Wanna see a dead body?
CrossFit sucks and it's stupid.
My wife is an athlete…and a unique one at that.
This year I’ve had the unique experience of watching her compete in the Crossfit Open. It’s been thought provoking to say the least.
The majority of us who find high levels of performance in the physical realm come from a childhood of organized sport. We played soccer, ran track, did gymnastics and threw fists with our siblings in the back yard. She had none of this.
She grew up focusing on school and work and friends and didn’t find the gym until 6 years ago. What she has accomplished through sheer will and brute force in that time frame is astonishing. The athlete she is today is 100% a result of showing up, every damn day.
When we met, I knew she was a CrossFit athlete, and a good one at that, but I didn’t know how she came to be. Watching someone move with the efficiency and intensity she does almost doesn’t register as possible in my mind sometimes, and knowing it’s a skillset that’s been developed over such a short period time, by just showing up and eating shit in the gym day after day, is even more mind blowing. She is the definition of what it means to be an athlete. She is why I tell people so often…just show up.
I’m not writing this to debate whether CrossFit sucks or not. It does. It’s stupid and nerdy and hard and creates a lot of really punchable personalities but then again it also is probably more effective at producing athletic humans than the large majority of all other group fitness programs on the planet and that means it can’t suck and it can’t be stupid and who am I kidding I’m just bitter I can’t do a muscle up and wanna punch plenty of people in other areas of sport.
So yeah, I muse that CrossFit sucks and it’s stupid…because it’s not something I can do and I’m not willing to put the work into it to be good at it…which is just fine…because it’s not my thing. It’s not what my athlete identity is built around. I say it sucks and that it’s stupid because it sucks I can’t do those things and it’s stupid how proficient other humans can be at it.
The entirety of sport is full of stupid things that suck, because they’re things I can’t do. And that’s beautiful. The expression and exploration of effort is such a perfectly unique experience for each person who chooses to dive head first into it. What a travesty it is for people to live their lives and not experience what it means to test the meat vessel we reside in. To be able to see someone move in ways that are so unbelievably foreign to you is something that will open your eyes beyond comprehension to what we are capable of as a species.
I coach a lot of special humans. They climb mountains, they run hundreds of miles, they lift heavy weight, they move in unique-to-them ways through the space of endurance and adventure…it’s glorious to observe. Watching human beings explore the edges of what it means to be a human being in so many ways is one of the most inspiring things you can witness. It is why we are here. We do not exist to fill cubicles.
So now is where I yell at you.
Find your limits. Have you ever tested them? Have you truly ever pushed yourself to an edge? But Kyle “Any movement is better than no movement!” they say…and by they I mean people who want to make excuses for why they aren’t working harder. Is that the degree you want to hold yourself accountable to? That you aren’t doing nothing? Fuck that. You should be angry if you haven’t tasted blood lately, if you haven’t touched the upper limits of what your body and mind can do, if you haven’t ended up in the fetal position on the gym floor or hugging the hood of your car at the end of a run. You need to work and it needs to be really…fucking…hard. Or you don’t, and you’ll die less than you could have been because of it and you’ll have nobody to blame but yourself.
I am so thankful for..and aware of…the perspective Sara has given me not only on effort and what it means to be an athlete, but on what it means to be human.
I have the honor of stepping foot in the gym every day with someone who is an animal I am not…and it reminds me every single session, every single set, every single rep, that I can be better. It reminds me that anything that you perceive as a limit to what you can or cannot do is just an excuse for why you won’t do the things needed to be the thing you want. You can always be more by surrounding yourself with more.
Turns out CrossFit doesn’t suck, but lazy people who don’t chase their potential do.
Find your Sara. Be more.
Onwards, Always.