The curse of the novice is two-fold.  Along with a wanton desire for progress comes a concomitant failure to realize that advanced skills are not the province of the beginner. 

Little attention is paid to such lowly matters such as the air squat while the newly christened athlete seeks the clean.  The push press is left aside in favor of the split jerk, and the pull-up gives valuable practice time to the muscle-up.

This phenomenon is unavoidable in our culture of instant gratification, so there is little point in disparaging our collective lack of patience.  Without fail, we’d rather be the CEO than the mailroom clerk, and ambition should not be dampened.

Nonetheless, the clash of unbridled desire and unyielding reality meets with its timeworn end—unhappiness.  

Give a guy with four pull-ups and two dips a set of rings, and he’ll pine for a muscle-up.  He’ll pull on those rings two or three times, confident that the next rep will be the one.  On rep five, his gaze finds the ground, and the little muscles surrounding his eyes relax.  By attempt ten, he’s defeated, and the swearing starts.

Our athlete’s problem is simple—he’s unprepared to succeed, and he hasn’t given himself permission to fail.   

The first step to mastery is preparation.  The dips and the pull-ups need to be there prior to the muscle-up attempts, or the frustration will be unending.  Our athlete needs to own the basics, or advanced movement will never happen.

Even with proper preparation, the athlete must be willing to fail repeatedly, practicing the impossible until it is no longer so.  This journey, a seemingly endless parade of incompetence, is hard on the psyche.  At every moment, it’s easier to quit than continue.  

The ensuing struggle between ego and reality is won by the ego more often than not, and practice ceases in favor of easier tasks and quicker victories.  This is a surefire way to keep experience within narrow bounds, impeding athletic progress for the sake of transient happiness.

Recognize that competence lies on the other side of slogging failure.  Make your preparations, and assault your target, never forgetting that victory is the end state of persistence.  You’ll find that the curse of the novice is no longer yours, as you’ve recognized that success comes only by embracing failure at every stage of the game.

Picture courtesy of J. Craig Zelinski, supreme dot commander of Fast and Light 2.0, atop An Teallach in Scotland.

 

Tim Russert is dead.  The suffer-no-bullshit anchor of “Meet the Press” had a massive coronary on Friday at the too-soon age of 58.  

This was a guy you liked for the same reason you liked Die Hard-era Bruce Willis.  He was funny, he was aggressive, and he saw right through your front.  The only way you got off Tim’s hook was to tell the truth, own up to your argument, and admit your shortcomings.  I routinely felt sorry for his Sunday morning guests—they’d stumbled into a maze where the Minotaur was impossibly smart and every passage was a dead end.

Unfortunately, the otherwise brilliant Mr. Russert fell prey to the plague of the intellectual class, treating his body as an inconsequential vessel for his rock star brain.  His work ethic was notorious--round-the-clock marathons of analysis and exposition, executed for the benefit of a spoiled television audience.  His long hours in the office precluded regular exercise and proper diet, and his heart gave out.

Right now, you’re feeling pressured to put nose to grindstone on your own behalf.  Gasoline is four dollars a gallon, food prices have skyrocketed, and folks in Venezuela are using American dollars to light cigars and clean up after the kids.  Every hard goods provider in the country is ratcheting up prices, citing the astronomical cost of shipping, thinning margins, and the ridiculous expense of raw materials.  You’re getting squeezed, and you need more money.

You’re working harder and looking for things to cut out of the budget, taking big swinging hacks at the checkbook to free up devalued dollars.  Lattes are gone, your Friday night dinner date has gone the way of the Caribbean monk seal, and your gym membership is next on the chopping block.  

Eighty, a hundred, two hundred dollars a month, back in your pocket in one fell swoop, dedicated to more important things like filling the tank, clothing the kids, and keeping the mortgage out of default.  Here’s the problem—Tim Russert is dead.

The tanking economy is irrelevant when you’re pushing daisies. Without properly functioning organs, your idea-rich brain has all the utility of a table lamp during a blackout.  When your body crumbles, everything else takes a back seat. When the bills start mounting and your work consumes you, take a minute to remember this basic fact:  without your health, you are nothing.  

With the boogeyman budget staring back at you, it’s tempting to axe the gym and trade in grass-fed beef for twenty-five cent boxes of linguini.  It’s tempting to let your health go to meet near-term material needs.  Find another way to make it work.  Dig deep, and make it through with your health intact.  Economic woes will pass, but the road to bodily ruin is downhill, and the bottom comes quick.

I am truly saddened at Tim Russert’s death.  He was the type of man that men should strive to be.  He left too soon, and now we’ll never get to see him tear into the next Administration.  If only his all-consuming desire to expose the truth had led him to the gym.  Godspeed, Tim.

You think you know pain, but you have no idea.  The heart thumping, chest expanding, lactic acid burn of your last workout was a walk through the meadow.

Somewhere, there’s a guy who did it in half the time it took you.  He suffered.  Plasma forced its way into his lungs, causing him to hack on repeat.  He choked down bile halfway through, and ended on his back, pupils dilated to the size of dimes.

While you were walking around, telling your friends how hardcore your workout was, Guy Number Two was still collapsed, the prospect of driving home as daunting as climbing K2 during a snowstorm.

When he finally stood up, he didn’t say a word.

CrossFit is a decidedly masochistic pursuit.  To be any good at it, you have to enjoy the pain.  You have to push back the threshold day after day, until last year’s traumas feel like an hour-long rubdown at the Canyon Ranch.  One day, you find a threshold that takes the whole thing just a little too far, and you get scared to go back.

The men and women that decimate your times are not superhuman.  They’re not particularly genetically gifted.  Hell, most of the top CrossFitters in the world would get absolutely pummeled in your standard game of rugby, buried by larger athletes begat by larger parents.

What differentiates these individuals is not a gift, but an unreasonable desire to push self-imposed suck beyond its logical limits.  What comes out the other side becomes legendary.

Like any human pursuit, we seek ways around the hard part.  Limited range of motion and new techniques.  Dropping the deadlift from the top, bouncing it off the floor.  Squatting above parallel and not standing up all the way.  Chicken-necking above the chin-up bar, and reviewing the tape to see if we made it.  

We want the reward (speed) without the sacrifice (pain).

This is not conscious cowardice.  It’s pure out-and-out rationalism.  At some point, the next threshold is the one that takes it too far, leaving us in an exercise-induced hallucination that lasts a few moments too long.  Our hearts bounce around our insides for one beat too many, and our lungs beg to explode for an unwanted extra second.  Every exhalation coincides with a constriction of vision, and the cold taste of copper.  

No sane human being would enjoy such a feeling.

Still, the glory beckons.  Surely, with enough training and the right supplements, there’s a way around the Hard Part.  Enough sleep and enough vitamin B will get you the sub-whatever time without the attendant pain.  There’s no need to redline your heart rate or pop capillaries.  No need to ache so badly at night that you can’t sleep.  Surely, there are ways around this.

Fortunately, the steroids are a no-go, and the exercises are done correctly or not at all.  The only way to legend is through ever-mounting piles of pain.  The meadow has to tilt at 45-degrees, and he rubdown at the Ranch must be done with Brillo Pads.  If you can talk, you’re not trying hard enough.  If your nerves aren’t frayed and ready to rebel, you’ll never get there.

Do yourself a favor, and realize that there’s no technique in the world that will save you.  There are no pills, no secrets, no passwords on the path to greatness.  You’ve got to embrace the pain, push the threshold, and feel the suck, and then you’ve got to muster the courage to go back six times a week.

After all, the world is a lot brighter when your pupils are the size of dimes, and massaging your sternum with your heart starts to feel good after a while.  The plasma finds its way out of your lungs, and eventually you’ll be able to drive. 

Sometimes, lying on the floor is its own reward.

Dave Castro takes his kettlebell for a walk.  Picture courtesy of CrossFit.com.

The upright squat—hips under the shoulders, back arched, weight on the heels—requires tremendous strength, stability, and motor control.  It’s less-than-upright cousin, the powerlifting squat, requires the same, although it puts the hips behind the shoulders and the torso at a forward angle.

There is no question that the powerlifting squat allows athletes to move greater loads.  Simple observation adequately proves this point.  The end goal of the powerlifter—to put up the biggest total possible—is borne out again and again using this method.

Nonetheless, my athletes are taught to strive for a perfectly upright torso, bypassing the weight-bearing advantages of the powerlifting squat.  The reason is transferability.  

Given our goal of developing athletic power, it is not enough that my athletes possess the ability to move large loads.  They must also be able to move them long distances extremely quickly.  In addition to maximizing strength, we seek to maximize speed and range of motion.  For this reason, we do not practice the squat as an end in itself, but rather as a steppingstone to the high-power Olympic lifts.

Proper execution of these lifts, in which maximal loads are moved from the ground to overhead in mere seconds, requires a rock-bottom squat and a vertical torso.  Due to the dynamic nature of these lifts, any forward lean unacceptably exacerbates the torque around the hip, increasing the possibility of failure.  

Again, observation adequately proves the point.  Snatches and cleans are caught atop upright squats and brought to standing.  When the athlete is unable to bring the spine under the bar with the hips directly below the shoulders, the weight inevitably hits the platform.

While a debate on the relative merits of powerlifting and weightlifting is beyond the scope of this discussion, the former does not develop many of the qualities we want in a well-rounded athlete.  Flexibility stands first and foremost.  An upright squat, especially in combination with the rack position seen in a proper clean, demands and develops flexibility in the legs, back, shoulder girdle, arms and wrists.  This full-body flexibility is a prerequisite to successful gymnastics—muscle-ups, kipping pull-ups, planches, straddles, and hip pullovers all require pliable body parts.  

Add to this the accuracy, agility, and balance components of the Olympic lifts and their transferability to nearly any sport, and it’s easy to see why our athletic journey progresses beyond the powerlifting squat.

Squatting style is an individual decision, predicated entirely on the reason for squatting.  If maximal strength is the goal, irrespective of speed, the powerlifting version is the wise choice.  If the athlete is striving to move beyond strength, into the realm of speed, power, and wide-ranging athletic competence, the upright squat serves as the gateway.  

 
Nicole demonstrates a fully-transferrable air squat at CrossFit Boston.  Picture courtesy of the author.  For a tutorial on obtaining an upright squat and additional reasons for doing so, check out Fixing the Squat on our Mic’d Instructor page.

 

Dubbed “the toughest two minutes in sports” by ESPN, the Scott Firefighter Combat Challenge is tailor-made for CrossFitters.

The participants, all active firefighters, scale a five-story tower with a 45-pound high-rise pack, pull a second pack up from the ground, rocket back down the tower, and hit every step en route.

Picking up a 9-pound plastic hammer, they drive a 160-pound slug three feet along a skid.  Abandoning this setup, the firefighters sprint through a serpentine course, pick up a charged fire hose, and drag it thirty feet through a pair of saloon doors.  Pulling a handle, they unleash a jet of water on a circular target.

Ten feet distant, 175 pounds of dead weight waits for rescue.  Grabbing the man-sized dummy around the torso, the firefighters backpedal one hundred feet to the finish line, collapsing to the ground to the sound of a buzzer. The best athletes run the course in under 1:30.

The entire event is run in full turnout gear, compressed air flowing to the competitors through a 30-pound self-contained breathing apparatus, functionally identical to the one used to fight fires.  

 
Profession-specific equipment aside, the event is a generalist’s dream—carrying, pulling, striking, sprinting, and dragging, always under load, and always with the clock running.  The course practically screams for a name like “Eva” or “Annie”.

The similarities between the Challenge and CrossFit are not lost on the athletes.  Many of these men employ a rigorous WOD schedule, combining course-specific training with the constantly varied functional movement of CrossFit.  

I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a few of them.

Two weeks ago, I walked onto the National Mall with Paul Weinburgh, a Lieutenant with the Haverhill Fire Department, for the first stop of the 2008 series.  Weaving between trucks and display booths, we made our way to the competitor area for sign-in and warm-up.

Paul had contacted me a few months earlier, asking for a sponsorship and the opportunity to beat his CrossFit-training, hard charging, Combat Challenge rival.  His request granted, we trained in earnest.  We focused on his weaknesses, hammering leg strength and local muscular endurance by squatting, deadlifting, dragging, and sprinting.

 

Paul’s first run of the day, the individual, was disappointing.  He finished a full ten seconds behind his personal record, coming out of the tower slowly and having a hell of a time with the dummy drag.   His experience wasn’t unique.  Most of the CrossFitting firefighters came out slow, turning in times that were short of the previous year’s bests.  

Inevitably, the disappointment set in, and the questions came with it.  Sitting on the D.C. Metro with Paul and his fellow competitor, Dave Bowman, I fielded the torrent.  Given the promise of CrossFit—elite level general physical preparedness—Paul and Dave wanted an explanation for their sub-par performances.

The answer extends beyond the Challenge, and is applicable to every sport in the world:  CrossFit does not replace sport-specific training.  

Although the Challenge clearly favors general physical preparedness, elements of the course are unique.  Climbing the tower demands leg strength, but it also demands proper placement of the hose pack, familiarity with the breathing apparatus, comfort with the rise and run of the tower, and a quick transition to the hoist pack.  Hitting the Kaiser requires tremendous hip flexion.  It also requires a proper hammer grip, staying in front of the slug, and accurate striking.  The list goes on.  Each portion of the course has obligatory skills above and beyond those provided by GPP.  

For the men in question, this was the first time they’d been on the official course since August 2007.  Although each had done his best to mimic the course in firehouses, garages, and parking lots, they lacked recent course experience.  While their general physical preparedness was undoubtedly at its peak, it couldn’t overcome the relative absence of skill-specific training.

Paul ran the tandem ninety minutes after his individual effort.  Running with a champion teammate and the fire of failure at his heels, he turned in a gold medal-winning personal record of 1:24.  His skills were back, and the results were astounding.

CrossFit fills holes.  Unparalleled at exposing and correcting for athletic weakness, it creates versatile monsters out of former non-performers.  Combined with adequate skill training, it will improve the performance of any athlete in a non-specialized sport.  The Scott Firefighter Combat Challenge certainly fits the bill.  

Don’t worry gentlemen—domination is coming.

Paul and Brandon await the start of the team relay on top of the tower.  Picture courtesy of the author.  Check out the D.C. stop in an Again Faster original video, "CrossFit and the Challenge".