Embrace the Suck

by Stephen Madden

  But my mind said yes. And my mind won.

  8

  Nine Days in May

  I had done the 20X to make myself mentally tougher. I was doing CrossFit to see what I was really made of. But what I was learning was that I was made of perfectly ordinary muscles and bones, but that it was my spirit, my desire to be a better husband and a better father, a better friend, a better teammate and coworker, that was pushing me.

  I was also accepting, after a lifetime of beating myself up, that when it came to a realm of human activity in which I had always wanted to excel, that I was perfectly subpar, and that the joy and reward were coming from the perseverance and the pleasure of the movement, not from measuring myself against everybody else

  When I was being totally honest, though, I had to admit to a dirty little secret: CrossFit, at least the way I practiced it, was starting to wear me down. The 5:30 a.m. starts were killing me again, and being in bed by 9:30 on weekdays and falling asleep on the couch by ten on weekends wasn’t winning me any points with my family. If I were doing my four or five workouts a week at noon, or even after work, it might be a different story, and it seemed to be for Anne, who went at 8:45 a.m., after the kids went to school. But while she was thriving, I was stalled. I had hit some plateaus. I wasn’t getting any faster running, my one-rep maxes on most weights weren’t going any higher, double unders were intermittent, and my muscle-ups were stalled at the pull-up phase.

  Still, I felt strong, and in the best shape of my life. I could throw around weights I could never dream of lifting before, I could go off and do pretty much any physical activity I wanted to, and I looked better than I ever had. And I felt good. Plus, basic little fitness tests told the story. I could walk up stairs two at a time with no effort. I could stand up from a chair without touching the arms, and my general balance was as good as it had ever been.

  One of the basic goals of CrossFit is to get you ready for whatever life throws at you. I learned the hard way when I worked at Bicycling that relying on any single exercise movement can get you in very good shape—for that single exercise movement—but that if you want to be an all-arounder, you need to mix it up. CrossFit does that in spades, through its credo of constantly varying the motions and exercises we do. But after all the time in the box, I wanted to feel the sun on my back, and to test myself in a variety of ways I can’t do when always in a gym. It was time to take it outside, and to see what was under the hood. I wanted to play with my fitness, and with my friends and family.

  I wasn’t the only one at the Annex who was feeling that way. Mickey had organized a team to compete on May 18 in the Civilian Military Challenge (CMC), a race that consisted of a seven-minute WOD followed immediately by a five-mile cross-country run strewn with natural and man-made obstacles laid out on a ski slope in the Poconos. By coincidence, my family and I had entered an open-water swim to be held on our annual trip to St. John the following weekend. And somewhere in there, the Annex would be completing a Murph. If I took part in all the fun, I would be beating the shit out of myself over just nine days. We don’t run that much during our winter programming at the Annex, and I hadn’t been swimming much, at all. But I was always beating the shit out of myself. Now was the time to test the fitness, and to test whether I really had quelled the bad voice in my head.

  Camelback Mountain is a small ski area in the Pocono Mountains of eastern Pennsylvania. Once a region known for producing the coal that fueled the furnaces of nearby Bethlehem Steel, the forge that produced the framework of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, and a fleet of battleships, the Poconos now are a ticky-tacky tourist mecca filled with designer outlet malls, low-stakes casinos, fudge stands, and taxidermy shops that cater to the hunters who flow in there every deer season. None of this detracts, however, from the harsh steepness of the thousand-foot hills (mountain being a relative term here) or the seemingly endless piles and fields of rocks strewn across them. This is where we’d be racing. In addition to 166 acres of skiable terrain, Camelback, in a nod to increasing the length of its season, had built a water park, whose wave tanks, flumes, and feeder ponds would serve as some of the obstacles in the race. That boded well for me; water was my great equalizer.

  Team Annex consisted of two men: me and Mickey, and six women. And the women were ready to kick some ass.

  The core group of women who work out at the Annex are the 35–50-year-old suburban mom equivalents of the Type A guys who make up the 5:30 WOD. Hypereducated executives turned stay-at-home moms, they are fire breathers in yoga pants and sports bras, former college athletes who compete at everything they do—CrossFit, running a school fund-raiser, managing the funds of the town Cub Scout troop—with a ferocity that would put Michael Jordan to shame. They may not lift the same amount of weights as the guys, but they can run as fast if not faster than most of them, and pump out pull-ups, double unders, box jumps, and burpees like marines. They are badass, all business at the box, and if they weren’t home raising their broods, they would be ruling the world.

  I am married to one of them. Anne and I met on a blind date, set up by friends who knew we were both into, in Dan’s words, “all that running and swimming shit.” Anne had taken up running in high school and had been on the track and cross-country teams at Williams College, where she learned how to shake off the previous night’s party by running ten miles up and down the trails in the Berkshire Mountains. Working out was a regular part of her life before I met her, and it was part of what drew us together. We got engaged on a hiking trip to Washington State. We honeymooned with a sea kayaking trip to Hawaii, after we had given each other new road bikes as wedding presents.

  We would always make time to work out, even after we had three kids in two years. We made it a point to exercise with the kids, even getting a triple baby jogger to push Luke, Catherine, and Christine on runs through Chatham. We’d take turns pushing, trading off a backpack filled with diapers, formula, and blankets, all in the name of getting out of the house and staying in some sort of shape. We must have looked absurd.

  That Anne was a better athlete than me never bothered me too much. I was part of a generation of boys who were starting to get the message that if it was okay for girls to be smarter than us in school or have better positions in the student council, then it only followed that a girl could run you into the ground, too. Anne could run me into the ground, do more sit-ups, and ride away from me on a bike. I could swim better than she could, but that was just because I had been swimming longer.

  But now, as she stood with them in a loose circle at the parking lot of Camelback’s base lodge, she scared me. They all scared me. We were there as Team Annex, and I knew there was no way I was going to be able to keep up with them. Any of them. I would be the weak link. I would be the drift anchor. I would be the one they stood waiting for, impatiently checking their watches as precious seconds ticked by, seconds that defined how you compared to the other people who were here, seconds that defined who you were and where you stood in the world. I would be pissing them off. And I didn’t want to do that. You don’t want to piss off the suburban she-wolves.

  “Hey, guys,” I said, as we contorted our legs into stretches, already planning my out as I surveyed the rest of the field, which was uniformly younger, fitter, and more tattooed than Team Annex. “I was thinking that maybe we should do this not so much like a team where we all run together but more like a cross-country meet where everyone just goes for it and our individual points count at the end, you know?”

  “No, we’re all here together, we can do it together,” Muffie said, hopping from one foot to the next. Muffie, mother of five, former college lacrosse player, former network sales executive, is a machine. I didn’t know how she’d do on the water obstacles we’d face, or on the walls we’d have to scale, but when it came to running and just about anything else, I knew she’d eat me alive. “It will be fine.” Here comes the ass-kicking. Mark Divine and his band of former SEALs could put a hurt on me that I knew
I could endure. But I knew I’d never see any of those people again. I saw some of these women—say, for example, my wife—every day.

  The first challenge we faced was the CMC Pit. It was a seven-minute WOD in which we were to do as many reps as possible of seven kettle bell swings, seven burpee box jumps, and seven strict presses. We had practiced this WOD a few times at the Annex, programming it in to the daily WOD so people would know what to expect. Here at the Pit, each athlete had his own station and judge, who was there to offer encouragement but mainly to make sure we did each and every rep strictly by the rules. They could “no-count” us if one of our feet didn’t go over the top of the box on the box jump, or if our ears didn’t show in front of our arms on the kettle bell swings. There were some sixty workstations in the Pit, overseen by a DJ connected to an extremely large sound system that pumped out the speed-metal-meets-rap music that formed CrossFit’s sound track.

  Athletes entered the Pit, a rectangle defined by crowd-control barriers in the ski area parking lot, in groups of sixty, and ran to a vacant workstation. Team Annex entered as one. But I wanted to be far back from the barriers, because I didn’t want any spectators gawking at me. I didn’t want the distraction. My plan was to start slowly, easily, build into the workout, and make sure I didn’t blow up. As I jogged toward a nondescript station, head down, I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Hey 20X!” a voice called. It was familiar, but I couldn’t place it beyond knowing it had something to do with both pain and encouragement. Strange. I stopped and looked, and there was the muscular fireplug who had put his hand on my back and willed me through the last stages of the ruck at the SEALFIT 20X with his gentle “You got this, Madden.” It was Paul. And he was a judge. My judge.

  We hugged like we were brothers, which was weird. I still didn’t know if Paul was this guy’s last name or first name. All I knew is that he had it stenciled on his T-shirt at the 20X, front and back, the way I had Madden stenciled on mine. But we hugged and backslapped and yelled as if we had been through a hell together, a hell nobody else but those who had endured it could understand. Up until that point, I had considered the 20X a very hard one-day event, one that taught me a lot. But the pure elation and surprise I felt at seeing this guy who had helped me so much, who had given of himself so that we could finish as a team, who had helped me arrive at the answer, knocked me back on my heels. Any trace of doubt I had felt, or fear of getting my ass kicked, evaporated as soon as Paul told me, “Madden, you have so got this.”

  I settled in with my hands on the kettle bell, my ass in a low squat, weight on my heels. Paul asked how many reps I thought I could get in seven minutes, and I told him my best efforts so far had yielded ninety or so. “You look fit and you’re psyched, right?” he shouted over the amplified din. I assured him I was. “Get ready to break one hundred,” he said.

  “Three, two, one, GO!”

  I still don’t know the primary source of the roaring in my ears. Was it Paul, screaming encouragement? The music, played at a stadiumlike decibel level? The sound of my own heartbeat? I pumped out the seven kettle bell swings and immediately dropped to the ground to begin the burpees. Unlike a regular burpee, in which you just jump up and clap your hands over your head, the Pit version called for us to jump up onto a twenty-inch box, stand up straight, then jump back down and do it again. I did, as Paul screamed and the announcer roared about how well Team Annex was doing. I finished the burpees, grabbed the barbell, cleaned it into the high rack, and pumped out seven push-presses. After one round, it was clear: the burpees would kill me. I needed to get through the kettle bell swings and the presses as steadily as possible and focus on the burpees. Paul sensed it, too, and ratcheted up his encouragement when I did the burpees, but delivered a smooth, modulated stream of “Yes, yes, yes” while I did the others. Two rounds. Three rounds done and 3:30 to go. Could I possibly be headed to 120 reps? Oh my God. I felt so good. I was strong, and Paul knew it. Everyone knew it. I was flying.

  Until I wasn’t. At once, I felt as if a bomb of lactic acid had gone off deep inside me, and was sending its muscle-stopping shock waves out through my trunk, my limbs, my hands and feet, my scalp. The trick now was to beat the waves and get as many reps in as I could. I bent over to grab the kettle bell and blew out, three steady breaths. “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!” Paul screamed. I stood up “Don’t let go! Get reps! Go!” Paul was crazed. He wanted me to break one hundred more than I did, and he didn’t care that I was gassed. I didn’t care if I broke one hundred, but Paul seemed to care very much for me, and after what he had done for me at the 20X, I didn’t want to let him down. Sweat burst out of my forehead, which only seconds before had been dry but now was a lawn sprinkler. Drops appeared everywhere, on the mat, the box, the barbell, the kettle bell. A metallic tang hit the back of my throat. Time seemed to be standing still, and now there was no noise, only a bar to lift or a box to jump on and precious air to try to suck into my lungs, as I swung, pressed, and jumped.

  The announcer broke the reverie. “One minute to go!” he screamed. Paul screamed, too, but I don’t know what he said. I knew I had slowed down, that 120 wasn’t close. His words came into focus: he wanted me to grab the bar and pump out seven more presses. What had felt like a mere pillow now felt like deadweight. Seven seemed out of the realm of possibility. If I dropped the bar after lifting it overhead, I was spared the effort of lowering it. But then I would have to lift it from the ground, a time-consuming move. I found a spot in the distance, an exit sign over a door in the ski lodge, and focused on it. One press. Down to my chest. Focus. Breathe. A second press. Down to my chest. Two breaths. Paul screams. The announcer screams. I breathe, try to focus, push. Another. Another …

  “Three, two, one, TIME!” I drop the bar and collapse in a puddle of my own sweat and spit and try to breathe. Paul is screaming, pounding my back as it heaves, beyond my control. “You did it! You did it! You got a hundred and one reps!” he says, happier for me than I am for myself. I rise to my knees after a minute, one knee after two, the acid subsiding, the breath returning, the sweat still pouring. I stand up, hug Paul, and high-five and fist-bump the other Annex athletes as we file out of the Pit. Paul is by my side, hand on my lower back again, ecstatic. “I knew you could do it,” he says.

  “Only because of you,” I gasp. “Thank you. Thank you.”

  Paul laughed at me; he had another round to judge and was gone.

  We moved immediately into a chute lined with tables filled with cups of water. We had a few minutes before the obstacle run started, so we deconstructed the workout. Turns out I did get my ass kicked by the other Annex members, especially Mickey, who got in 133 reps and barely broke a sweat. Everyone else got in at least 115 reps, which didn’t bode well for the run. True, I had done a seven-mile run with Anne, kind of on a lark, about a month before, and was surprised at how easy it felt, despite the fact that I hadn’t run much more than two miles at a pop. But we were putting Tabata’s principles to the test here: short-duration training can equal long-duration efforts.

  I hoped he was right. He’d better be right. These people were strong.

  They showed it when the gun went off to send us on our way. While I was content to lumber along and conserve energy for what lay ahead, my teammates bolted off, energy conservation apparently not an issue. After five hundred yards or so of a course that wound through Camelback’s base area and water park, we came to the first obstacle: we were to get from one side of the water park’s wave tank to the other, deep end, and haul ourselves up and out on cargo nets. No problem, for me. I put my head down and swam, all awkward with boots and long shorts but feeling more in my element now that gravity’s effects had been lessened. I swam, keeping an eye on Anne, a decent swimmer, but I wanted to be sure she could get up the nets. I reached them first (the last time today I would be first over anything), hauled myself out, and reached down to help the others. Here we were, a team.

  The others bolted off, down a short, slippery hill toward a ser
ies of wooden walls of varying height. We were all thoroughly soaked from the tank, and it had started to rain, turning the dirt trails into rinks of mud and making the obstacles slick. Here’s where I can be a good teammate, I thought. I’m a good climber, I’m not afraid of heights, and I can encourage everyone up and over. Some of the Annex ladies had professed to a fear of heights. But from the way they vaulted, pulled, and threw themselves over the barriers, some of them a mere four feet, some as high as fifteen, I started to think that these were the people who thought using epidurals during childbirth was a character flaw. Nobody looked scared. Or winded. Or like they needed a teammate’s help.

  We ran on, starting to string out over the course, through a long, unlit drainage pipe, ankle-deep in cold water. Along a creek bed, hopping from rock to rock, using the small trees that crowded the banks as hand grips. We ran up some small hills and back down them, climbing over a container box in the middle. Anne wanted to run off with the others, to keep up and then beat them. She never said as much, but I could tell. But she stayed with me as I lumbered along. The farther I fell behind, the more I could feel anger rising in my blood, flowing the same pathways as the lactic acid. Mad that I was falling behind, that I was the weak link. Mad that they were faster than me. Mad that we weren’t working together. It was the bad voice, and I told it to shut up.

  Soon we headed up a snowcat track that switchbacked across the ski slope. All but the smallest and fastest of the competitors started walking, some with heads held high, some with heads sagging. A race volunteer handed me a sandbag, probably about a 35-pounder, and told me to follow the others up the hill. I did, but I was losing contact. I tried hard, but I knew that at some point we were going to go over the top of the mountain, and I’d need to conserve some energy, because we weren’t even halfway there.