The Sport of Fitness

 

Sam walked in the door last night, and my mouth dried up.  I started shaking and dry heaving, and my breathing became shallow and forced.  Clearly, this is no way to react to the sight of your girlfriend, but we'd traded in our Wednesday night dinner date for a one-on-one go at the CrossFit Boston WOD.

Our third day of competition promised to be an easy one.  Only 135 reps and six minutes of effort stood between us and a trip to the showers.

Shawn called “Go!” and I buried my sledgehammer into the tire at my feet.  Rhythmically pounding the helpless radial, I listened to Samantha doing the same thing to my right.  I slid my hand down the handle so fast it burned my palm, recovering as quickly as possible to do it again.

The wall ball shots were a breeze, and I had three of them done by the time Sam picked up her Dynamax Ball.  Unbroken, I sprinted across the room to the pullup bars, bounding off a plyo box and starting my first knee-to-elbows rep.  Pulling my knees upward, I watched Sammy finish her wall ball shots and run across the room.

She never caught me.  I yelled “Time!” after the third round of knee-to-elbows, and dropped to the black rubber floor.

Head-to-head competition is a hard activity to sustain day in and day out.  Giving your best ceases to be optional, and the abstract idea of winning becomes hard and fast.  You either come in first or you lose.  This kind of pressure can make a person do one of two things:  excel or collapse.

Sam would never choose the latter, and neither would I, causing us to blast through every second of our daily WODs.  We know that one moment of weakness, one prolonged rest, or one failed rep could cause the other to walk away with the win.  We’ve elevated our CrossFitting to a do-or-die level.

This sense of urgency is hard to create in groups larger than two.  Mismatched ability levels and unconscious benchmarking cause the entire room to dial it down a notch, even when everyone is “giving their best”.  The knowledge of previous results causes everyone to develop a mental picture of where they fit in the class hierarchy, leading to consistently predictable results day after day.  With vague stakes—“fitness” and “pride”—there is little incentive to turn in a better time.  We take solace in the idea that we’re only competing against ourselves, making our fitness program more acceptable in a world where “everybody wins”.

After only three days, I’ve seen the results that true competition with concrete stakes brings.  Benchmarking your performance to that of your competitors becomes a good way to walk away without a win, and giving your best becomes a very literal pursuit.

CrossFit is predicated on highly varied, functional movement, executed at high intensity.  While the first two variables in this definition are explicit, the third is somewhat subjective.  High intensity is relative to the individual.  Nonetheless, it can always be made higher through increased speed and decreased rest times, two things that head-to-head competition is sure to engender.

Make a conscious effort to reject the feel-good dogma that eliminates competition from your workouts.  Find a friend, call them out, and get going.  Shaking and dry heaving is a small price to pay for elite fitness.

Big Jack scares the crap out of my old Honda tires.  Picture courtesy of CrossFit Boston.