by Jon Gilson

There’s always something.

The bright lights.  The Top 20 pop.  Someone wanting to talk to you about the something about the time you did the thing.

Ignore them.  Not nasty.  Not with distain.  Because now is the time, the moment when you concentrate on the task ahead, on the never-ending belief that what’s about to go down will go down, that you can’t be beaten.

Every ounce of psychic energy you’re about to bring to bear; it’s easy to disrupt, easy to kill.  You have to protect it, feet on the ground, head down, focusing on the simple mental images of success.

There is great power in the singular sight, the sole goal, the only reason you came here.  Your next personal record, better than last time, better than ever, it’s right here in front of you, ready for the taking. 

And now, you have to take it.  Two words, three words run through your head, a tight, concise, pithy description of the end state, the moment right before the chest bumps and high fives and screams like a fifteen-year-old’s cracking voice.

When they try to distract you, jump in on your bar, talk about the suck, borrow your 5s, cure your stress, just stop.  Look up, make eye contact, not angry but ready, and look back down.  This isn’t about Community.  Not now.  This is about winning, succeeding, making yourself believe that what’s about to happen will happen, must happen, that nothing else can happen, the intellectual certitude followed by physical reality.

And then, get ready to go.  Grip the bar.  Chalk up, and remember that your momentary lapse in social nicety will be rewarded with what you wanted, the moment of apex.  Your short, pithy phrase repeats until there is nothing else, no sound, no Top 20, no mats, no platforms, no nothing except a bar and a goal, the universe bent around you in a cocoon of now.

Don’t think heels down, chest up.  Don’t think at all, because you don’t need to.  You already did it, and miracle of miracles, what was supposed to happen happened.  It’s over your head.  It’s locked out.

And now, they fade back in.  The sound of volume slow marching to full blast, clapping, screaming, backslapping rah. 

You can give in, or you can go back.  Sit down, shut your eyes, and bring pithy back.  Because it’s not over, and you can shut it out again.  Accept that this is just a step and not the end, and it will happen all over again.  Another record, not a defining moment, but an ephemeral glimpse at where you were, the shallow footprint of an athlete who’s moving forward faster.

Ignore them, and bring it.  Because there’s always something more.

Neal cleans at CrossFit Boston.  Picture courtesy of CrossFit Boston.

by Patrick Cummings

“You know, your grandmother’s been doing CrossFit in her basement.” 

Maybe it’s only a rumor, an exaggeration at best.  But as the potatoes are getting mashed and the pumpkin pies are batting their eyelashes at me from the countertop, as my family mills about the kitchen waiting for the official start of our Thanksgiving festivities, my mother whispers to me and I can’t help but believe it. 

“She’s not telling anybody, but she’s doing it.”

My grandmother is almost eighty years old, but don’t tell her that.  She’s a former nurse, mother to nine children, and wife to one stubborn and amazing old man.  Together, they are the picture of what retirement should be—travel, family, continued intellectual curiosity and the occasional glass of good scotch.  They are the reason I’m not scared of getting older.

So when my mother tells me that my grandmother is doing CrossFit in the basement, she unwittingly jars me from my newfound CrossFit malaise. 

It’s been a week of reading blog posts and endless pages of repetitive comments.  Days of conversations with no real conclusions.  Hours spent trying to determine how I felt about the whole mess, with no result other than disappointment pointed in no general direction. 

But now it’s as if my mother’s taken me by the shoulders and shaken me back to reality. 

I think about my aunt in Virginia emailing me a few days earlier to tell me her “Fran” time.  I think about doing “Daniel” at CrossFit Cape Cod alongside two aunts and a cousin, my uncle across the gym on the C2, pulling himself toward a new 2K PR.  I think about teaching my twenty-nine year old sister how to do pullups with a band and my four year-old cousin showing me what a burpee was. 

Later, after the turkey has been cleared from the table and I’ve finally given in to the pumpkin pie, I sit across from my grandfather.  We’re talking about why the world seems so imperfect these days and I ask him a simple question.  I ask, “If someone comes to you tomorrow and says, ‘Give us the one thing we can do to turn this all around.  One thing, and we’ll all do it and it’ll set us heading back in the right direction.’  What’s that one thing?”

He thinks about it for a few seconds, leans back and smiles.  He says he has no idea, which, if you know my Grandfather, is a rare occurrence.

He says change isn’t so simple, that it doesn’t work like that.  He says the best we can hope for is to positively affect those people within our own circle of influence.  Do right by the people closest to you, and they will do right by those closest to them. 

I make a quick mental list: one grandmother, one mother, two sisters, three aunts, one uncle, three cousins and three college friends.  I claim no credit but being lucky enough to have been introduced to CrossFit two years ago by a good friend.  I was within his circle of influence and they are within mine.  The two women my aunt has recruited to workout with her in the basement are within hers. 

They don’t care about the drama.  They don’t care about the ramifications or the politics.  They care only about feeling better and living fuller lives.

And that’s what I’m back to thinking about now.  Because my grandmother might be CrossFitting in her basement.

by Jon Gilson

The contention, like most that endure, made perfect sense.   Get too strong, and your endurance will suffer.  Too much endurance, and your strength will drop.  You can’t have everything.

Fortunately, perfect sense and reality do not always occupy the same space, their neat relationship thrown askew by the inexorable march of athletic evolution.

The fact that we missed:  previous feats of athleticism will always be surpassed.  Sprinters will sprint faster, lifters will lift more.  Quarterbacks will throw more accurately, batters will hit more home runs.  CrossFitters will get stronger and faster. 

Once, we said that developing the capacity of a novice across a variety of physical disciplines would create the fittest men and women on the planet.  Unavoidably, we’re being forced to remove the word “novice” from this definition; it no longer applies.  Our fittest are not novices, but legitimate contenders in nearly every arena.

For the first time, we’re seeing the strong, the fast, the enduring, occupying the same space.  The guy with the 5-minute mile is deadlifting 500 pounds.  He’s putting out half a horsepower for ten straight minutes.  He’s jumping four feet in the air.  He’s running eighty miles.  He is world class; his accomplishments are not a compromise.

Simultaneously, we are seeing adaption to imposed demand that does not follow traditional pathways.  Now, the strongest are not the largest, the fastest not the most waiflike.  Strength is achieved through increased neurological efficiency rather than mass.    Speed is achieved by getting stronger, not running more.  Athletes are borne from variety rather than specificity, exhibiting unheard of strength-to-bodyweight ratios.

We are throwing training on its ear, and this is just the beginning.  This discipline is in its infancy, still far from widespread, still the province of few.   There may come a day when our definition of fitness is not a compromise, when we no longer sacrifice mastery in one domain for competency in many, instead choosing mastery in all.

That day has started to dawn.

Josh Wagner fights 485 in Aromas.  Picture courtesy of CrossFit.com.

by Jon Gilson

Boston’s Back Bay is surprisingly stable.  Row after row of brick homes, built on top of a dirt-filled marsh, every flagstone basement below sea level.  Logic would dictate that this early nineteenth-century engineering should have calved into the Atlantic years ago, yet it stands to this day, a testament to the audacity of those who built it. 

John and I were driving down Beacon Street, the Back Bay’s main artery and canyon of Victorian-era architecture, when he handed me a manila envelope.

“This is my knee.”

Today marked the first time I’d seen John outside of the walls of CrossFit Boston, where he’d been training for six months.  Headed to a Celtics game at the Fleet Center, we were trading the platform for the parquet.

The son of a world-class powerlifter, John looks anything but.  Six foot five with limbs to match, he wasn’t built to move weight, yet a childhood of ignoring anthropometry had left him crazy strong.  Years without coaching had simultaneously eroded his technique, and we spent months bringing him back to the realm of acceptability.

John’s squat stance was too wide and his depth high, a silent admission to the pain he felt each time he descended.   We worked gradually and steadily until he made bottom, pushing his knees out and his hip backward.  Now, John squatted correctly, fighting his size for every inch.

I opened the envelope and slid out an x-ray film.  Holding it up to the dome light, I saw a blacked out joint, a femur and tibia joined by thin white tentacles and a pile of rubble, the detritus of a destroyed knee.

“This is your knee!  Jesus, why didn’t you tell me?”

My brain cycled wildly between disbelief and regret.  I’d stood beside John, demanding range of motion, demanding bodyweight back squats, the Space Needle built on a pile of marshmallows.   I’d told him to do what no sane man should.

"My ACL is gone, too."

He laughed, and my confusion gave way to understanding.

I hadn’t pushed John down.  He’d pushed himself down, stronger with each descent.  Even more, he’d pushed against decrepitude, reclaiming range of motion that a weaker man would’ve lost forever, and somehow he’d done it in the face of impossibility, a gravel-filled knee with imperfect muscular support.

Like the men who built the land we were crossing, John had seen an end result that was more important than the obstacles in the way, that something beautiful could be built atop something inhospitable, and now he was reaping the benefits, back squatting three hundred and thirty five pounds at thirty nine years of age.

I wouldn’t pretend that we’re all capable of doing what John did, an assertion that would merely belittle his accomplishment.  Nonetheless, I firmly believe that we are capable of more, that we can build something from nothing.

I handed the x-ray back to John.

John overcomes gravity at CrossFit Boston.  Picture by Again Faster.

by Patrick Cummings

His name was Brett and he was the fastest kid I ever knew. He was shorter than I was, and lighter. He never seemed to get tired. He ran the 400-meter race every meet, and that confused me. I didn’t understand anybody who would want to do that. Every time he did, though, I was relieved. If he ran the 400, then it meant he couldn’t run the 200, and that was my race.

Senior year in high school, I only lost the 200 was when he was in it. I couldn’t catch him.

The end of the season came, and our team of athletic misfits gathered in the center of the track for the league championship meet. A few hours later, I was setting my blocks for the 200-meter final. Twenty-two and a half seconds after the gun, I crossed the line ahead of everybody else.

Call it hubris if you like, but there was never any question in my mind as to what the result would be. Over my entire athletic career, the only moments of clear, unquestioned confidence came at the start of that event. They were the kind of moments where nervousness somehow transforms into energy instead of dread. The kind of moments where your body is light and your mind uncluttered. The kind of moments I never felt when Brett lined up beside me.

No matter how many races I won, I never believed I could beat Brett. And so I never did.

And that’s a hard habit to break.

From the first CrossFit workout I hit, and almost every subsequent one since, I knew where I would finish before the clock ever started.  I never thought I could win, and so I've finished lower far more often than I have higher.

High school track and field long gone, it’s been awhile since I've felt that unquestioning confidence. Years away from organized sports have dulled my desire to win, and my inability to transcend my own muted expectations have left my progress stagnant in the gym.

I never beat Brett because I knew I never could. I didn’t let him make me better. Instead, I felt sorry for myself. I settled for being good rather than the best. And as a result, I never grew as an athlete.

I’ve watched this video fifteen times now, and every time I do, I am amazed at something. Something other than Usain Bolt and his new world record. It comes at the end of the video, while Bolt takes his victory lap.

The camera finds Tyson Gay, second place in the race and amongst the few men on this planet even remotely in the same league as the Jamaican. The race is over and the results are on the board. Bolt runs a 9.58, Gay a 9.71. With a slightly injured groin, Gay sets the American record and runs the third fastest time ever recorded.

The camera finds Gay, and though we can’t see his face, the gesture he makes is familiar to us all. It’s one of disappointment.

Instead of lining up next to the 6’5” Bolt and thinking, “I’m just going to try and beat everybody else,” he went after the top dog. And because he did, he ran faster than he ever had before.

You can’t learn confidence, but you can earn it. Gay may have lost that race, but he knows he can go faster. He knows what it feels like, and it’s that feeling that he’ll be chasing every race, whether Bolt lines up beside him or not.

I never let Brett make me faster, and I haven’t let James Hobart or Stacey Kroon make me faster, even though I line up with them for every WOD. My progress is minimal and slow and I have grown impatient with it.

I lost my competitive fire not because I’ve stopped wanting to be the best, but because I stopped wanting to be disappointed when I was proved anything less. I have forgotten the single most important lesson we learn from CrossFit: Through struggles, to the stars.

I have beaten James at exactly one workout over the past year and change. It’s time I finally went after the big dog.

Picture of Kevin Williams and Jay Swift, battling it out at a recent CrossFit Endurance cert in Milford. They were doing "Death by 10 Meters". Picture courtesy of the author.