Have you ever pushed yourself? I mean really pushed yourself? Have you ever found that quiet space in your mind where silence drowns out the strained screams of encouragement from your peers; where thoughts of pain and agony receive no quarter; where every muscle, tendon, and neuron are singularly driven towards the completion of one agonizing task?
How would I answer? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves…
Up until three weeks ago, my understanding of exercise and fitness were that they were lonely endeavors to be pursued in large, impersonal, corporate gyms with headphones on aloof to the world around me. Over the years I’ve been a member of many gyms and in that time, I can probably count the number of people I’ve talked to on one hand (maybe both hands if you count, “hey, you done with that?”).
Then I came to know Crossfit; the fitness movement that strives to, “increase work capacity across broad time and modal domains” through functional training. English translation? To put it simply – to perform any task well in any circumstance under any time constraints. And the functional training part? Yeah, that means it has to be useful in real life. You won’t find bicep curls or calf raises on the agenda. What you will find is plenty of full-body movements; everything from power cleans and snatches to rope climbs, sled pulls, hand-stand push-ups and burpees.
Yet there’s another component to Crossfit – the camaraderie. It’s the type of camaraderie that can only come from healthy competition and mutual suffering. From the first day I arrived, I understood that this was going to be something very different. I was used to pushing myself (or so I thought!), but competition was never something I enjoyed. Growing up, I wasn’t the kid that was picked last for kickball… I was the kid watching from the stands. To say I wasn’t competitive would be an understatement. As a result, I grew up with the mantra, “I’ll just try to beat my best score!” A mentality that is perfectly reasonable in a game of pinball, Tetris or (for those of you not born pre-80’s) Angry Birds. In real life, however, that reasoning just isn’t very… what’s the word... ah yes… functional.
Something changed in me after that first class. Maybe it was the fact that I thought I was fit or perhaps it was the thought that my first class might not be a challenge. Maybe it was when my time went on the chalkboard and I had to stare at it in plain black and white… dead last. Time to re-evaluate my game plan. I would not be last again. Later that night, it occurred to me that my non-competitive nature had led me to complacency and led my growth to stagnate. It allowed me to fool myself in to thinking I’d given 100% when I hadn’t.
So have I ever pushed myself? Have I ever really pushed myself? Not until three weeks ago when I walked in to a Crossfit box. The bottom line is this: if there’s somewhere in your life where you’re stagnating, where your complacent… try a little healthy competition. You just might find that you were capable of more than you thought.
Dan
