Embrace the Suck

by Stephen Madden

  I had always paid attention to correct form, no matter what I was doing. Not because I wanted to look good, but because I needed every advantage I could muster to be able to keep up. Turns out that not blindly thrashing my arms was helping me swim faster, but it was also protecting my shoulders and hips. Taking the time to set up my bike in a way to maximize both comfort and speed allowed me to put in a lot of miles without having to visit a chiropractor.

  All of which served me very well when I started doing CrossFit, which emphasizes technique over all things, as well it should. It’s one thing to half-ass a sit-up. But try to fake your way through a complicated Olympic lift like a hanging squat snatch and the results can be catastrophic as 135 pounds come crashing down on your head and neck.

  That’s why On Ramp is a standard CrossFit protocol. Designed to teach newcomers the basics of movements and terminology, On Ramp is an eight-class prerequisite to being able to attend a regular CrossFit WOD. Trained instructors use those same broomsticks we use for pass-throughs as standins for barbells, and teach the foundations of each movement. This is where you learn to keep your weight on your heels when you squat so that you can wiggle your toes when you’re butt is near the ground, and so that your chest and shoulders stay up. On Ramp is where you learn to shrug your shoulders when you clean a bar, push your elbows up and through when you front-squat, and always squeeze your butt cheeks together when you’re at the top of a move so you know your hips are fully extended.

  This is also where you learn you have zero flexibility, aren’t nearly as strong as you think you are, and may be able to run for two hours at a steady trot but can’t go more than ninety seconds flat-out. It’s also where you learn where you excel beyond your peers, be it at things involving leg strength or the ability to hold a plank pose. And you will pray for these exercises to be programmed every day so that you can grasp the opportunity, no matter how fleeting, to feel smug.

  But pay attention and do it right. Because if you don’t, you will get hurt. And do it right, even when you’re well into a workout and starting to get tired. Especially when you’re tired.

  But aren’t we always tired?

  CrossFit suggests that you WOD no more than three days in a row. Not that you do nothing on that rest day. You work on your mobility, you go for a walk, maybe throw a Frisbee around. But you don’t WOD. Not even a little bit. You can then start it up again after a day of rest. So if the week starts with a workout on Monday, then Tuesday and Wednesday, you can rest Thursday, then work out Friday through Sunday. That’s six WODs in seven days. Lots of exercise.

  There are those among us who pay no attention to this rule, and they tend to be the same ones who nurse chronic injuries, who show up at the box slowly rotating a shoulder with a wince and a troubled look. For in the same way that a sore, swollen muscle responds to the cold packs, a tired body responds to rest. When you exercise, you expend energy. When you exercise a lot, or very intensely, you expend a lot of energy. Replace the energy with the proper nourishment, fluids, and sleep and you will recover. Skip any part of the process and you won’t recover fully. It sounds obvious, but laying off, lying low, lying around is as important to progress as WODing. As the old cycling saw goes: you get fast in bed.

  This was yet another lesson I learned the hard way, in August 2013, when in a burst of enthusiasm I dug myself a hole so deep over the course of a week that I then spent another week climbing out of it. When I look at my training notes for that time now, I wonder what the hell I was thinking. With such entries as “felt bone-tired, depleted,” “felt shitty,” and “terrible night’s sleep,” you’d think I would have known to back off. But I didn’t. Starting Sunday, August 18, and running through Saturday, August 31, I worked out eleven times, including a pretty tough four-mile obstacle course race, and either walked or rode one of New York City’s public bikes, a Citi Bike, the 2.8-mile round-trip between my office and Penn Station, New York, every workday. I also got up most mornings at five. There were just two consecutive days in there when I did absolutely nothing.

  It all came to a head on Saturday the thirty-first. The Annex had planned to honor the nineteen Granite Mountain Hotshot forest fire fighters who had died at Yarnell, Arizona, in June 2013 by joining a national WOD that raised money for the dead men’s families. “Hotshots 19” called for us to do a staggering six rounds of the following: 30 air squats to a medicine ball, 19 cleans of an 85-pound load, 7 pull-ups, and a 400-meter run. That’s a total of 180 air squats, 114 cleans, 42 pull-ups, and 1.5 miles of running. As fast as you can. It’s a lot.

  Especially considering the volume of work I had done in the previous two weeks, and considering that the evening before I had been so exhausted I couldn’t carry on a conversation and could only lie by the pool in a lounge chair drinking Budweiser Tall Boys. What’s worse, a duvet of August humidity lay over New Jersey, and I should have been smarter and cut my losses by just staying in bed. Clearly, my body was telling me it was time to rest. And I wasn’t listening.

  We were leaving for a week’s vacation in Quebec that afternoon, a week in which I was sure to hike and swim but not sure to WOD, so I wanted to get in one more burner. Besides, doing Hotshots 19 had been my idea; I was the one who pushed Mickey to program it, despite his better judgment that it was too much volume. “We should honor these guys,” I told him, and said as much in an email I sent to everyone at the box.

  I knew, from the moment I put my bare foot on the floor to get out of bed, that the day was not going to go well. Neither my mind nor my body was ready to do Hotshots 19 and honor the guys who had died. I was tired in my bones. My mind was blank and wrung out. I couldn’t focus on the warm-up, which despite its easy pace had my heart rate soaring, a sure sign of overtraining. Sweat flowed too easily. “I got this,” I told myself. But I didn’t believe it.

  Six people showed up for the WOD. Under normal conditions, I would be a mid-packer on this one. Squats were never a problem; nor were cleans, although 19 per round was a lot of throwing around. Pull-ups still sucked for me, but that was nothing new. Running 400s? Always dicey. Short enough to want to make you go hard, long enough to make you suffer. The 400 course at the Annex was an out-and-back on River Road, slightly uphill to the turnaround point marked with a spray-painted CROSSFIT on the pavement in front of the door to a school bus company.

  Mickey stood, his usual morning statue, and counted down the start. “Three, two, one, GO!” I knocked out the squats, finished the pull-ups with the help of a band, making note of the utter lack of power in my arms, then set to the cleans. I should have been able to do them in a single set of ten, caught my breath, then finished them with a set of nine, but found myself right away settling on three sets of five and one of four. Rather than putting the bar back on the ground with control, I dropped it as soon as I had completed the lift. That was a very bad sign.

  It was about to get worse. I headed out the door to start the run right where I thought I’d be, in the middle of the pack, behind a new, fast guy named Mark, the aerobic freak Jason, and Anne. I may as well have been running up a ski jump. My legs had no give, no turnover. Before I had gone fifty yards, Lisa, a good runner who can’t do pull-ups because of a shoulder injury, passed me. That’s okay, I thought to myself. She didn’t do the pull-ups. I’m doing more work. This sucks, but I can do it.

  That’s when Chris Duignan passed me. Duignan, a former collegiate rower and marine, was easily the most affable person at the Annex. As funny and self-deprecating as he was eager to learn the ropes, Chris threw himself into workouts with an enthusiasm that far outstripped his conditioning, flexibility, or strength. He climbed ropes with such vigor that the telltale burn on his ankle from bracing himself on the ascent became infected. He sweat so vigorously, even after he’d finished the WOD, showered, and toweled off, that he’d say the shower “didn’t take.” The standard line on Chris, one on which he agreed, was that when he lost twenty or thirty pounds he was going to be an animal. You could see it w
hen he rowed and his experience in a collegiate boat showed.

  But none of that showed when he ran. When he passed me and then offered a “Come on now” as encouragement, I felt as if I had been gut-shot. Fuck. Duignan’s passing me? How can this be? He left a spray of sweat in his wake. I sped up, struggling to maintain contact. I caught up, moved in just behind his shoulder, and matched his pace.

  For about five strides.

  I was now, officially, in last place. And we were only finishing the first round. I told myself that it was okay, I’d be okay, that the others couldn’t possibly hold this pace, not with this oppressive humidity, that my workhorse nature would help me grind it down. I didn’t believe a word of it, but I said it to myself, hoping that if I said it enough it would become true. I had every reason in the world not to be performing well. Every single sign had foretold that I was overtrained and didn’t belong there, that the right thing to do was to have stayed in bed. Nonetheless, there was that old feeling all over again: I was fat and slow. All talk and show, no go.

  The second round picked up with the air squats, an exercise I can usually do all day long. But not today. Rather than pumping them out unbroken—thirty in a row, without pause—I broke them into groups of ten. Take a big problem and make it a few small ones. It was as if sections of rebar had been put in my quads. They simply wouldn’t bend. My energy was low, fuel seemingly nonexistent. And my will? I had none.

  Mickey scowled. Duignan sweated. Anne and Lisa and Jason and Mark ran and cleaned and pulled up. I paced in place, trying to find a rhythm, a gear, some fuel, anything to get me going. But the fact was simple, and unavoidable. I was tapped out.

  I used to swim for a coach who from time to time would come over to a swimmer during warm-ups and say, “Climb on out of there. Why don’t you go get a pizza or something? It’s just not happening for you today. You’re struggling.” The couple of times I got such a tap, he was dead on right. Here’s the thing about CrossFit: nobody will ever say that to you. If you started, you’re gonna finish. An obvious trauma like a dislocated shoulder gets you out of that, but being tired or feeling tapped out or even having bloody palms from too many pull-ups is no excuse, if for no other reason than that you are training your mind to be as tough as your body.

  So I took twenty pounds off the bar and cleaned 65 pounds rather than the 85 I had started with. I switched the white elastic pull-up band to the super-strength black one, and I shuffled through the 400s as if I were carrying a load far heavier than mere fatigue.

  When I came in after completing the fourth round, I checked my time on the digital stopwatch on the wall. It read 30:00 exactly. It seemed like a good place to stop. Thirty minutes is a good long time to exercise hard, it was my fifth workout of the week, vacation was about to start, and I had done my part to honor the memory of the fallen firefighters. So I ambled over to the bench where a dry T-shirt awaited me while the others chipped away at their sixth round.

  “What are you doing?” Mickey asked as I stripped off my soaking workout shirt.

  “I’m done.”

  “No, you have two more rounds to go,” he said.

  “I’m fried. Been a long week. I’m finished.”

  Mickey is twenty years younger than I am. I’m much farther along my path than he is. I’d like to think that as an elder, I had some respect coming to me. I’d like to think that over the past year or so, a year of grinding it out, of pushing and lifting and collapsing on the stinking turf after depleting myself, after puking and still finishing WODs, I had enough cred to be able to bounce a check to the boss once in a while.

  I also like to think I will never again see the look that flashed through Mickey’s eyes, just for a second, when he realized I was serious, that I really was quitting. I could tell he wanted to call me out, to say that Duignan and Lisa and my wife were still going, and to question not my manhood but my very sense of humanity, because who gets up on a Saturday morning in summer to do a workout like this to honor guys who didn’t have the luxury of quitting, and then walks away with two rounds to go? What the fuck is wrong with you? he wanted to say.

  But he didn’t. He just turned his back on me and walked away, which was worse. I slunk off to the locker room while the others finished the workout. When they were done, nobody said a word to me. They chatted excitedly about how hard the workout was, how their strategies had changed as it went along, how they struggled but adapted and finished. Their smiles to me were polite, but it was clear that I wasn’t one of them, because I hadn’t done what I had set out to do, and they had.

  And then this flashed through my head: What makes you think you can do this?

  My God. What had I just done? I had chosen to listen to the voice, the old one, the ancient one, the one that told me I wasn’t good enough, not as good as the others and that it was okay to quit, because I was really tired. What had started out as shame turned to guilt and then horror as I realized what I had done. It wasn’t just letting Duignan beat me. Or looking like a lesser man in Mickey’s eyes. I had spent the better part of a year making the voice a little quieter each time I refused to stop. And now I had just let it back in the game. Because I was tired. Fuck.

  I had proven to myself over much of the past year that I had the guts and the heart to lose control of my bodily functions and still complete the task at hand. I had earned the respect from people I revered. But I had thrown that all away in just the few seconds it took to make a bad decision. I had let my pain and fatigue overcome my willpower. It was a brutal way to relearn the lesson. You never quit a workout. Never. Don’t get so tired—or sore, or sick—that you can’t finish a job you start.

  That was the last workout I ever quit.

  6

  Diet and Body Image

  It’s telling that a book about CrossFit would contain a seven-thousand-word chapter on fatigue, pain, and nausea and a chapter half that length on nutrition. Because while mountains of ever-changing information about diet and nutrition and their relationship to health and performance are published each year, the basic tenet of nutrition in the CrossFit world is one I’ve already mentioned: don’t eat shitty food. If you absolutely had to embellish that nugget, you could add this: eat just the right amount of the good stuff. As CrossFit founder Greg Glassman puts it in the very first sentence of his brilliantly succinct “CrossFit in 100 Words,” “Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat.”

  These are words we all could live by, CrossFitters or not. Because whether you want to lose a few pounds to look good at a wedding or get all Biggest Loser to regain your life, nothing works like a calorie-restricted diet based on plant foods and lean proteins. This isn’t anything new: high school wrestlers, body builders, models, actresses, and magazine editors with upcoming TV appearances have known for generations that if you need to drop a few pounds quickly, you stop eating carbs, be they processed, like pretzels, or even whole grain, like brown rice, and tuck into a limited amount of salmon, skinless chicken breast, kale, lettuce, and tomatoes—but not potatoes, bread, cereals, even carrots and apples. Take it easy on the salt and drink a ton of water. Maybe you use a little bit of olive oil and vinegar to add flavor, but nothing processed, and nothing with sugar. Just have to have a drink? Try red wine but stay way away from beer.

  For someone who has spent a lifetime being traumatized by being a fat kid, you’d think I would have been more concerned about all this stuff. But when it comes to diet, I’ve always been way over in the liberal arts wing of the fitness world, approaching sports and my various workouts with a combination of rationalization and I’m-just-an-English-major ignorance. Exercise was all just part of a complete life. No need to get carried away by obsessing over my diet. Besides, I worked out so much, I could eat whatever I wanted, right? Those arguments work up until about age twenty-five; after that, I bought progressively larger pants and tried to not go too nuts with my bête noir: s
weets.

  When I went through my CrossFit certification class, I was shocked by how much time the instructors spent talking about diet. You’d lose weight, they told us, which would certainly make pull-ups easier, and you’d feel good, too. You would develop something we are all proud of but went largely unspoken: the CrossFit Body. Muscles, ripped and hard. CrossFitters spend a lot of time and effort developing their muscles, so it’s little wonder that a whole lot of skin is visible in most boxes. It’s perfectly acceptable for guys to rip off their shirts at the slightest exertion and do the WOD bare-chested (but not at the Annex, where the older male clientele would rather be waterboarded than take off the Tshirts they bought at a bar in the Virgin Islands on vacation ten years ago). Lululemon has prospered catering to female CrossFitters who want to cover only what they need to; sports bras and tight short-shorts are the norm (but again, not at the Annex, where the older female clients are more modest).

  As I mentioned before, the Zone Diet, the brainchild of Dr. Barry Sears, held that any person, athlete or not, could achieve optimal performance with a diet whose caloric composition was 40 percent complex carbohydrates, 30 percent protein, and 30 percent fat. On the Zone, you could have a nice meal of, say, chicken with soba noodles and a couple of servings of vegetables. But in order to make the Zone work, you needed to weigh your food, especially in the first weeks of the program as you dialed in portion sizes.

  This seemed like way too much work to me, and frankly, a bit of a buzzkill. I wanted to get in better shape, and sure, it would be great to shed a layer of fat to show off my new guns, but I’m a guy who doesn’t see the need for kitchen cabinets when countertops hold plates and glasses just as well. Weighing my food seemed way too obsessive, if not just shy of lunatic fringe.

  The Paleo Diet gets its name from the fact that you eat only food that a caveman could have found. What could you eat? Meat and fish, including bacon and ham. Pretty much any green vegetables, avocados, nuts, and certain kinds of berries. No melons or mangoes or bananas—too high a glycemic load in those fruits. (Apparently Paleolithic man hadn’t made it to the tropics.) While I knew the diet didn’t include Fritos or Dr Pepper, I was surprised to learn what else was on the taboo list: milk and any milk-based products; grains, including corn, rice, and oats; potatoes, bread, cereal, refined sugar, and coffee.