, if I were going to expect myself to get my ass out of bed most mornings at five to get to the Annex, I would need a double shot of my dark master.

  I figured wrong. Way wrong. Whether it was the acid of the coffee, or taking it on an empty stomach, or just the plain exertion of the drill, Pukie came to visit me not too long after I returned to the Annex. Mickey was coaching one early morning. Nothing felt right to me. I hadn’t slept well, I felt spastic, and my head wasn’t in the game. It wasn’t Mickey’s fault, of course. I was the dumb-ass who had pounded two shots as an eye opener before embarking on a course of thrusters and double unders well before sunrise.

  But he didn’t help, either. I felt both his stare drilling through me and the familiar wildfire taking off in my belly and throat, of bile rising with each thruster, of barely digested coffee mixing with stomach acids to form a witch’s brew of disgust that wanted to do nothing but leave my stomach.

  Try as I might, the brew won the fight against gravity. This time, conditioned by my experience on Ann Street, I made it to the barrel near where Mickey was standing, arms crossed, impassive. I heaved. He stood. I heaved some more and still he stood. I wasn’t expecting a sorority-sister-holding-my-hair-back kind of moment, not at a place where Metallica’s Kill ’Em All blared before sunrise, but I thought I’d get more than “Make sure you wipe down the edges of that barrel.” I did.

  And then I did something that surprised even me. After rinsing my mouth with cold water, and absorbing the condescendingly sympathetic glimpses of my classmates, many of whom had by now finished the WOD, I went back to the puddle of sweat that marked my workstation, grabbed my kettle bell, and finished the workout. Getting sick was a weakness, one that I could eliminate by learning from the experience and chipping away at the flaws that made it happen. I was eight minutes slower than everyone else that class, but I was the only one who got a “right on” along with the usual post-WOD fist bump from Mickey.

  That morning, puking wasn’t the badge of honor. Getting back up and finishing was.

  One of the keys to survive—and thrive—in CrossFit is learning how to tell the difference between regular old soreness brought on by hard exercise, and the kind of pain that’s telling you something is way, way wrong, or at least wrong enough to become way, way wrong if left unattended. Trap your hand between a dumbbell and the floor, as I once saw someone do, and you’ll crush bone and rend skin in a way that draws blood. That’s obviously way wrong. But what if you feel a twinge in your shoulder after working on muscle-ups? You’ve been trying to defy gravity by swinging yourself up into a hand press in the air for the last thirty minutes. Of course your shoulder hurts. But will it go away by itself, or should you run to the doctor or physical therapist to have it looked at?

  Most important of all: can I work out tomorrow?

  There are two types of muscular soreness. When you’re in the middle of a workout, going hard, your muscles start to burn because they’re producing lactic acid (LA). Pause for a minute, or back off the intensity, and the burn will subside. Part of the point of training is to push back the time of arrival of lactic acid, and to adapt to its presence so it doesn’t cause you to stop. Once the workout is over, LA clears the system within an hour or so, and a good cooldown will ensure that it’s flushed from your body.

  The second type of pain is delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), the result of tiny tears in the muscle—or, more specifically, between the muscles and surrounding tissue. These tears release chemicals that cause swelling, and it’s that swelling that makes you sore. DOMS is the reason people can walk normally immediately after crossing the finish line of a marathon, limp the next day, and can’t get out of a chair the day after that. It’s why CrossFitters can put on their sweatshirts after a WOD and drive home but can’t control a coffee cup or a computer mouse that afternoon. It’s most likely to occur when you start a new exercise program or mix it up some way. If you do the same thing all the time, your muscles adapt and you won’t feel the soreness of micro tears, just the ache of lactic acid, and not even that if you don’t push yourself hard enough.

  But if your routine is anything but routine, if it is “constantly varied,” then it stands to reason that you will be constantly sore. Welcome to CrossFit.

  This is where experience comes in handy. I’ve enjoyed a lifetime of physical activity that has included training regimens in swimming, running, cycling, triathlons, mountaineering, and rowing. Over the years, I’ve had sore arms, sore legs, sore necks, hips, backs, knees, and elbows. My soma has been sore, and my soul has been sore. But I’ve figured out the difference between the workaday aches caused by training and the deep-muscle fatigue caused by maximum efforts like racing, and the I-think-I-just-separated-my-shoulder moment of a trauma. I’ve always been able to loosen up in the days after a tough workout by moving slowly but surely in the hope that my muscles would unwork themselves. One way or another, the idea was to get back to training, even if it meant a bit of rest and the sometime obligatory ice packs and ibuprofen. The older I get, the better able I am to judge how much rest and recuperation I need.

  Unlike my behavior in most of my other athletic incarnations, I have taken very much to heart CrossFit’s admonition about warming up vigorously, cooling down with caution, and considering mobility a part of my daily routine, not just something to do, idly, sometimes, as I was standing around waiting for the activity to start. There are days when the longest part of a CrossFit workout is spent urging your muscles into just a centimeter more of give. It can be a strange sight, and a shock to a newcomer.

  CrossFit boxes come equipped with foam and plastic cylinders in a variety of lengths, diameters, and firmness; lacrosse balls, sometimes taped together to form a sort of scrotal sack; giant rubber bands of varying, color-coded tensions; lengths of rope, broomsticks, dowels, and pieces of PVC pipe. All are designed to help you work kinks out of your muscles, joints, and tendons, and to get ready to go back into the fray. It is perfectly normal to see CrossFitters astride those cylinders, rolling their asses on the hard foam to work out the kinks from yesterday’s walking lunges. The lacrosse ball sack is run down the muscle pads on either side of the spine, while a single lax ball can be driven into muscle just about anywhere, at any time. (I’m sitting in my office chair right now as I write this, massaging a lacrosse ball deep into my calves in between paragraphs.) We wrap the rubber bands around our feet and pull back with our arms to urge our legs into a millimeter more of a stretch than the day before. We hold the broomsticks in a wide grip and run them up, over, and behind our torsos—a pass-through—to make our shoulders and chests more flexible. Then we hold it up over our heads and squat down, deeply, chest and shoulders up, and hold that bar way overhead until our quads scream and our hip flexors surrender to our will.

  We co-opt the best bits of yoga into our mobility routines, facing doglike downward and then upward to loosen and strengthen pretty much everything. We push one leg behind us, cross the other in front, and lower to the floor in pigeon pose, lengthening quadriceps and hips. We prostrate ourselves in child’s pose to a god whose blessing will allow us to do one more burpee in the time allotted than we did when last we faced this particular WOD. We stand, backs, butts, arms, and heels flush against the wall, and slide our arms up and over our heads, which is much harder than it sounds.

  Some of us sit, after workouts, in tubs filled with ice to stop muscular swelling. We take post-WOD contrast showers, dousing ourselves with ice-cold water to quell the swelling before returning to w
armer water, a process we repeat over and over again after workouts as if we were annealing newly forged metal. Because, in fact, we are.

  Why? There is not a single study in scientific literature that can claim to prove, with evidence, that stretching works. But neither is there one that proves it doesn’t. Most come to the conclusion that we should do it anyway, scientific proof be damned. But as anybody who ever paid attention will tell you, the more fluid and supple and stretchy we are, the better our form will be. And the better our form, the more weight we can move. The more reps we can get in, the farther and faster and harder we can run and row and cycle and swim. We can be better. Good form solves all problems. Most important, good form prevents injury.

  Maybe that’s why I’ve never had the kind of injury that leads people to go up to Bill Rodgers at a spaghetti dinner and ask for advice about the pain in their arch. For whatever reason, I was blessed with the body of a workhorse—or, more to the point, a plowhorse. Nothing fast. Nothing pretty. But durable. When other runners complained of knee injuries, I listened sympathetically but didn’t understand. When my swim lane mates had to take weeks or months out of the pool to nurse sore shoulders, I missed them, and swam on. When cycling friends would complain of wrist, neck, shoulder, or knee soreness that made cycling impossible, I’d check my saddle height to make sure it was correct, and throw a leg over.