High

It should look like this. Wreckage. Destruction. Annihilation. After “Power Cindy” you should look like somebody just pistol-whipped you or shoved a needle in your vein.

You should be wrecked.

And if you’re not? Then your pacing was off, your intensity level was too low, your plan was too measured.

CrossFit, done right, is like taking drugs. Your brain gets scrambled and your hands shake, but you feel flippin’ FANTASTIC. Yet your health improves and you look better. The fact that it costs less than drugs and you get to keep all your teeth is just a bonus. But don’t try to fool yourself. You’re an addict. A CrossFit addict. Maybe you don’t have track marks on your arms, but look at your hands. Touch your traps. Check out the marks on your shins, or your collarbone. The signs are there, aren’t they?

You’re addicted to CrossFit but you don’t have to cruise bad neighborhoods for your fix and the cops aren’t going to bust you. In fact, the cops are working out next to you and they’re addicts too. Both of you will go home and find yourself thinking about your next hit — reading CrossFit Journal articles, haunting the blog, watching videos again and again, hitting Facebook for some CrossFit talk, jonesing for your next hit.

And the next day, when you get to the box and you’re lacing up your sneakers and the warm-up is about to start, you’ll feel that pit in your stomach and you’ll be scared and you’ll think, “Holy crap, why do I do this? It’s going to hurt.” You’ll almost want to run away, back to your couch, back to the food and television oblivion that used to dull your pain of living, back before you had your first CrossFit hit.

But then you remember the high you’re going to feel at the end. And you swallow hard and walk onto the floor.

The coach yells “3 . . . 2 . . . 1. Go!” The needle slips in. It pinches a bit . . .  but then . . . ahhhh . . .

Layin’ It On The Line

I can’t make you a better athlete. I can’t make you skinny. Or fat. I can’t make you a better person. I can’t make you a better friend, a better lover, a better mother or a better father.

I can’t make you run or row or front squat or L-sit or do handstand push-ups.

I can’t make you do anything.

You are the person with the power. The person with the choices. The person who makes the decisions. Only you can make you do anything.

All I can do is provide expert instruction, an outstanding facility, a phenomenal community, and an accepting atmosphere where it’s safe to f*** up and try again.

And results. Lots of results if you’re willing to work for them.

You have to decide if you’re ready to accept that challenge. You have to decide if you have a warrior’s soul, if you’re a CrossFitter.

I am a CrossFit coach. I am a CrossFit affiliate.

What are you?

10 Ways To Be a Better CrossFitter

Warning: I wrote this post to myself. But if the lifting shoe fits . . .

10. Hold the bar straight.

9. Pay attention to your breathing.

8. Use less chalk. Really.

7. Read the CrossFit Journal articles and watch the videos. What’s this going to take? Like 15 min a day? Worth the time and worth the $25 per year. Stop whining and commit.

6. Stop whining and commit. Yeah, that was so good and simple, it needed to be said again and for like all of life.

5. Put sh** away where it belongs. You might call it housekeeping but, really, it’s a form of discipline. You don’t want bumpers or collars or KBs or whatever all over the place. Pick your item, use it, and put it away. Mental discipline is as important as physical discipline, maybe even more so.

4. Get to class 15 minutes early, all the time. Use that extra time not to chat or work on stuff you’re good at — use it to suck. Suck at L-sits, suck at deadhang pull-ups, suck at KB snatches. All the stuff you and your ego have been avoiding. Put on your big girl panties and do the stuff you don’t want to do. It’s called being a grown-up. And a CrossFitter. Go do it.

3. Shut up about programming. Nobody’s ever happy with programming unless they’re the ones doing the programming. Do the workouts. If you’re getting stronger and quicker and feel better, guess what? The programming is working. And if you’re not getting stronger or quicker and you don’t feel better, grab a coach and address your concerns privately.

2. Pay attention. Stop chatting and daydreaming and goofing off. Focus.

1. Stop praying at the bar. Gather yourself, address the bar, breathe, and lift. Don’t make it more complex — in movement or thought — than it needs to be. Lift the flippin’ bar.

Confessions of a Recovered Globo-Gym Addict

It’s hard to change. Really hard. Pre-CrossFit (P.C.) I was a globo-gym addict. Five days a week, sometimes six. Waiting on the doorstep at 4:45am for the Air Force base gym to open at 5. Free weights, cardio equipment, leg presses, and even some machines. Leg days, tri/bi days, chest and back days. Quite honestly, I loved it. I felt great and really thought I was getting somewhere. My muscles were growing and I was a better cyclist because of it. Sure, I only had one kind of pathetic-looking pull-up but I had one! No other girl in the gym ever came close. I was the Queen of what the front desk girls called “The Testosterone Room.”

Then I found CrossFit. I tried one workout. It was supposed to be 20 min. I barely made it to 10. But it seemed like it had lasted for hours — and I was wrecked for the next day. I had finally met my match.

I tried another and another and another. Still cycling my “CrossFit-style lifting” sessions (that’s actually what I wrote in my training log) with long road rides, some sprinting, and swimming. I was still trying to break things up into “Leg Days” and “Upper Body Days.” Oh — and toss in 40 minutes on the elliptical and maybe the treadmill.

It worked for a while.

But then a funny thing happened. I realized I was an idiot. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t separate all the CrossFit workouts into upper body or lower body days. A power clean involved the whole body, as did clean and jerks, deadlifts, push presses, squats, snatches, kettlebell exercises, rowing, and even the famed pull-up. (Oh — and I had five of those now — something I had never been able to achieve in all my globo-gym days.) CrossFit made me mix up all the body parts, just like life did. It made me intertwine cardio and lifting — just like life did. CrossFit — when I went hard enough — was leaving me gasping and exhausted in 20 minutes — like hours in the globo-gym never had. It became my drug of choice. I still went to the gym five days out of seven, but what I did was soooo much harder, even though it was shorter. I felt better, looked better, was better.

See, what it took me so long to realize was this: more does not always mean better. We live in a big society, with big appetites — and this attitude bleeds over into our gym culture. We (mistakenly) think that more time in the gym means that we’re achieving more. Not necessarily so. What matters is effort and skill and attitude, not just time punched on the clock. That’s pretty much true for success in all walks of life — so why would we think that things would be any different in the gym?

To see that though, you have to turn things on their head. Look outside the box. Take a different viewpoint and don’t be content to just do what everybody else does.

Every once in a while, I think about taking two hours and doing one of my old globo-gym workouts – maybe a “back and bi’s” day, followed by 45 minutes on the elliptical. And then I remember how impersonal, soul-less, and boring it was — and I realize I’d rather shoot myself in the stomach. CrossFit is a better way. You just have to wrap your head around it.

The B**** Mode

There’s this person we become when we decide that simply surviving our CrossFit workout is not enough. It’s another level, another gear, another mindset. It’s when we look at the person next to us and think “I want to beat their score.” It’s not enough anymore to simply finish. Now, we want to finish well, we want to do more, achieve more, be more.

This mode has different names; the person we become when we decide to really achieve. Some folks call it Game Face, some call it Beast Mode. But for some of us it’s Bitch Mode. And that’s okay. Bitch Mode gets the job done.

Now some of you women might be shying away from that word: bitch. You don’t like to be called one, you’ve been schooled never to act like one, you hate to even hear that word because so many times in this life, it’s been used by folks to try to keep you down. But you know what? Who cares.

Words only have the power we give them. Think about that, for a moment. The word “bitch” only has the power we give it. So when we hear it used as a noun or as a verb and it’s used negatively, against us or someone else — well, we gave it that power. We shied away from it. “Oh no, I don’t want to be called a bitch.”

Well, f*** that. Let’s take it back. Now. Bitch is our word. Ladies, when you step into the gym today and you hear the “3-2-1-Go!” I don’t want you to be nice anymore. I want you to find your inner bitch. I want you to find her and tap into her and become her for 20 min or whatever time that workout takes. Don’t be nice. Don’t be polite. Don’t be what society tells you to be. Just for those 20 minutes. Be who you need to be to get the job done and done well. Be who you need to be to achieve what you want to achieve in those 20 minutes. Dig deep, go hard, go all out. Go balls to the wall even if you don’t have any balls.

Life is short. These moments are dying in our hands. Grasp them and live — really live — now. Turn on your bitch mode for the workout. See what you can do if you really try. Then, afterward, you can be nice again and polite and sweet to each other. We want that, we need that, we love that from you. It is the best part of life. But for 20 minutes today — just during that workout — let your inner bitch fly. Let her fight and persevere. Let her conquer. It’s okay. You’re safe here. Let’s see what you can really do.

The Simple Truth

I lift. That’s what I do. This shirt communicates that pretty darn clearly. Wish life was always that easy, huh?

Like if I walked into my CrossFit gym and one shirt said “Traps are really sore.” Or another one said “My ankle hurts” or the one in the back just read “Bloated. Cranky. I might snap for no reason.”  Yeah, that would be sweet. Even if the shirt said, “Just laid off. Don’t ask” — that would be kind of good to know. We’d all be a little bit kinder, maybe a tad funnier, maybe better at being a shoulder to lean on.

Communication is not the easiest task in front of us each day. Even as we race as a society towards quicker, better, and more comprehensive communication, we fall prey to the distance in our lives. We’re overwhelmed, overtasked, and (often) underserved by the very means of communication that seduce us into thinking we will be more in touch.

The answer doesn’t lie in my iPhone or my Mac. The answer lies in putting all that sh** down and talking to each other in real time. Like what we do for an hour in a CrossFit gym each day. No headphones, no e-mail, no texting, no isolation. Just people and sweat and effort and a common workout.

It seems simplistic — and that’s the beauty of it all. It is simple. Many of the best things in life are. I lift. Any questions?