Why I do Crossfit ~ Mariella

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!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbQI5ZPiPIk&index=10&list=PLwC4e-jE85BqqE-ZUtzaOTj3jQSuHyV_v

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:

http://www.crossfitplett.com/