Yes I too, have started Crossfit! I shunned gyms for most of my
life. It seems the more my brother and sister worked out, the more I ate
chocolate! The prospect of walking into a space where you get to sweat it out
with a bunch of strangers never made it to the top 10…..or top 100 things I’d consider
dedicating any amount of time to and I found it quite distasteful, and it didn’t
involve chocolate!
The motivations behind my change of heart are deeply complex
and complicated, but to sum it up briefly, I blame it all on the Croods!
The
first twelve minutes of this Dreamworks Animation about a family of cave people
and their survival in a harsh world on the brink of catastrophic change pressed an ‘on’ button deep within my DNA and it seems the ‘off’ switch has yet to be
located!
I’ve been doing Crossfit for about seven months now and they
say it doesn’t get easier, you just get stronger! There are ample websites,
blogs etc. on the subject of CF, the lingo, the benefits, the camaraderie, the
competition, the finer details of calisthenics, but I’d like to chat about why I
do it. Why I wake up in the dark, while my family sleeps on, and tiptoe out of
the house like a thief in the night to the ‘Box’ (ok, please allow me a little
lingo here and there, this is CF speak for gym!).
I remember the day I went in for a trial session, I was
petrified! I’d heard very little about it and all I knew was that newbies were apparently throwing up from exertion, and there were rumours of ropes, rings, weights,
burpies, whatever that was, and something called a kettle bell!
It was hard, there
was this white board of imminent doom with the day's work out written on it, and a clock which incited a level of mobility and strength I didn’t know I had, and just like that I was hooked!
When you
have a concept of what you are physically, what you can do, what your limitations
are, and someone who doesn’t even know you says, no, you can do more, not only in the future, with
hard work and effort, but today, right now, you are capable of more, like
twenty more sit ups, twenty more push ups, and another run around the block, it challenges those preconceived notions! It pulls the mat out from under how you see
yourself and replaces it with a well-wow-I-never-knew-I-could-to-that mat, and
that is the reason why people who start CF can’t stop talking about CF, because
we are so damn impressed, surprised, blown away by how much more amazingly
capable we are than we’d previously thought, that there must be more to every
other aspect of ourselves, our lives, our job descriptions, our place in the
world! It’s no small thing I tell you!
And when you’re on the losing end of a bad meeting or on hold
on the phone with Telkom during your entire lunch break, it does put a smile on
your face to remember that you deadlifted 55kg that morning which is surely
impressive because you only weigh that much! And yes, this sense of
satisfaction is utterly base and primeval, but millions of years of evolution
have brought us to a point where we are built to either chase down our lunch by
any means necessary or run and jump and climb and hide to avoid becoming
someone else’s lunch, on a daily basis.
It has brought up considerable
questions for me as a sentient being on this planet.
-What is important to me?
-Where do I want to excel?
-And therefore, what do I want to invest my time in?
These questions can churn up mucky conclusions if not for this simple answer
which has, so far, been sufficient; if it makes you happy, do it, as often
as you can! We are built to be much more agile, mobile, flexible and capable than we are, and we are much
stronger that we think!
And of course there is the cocktail of happy hormones
which comes with being physical! So it literally does MAKE me happy! These hormones
help arm and equip you for any tedium and irrelevance in the day to come!
~There is constant talk and much attention paid to financial
freedom, but too few people promote and encourage physical freedom. The ability
to physically do whatever you want to. To not be hindered by the limitations of
your physical form... Those few minutes in the Croods, when Eep climbs up a sheer
rock face and hoists herself effortlessly into a tree to better hear the sound
of a conch through the ravine struck me on a primal level, it said, you too can
climb a bunch of hectic stuff and swing and pull yourself up onto things with
your own body strength and you can celebrate it with a Palio brownie afterward,
as reward for your efforts! And that was all the convincing I needed!
This is the Box I go to, check it out:
