Foundation of "CrossFit in 100 Words" -- Food Freedom

 Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. 

These are the first words of “CrossFit in 100 Words” by which these pages are organized–in terms of methodological significance, if not popular perception or even experience (yet). It makes sense to begin understanding CrossFit this way, because how you fuel your body will ultimately determine both your depth of practice and duration of movement into healthy longevity. Young bodies can pretty much eat whatever the culture feeds them–pizzas, donuts, soft-drinks, high-sugar lattes, eventually beer, harder alcohols, chips, fast-food, and more. I loved my “eat a large pizza after work” days, myself. But eventually, the high intensity and strength-oriented movements in CrossFit will make a person curious about how the food you ate that morning impacts your workout midday or later. Or even how all the carbs you had two days ago impacts your level of thirst and sustained capacity.

You find yourself halfway through what’s called a “chipper”--a long-duration, multi-movement workout–only to have your body begin to shake, or you get light-headed, or perhaps you want to throw up. Wrong fueling strategy. Or you set yourself to do Fran Rx style, comin’ out hot as you’re supposed to, and five minutes later, huffing and puffing over the barbell, you realize your body was never going to pull, push, and lift heavy that fast with no breakfast that morning. Wrong fueling strategy.

Most of us with ingested or ingrained body-issues will accuse ourselves of being weak, or feel embarrassment that we couldn’t do it, or decide CrossFit itself is mean or stupid…when another interpretation could actually provide freedom from all of that and create a pathway toward doing chippers well, completing Fran in faster and faster times (regardless of Rx or Scaled). Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar is the foundation of CrossFit’s methodology because how you fuel your body will determine how you can move without pain, create more power from wisely sustained energies, and mature into the seasoned athlete any and all of us could become, if held, guided, coached, and taught well. Most boxes struggle how to invite members into this foundation, of course, for good reason.

We live in a numbing and avoidant overculture, using food to numb and cope in our social isolation more than becoming conscious and fueling well. CrossFit boxes are “living experiments” immersed in increasingly bizarre currents of food production (organic, processed, food-industrial-complex, marketed brands etc.), healthy nutrition (conflicting reports on even our acceptable “food pyramid,” what does “heart-healthy” even mean?), diet-culture (paleo, keto, low-fat, low-carb, Whole30, Atkins, etc.), food allergies (in younger populations especially), and the overwhelming sexualization and objectification of bodies in late-capitalistic, social-media worlds. Men are socialized to be ripped and strong. Women are socialized to be small and weak. There is no consensus on what fitness even means, let alone what it looks like or who to trust for guidance. It’s hard to gather in any communal form without walking on egg-shells (so to speak) due to all the conscious and unconscious energies we have about food and fitness today. Nutrition is the foundation of the CrossFit methodology, though the strategies boxes use can be indirect to non-existent, depending upon its business clientele.

My invitation comes from 6-7 years now of nutrition re-education, experimentation, and flexible practices that wax and wane as my life (and my body) has changed. I want everyone to know from the inside the “food freedom” that can come with the foundation CrossFit suggests for functional movement unto well-being and fitness. I have deep gratitude in me for the food freedom I now know is possible, palatable, even practical. 

What do I mean by food freedom?

Peaceableness in body. Steadiness in being in my own skin. Relief from endless food discernments and decisions.  Any philosophical inquiry into what we actually mean by freedom will specify the sense of being free from and being free for (whatever). In those terms, then, I now know freedom from a lot of things -- cravings, billboard or marketing triggers, expectations of others imposed upon me with respect to what food means for them, presumed to be for us. I also know freedom for a lot of other things -- physical play, increased sense of fun or levity, a high level of energy for my entire day and embodied movement with less and less joint inflammation or discomfort. Also less and less shame or guilt, whether internalized or imposed upon me by another. It took me a long time to find my way here, but I am so very grateful for the food freedom I now know and get to experience every day.

One of the pathways that began to open the way for me here several years ago is called the Whole30, which (I was surprised to be reminded recently) is probably where the use of the phrase first landed in my own vocabulary. Melissa Hartwig and Dallas Hartwig’s book, The Whole30: the 30-Day Guide to Total Health and Food Freedom, came down from my shelf recently. I was looking for some new healthy food combinations I could find to spice up the order and content of our summer meals, and I startled at the subtitle. I had not remembered their use of the phrase “food freedom.” The book itself doesn’t have much to say about it, but Melissa Hartwig has a video in which she describes what she means by the phrase food freedom. I recognize the steps in her words that got me here, even as there is a sense of ‘moving beyond’ into my own experience, my own words.

“You are in control of your food instead of food controlling you,” she begins. “No more uncontrollable cravings. No more feeling like you’re a slave to sugar or carbs. No more prowling through the pantry at 10:00 p.m.” Instead, food freedom means “you are making conscious and deliberate decisions about your food.” 

I appreciate her words and recognize the wisdom within them. They describe my own experience, at least to a point. Because I also feel a weariness in her words that I do not experience in my day to day. She speaks the truism that food freedom for her is making conscious and deliberate decisions about food. She offers a pathway there, in our cultural intersections where food-choices abound, and maybe only 10% of them are healthy. 

Is it worth it? 

Do I want it? 

These are the two questions she names within food freedom living. She’s basically asking what impact will this food have on my body--in ten minutes, in an hour, by tomorrow morning, or even into next week? Is it so special that it’s worth it? Is it so delicious that it’s worth it? What will the impact be, on my body?

These are the questions I also listen to when I’m in a social situation with my husband, necessary in his job. Or when a celebration weekend is coming and nostalgic-special foods are desired to observe the festive day. The consciousness and deliberation in decision-making is a pathway to food freedom. But it’s incredibly wearying as well. Particularly when we are bombarded from without by others’ food-insecurities or struggles in a high-marketing, high-consumption culture.

What I’m taking delight in for myself is the unexpected arrival into a space or habit whereby I don’t even desire or crave what’s difficult for my body to digest. Where the decisions I make about food each day are so free that I don’t even have to discern. It’s no longer that I am consciously choosing or being deliberate about food choices, but that the high sugar, high carbs things don’t even appeal to me anymore. I’m not deciding it’s not worth it as much as not even noticing an interest in having to choose.

Before this sounds all cut and dry, I so do have my area of consciousness and deliberate decision making, each week. My husband and I are foodies, and he loved learning about all kinds of cocktails in the lengthy pandemic-bubble months of shut-down. I was one of his only bubble-mates so regularly faced invitations to cocktail hour! The drinks themselves were not that high in calories or sugars or carbs, but they do lower inhibitions for old habits of munchies and hors’d’oeuvres. So...I learned that an ounce or two of vodka can go a long way in an evening with three cans of seltzer accompanying it over time. I’ve learned cocktail recipes actually control amounts and ratios, because you have to be precise in the creation of a Poet’s Dream, for instance. (isn’t that a great name? Easy for a poet like me to accept that celebratory beverage). Recipe cocktails are better than an eye-estimated Old Fashioned. More recently, I learned that sipping 1.5 ounces of really good (i.e. really expensive) bourbon also slows down the intake. Cost-benefit analysis of the home keeps imbibing down.

So...it’s not that I’m never weary in deliberating, but that occasion is really the only time where I get to practice differentiation (doing what my body needs and desires, splurging from time to time) and participation (communing alongside my husband and our friends, from time to time), both at the same time. The rest of the time, I take delight in the food freedom I now know, held in a community of fellow-travelers who love CrossFit intensity, who also navigate home and restaurant food choices within a commitment to health.

The secret here could be said to be "hidden in the sauce" of how CrossFit works--communally, collegially, competitively (for some). Several times a week, I surround myself with folks who are intensely committed to fitness. I pick up tips of the trade and new ways to prepare foods, which then circles back to supporting the community for me. It’s not a mindfulness or deliberation alone, in other words. It’s a communal culture that encourages good health and increasing fitness. As each decides for themselves. No shame, no blame. 

The end result has been a peaceableness and steadiness in my body, my life, which then allows me to be present to all that is around and within me. I rarely get triggered into feelings of shame or guilt anymore, at least with respect to body-image things. Awakened heart, some of my teachers call it. 

I know from the outside this way of being with food looks like a hugely willful and highly controlled-from-outside discipline or difficult regimen. I often get the comment that I must have huge self-discipline, or that the person talking "doesn't have that much willpower." I don’t experience it that way at all. By now, it's not my willfulness or even that much discipline anymore. It was a journey of discipline to get here, with coaching and community support/learning. But over time, even my husband with whom I eat the most often, who eats vastly different than I do now, honors and even does his best to support me. 

It can be hard to have willpower regarding food in our overculture, unless you surround yourself with those who are living into your choices, values, with you. So no...this way of being with food--no sugar, low carbs, rich healthy fats and proteins and veggies--is not a mind-trip or superhuman willpower. I find that it gives freedom from all that swayed me into anxiety and fear, and freedom for so much more in my life than I knew was possible to enjoy. 

That’s what I mean by food freedom. 

P.S. Melissa Hartwig has a book out with this title as well, since I wrote this post years ago. Check it out!

Food Freedom ...

... is about indulging when it’s worth it, passing when it isn’t, and never feeling guilt or shame for doing either.

...is about taking morality out of food, and recognizing you are not a “good” or “bad” person based on what’s on your plate.

...means you never again feel powerless over food. You don’t obsess. You don’t get anxious. You aren’t stressed.

... means that food is FUN again. It means you feel free to play around with how much, how often, and in what quantity while still looking and feeling exactly as awesome as you want.

... means you don’t restrict needlessly, or binge heedlessly. You make conscious, deliberate decisions around food, and sometimes you say yes, and sometimes you say no, and both are totally okay because you chose it.

... doesn’t mean you’re a perfect eater or always make the “right decision", always stay on track, or never fall back into old habits.

Core to Extremity, Then

If you’ve picked up these pages with a curiosity about CrossFit, it would be understandable to raise your eyebrows at the deep dive into purpose just above: horizon of ultimate value as an expressive delight able to companion the suffering of self and others. No one I know has come to CrossFit in conscious pursuit of any horizon of ultimate value, let alone the one I name above.

Folks usually come in to exercise, to get in shape, to redress a health issue in a more accountable practice, or to get ripped muscularly, to tone one’s body composition to social norms desired. That said, the glimpse I offer above does embody several fundamental principles or themes in CrossFit. Core to extremity, for example. I will honor the more formal definition within the physicality of CrossFit before goading you into the metaphorical and metaphysical, where it also holds true. The others will then weave and dance into the prose: midline stabilization, posterior chain engagement, active shoulders and full range of motion.

Core to extremity describes the ideal way for your bones and muscles to work together for greatest capacity, safety and efficiency in whatever you’re trying to do, physically. In CF speak, any movement should begin with a stabilized midline (more about that later), i.e. the “high force-low velocity movers called your abdominals, spinal erectors, etc., and the hips. Your “core,” of which mine always needs more strengthening. When grounded in this fashion, force for whatever you’re trying to do can “radiate outward” to what we’ll call the “moderate-force-moderate velocity movers (i.e. glutes, hamstrings, quads, shoulders, etc.). Big muscles doing the first pass at anything you’re trying to do, which is both wiser and safer than trying to use the small muscles for big muscle work. Any movement is then to be completed by the “low force-high velocity” movers of the extremities (calves, arms, wrists, etc.). Whatever you’re trying to do can be guided and completed with the smaller muscles further away from your core. Your extremities. Core to extremity is a fundamental principle of CrossFit for purposes of efficient movement and safety. When those are both familiar and habitual, then capacity can build for greater power, higher intensity that is safe, efficient.

A word now about midline stabilization, another fundamental theme in functional movement, CF style. Everything, and I mean everything begins with a stabilized form, neutral spine, core engaged. Lifting something over your head? Midline stabilization, so to use the strongest, largest muscles to transfer or radiate force upward before trying your smallest muscles, extremities. Lifting something off the floor? Midline stabilization, so to insure neutral spine, core engaged, use of the largest muscles to “push the floor away” more than use your arms or back to “pick something up.” Every move we do in our bodies should come from an engaged core, a stabilized midline. That’s what the big muscles are for…to help the little ones.

The other formal themes in functional movement worth nodding to include posterior chain engagement, full range of motion, and active shoulders. The language can feel formal, but each is an attempt to bring consciousness toward healthy movement and away from sedentary habits and the poor posture that comes from hunching over a computer or screen-device for hours a day. Posterior chain simply refers to all the muscles on the backside of your body. The lingo from CrossFit.com is "The front side is for show, the backside is for go." Erectors (lower back), glutes, and hamstrings are all your "performance engine," which, when strong, can also prevent injuries to your back or joints. Most folks are quad dominant--like me--so conscious intention needs to be directed toward trusting those muscles to get stronger and your balance, your performance, to improve.

Active shoulders is another counter-intuitive, structural part of functional movement. Finding the proper form of muscle engagement and arrangement of tendons, rotator cuffs, and fascia will most likely require coached or professional guidance. Most of us work and move in such a way that shoulders hang or fall forward, without active engagement. When all the muscles and tendons are actively engaged, in proper form, the right muscles get strengthened at the right times. Injuries are prevented with conscious activation. From CrossFit.com: "Active shoulders means "positioning your shoulder to maximize range of motion, strength, and joint stability. ... applying force with your shoulder opposite to the load, or resisting yielding to whatever force is acting on you." Proper form. Conscious activation of force from core to extremity.

Lastly, full range of motion completes the thematic pieces for functional movement, CF-style. Conscious confrontation of aging invites each of us to maintain the movements of our joints to full end ranges for as long as possible. Life naturally constricts and range of movement can become limited. Moving regularly in multiple planes of motion, with full range of your joints capacities, insures a most mobile and healthy life, able to confront the unknown as well as the known.

Go to any CrossFit box, however, and you’ll see the “state of the practices” or "themes" here for each and every one of us. I know this stuff in my head, but when I’m trying to lift a weight on a barbell that scares me a little, I will revert to what feels most familiar to my body. I’ll forget to stabilize my core and try to depend on my quads, because I trust them the most. When I’m getting a barbell overhead, I forget at least 50% of the time that my larger muscles are radiating force upward, causing the barbell to fly up almost like magic so my arm muscles don’t have to do the work. They simply need to support my skeleton in good form to catch the bar. Except I’ve moved with poor functionality for five decades, not knowing any of this! My body is faster at remembering now, eight years in, but it’s only been eight years.

Core to extremity also holds true for the less physical aspects of the community of practice called CrossFit. Tia Toomey makes this point in her recent book, The Heart is the Strongest Muscle. Knowing your “why” is what changes your mindset toward excellence. Knowing your purpose is what grounds you into why you’re where you are. It shapes all the storying of how you got there, and can attune you to the desires of where you want to go.

For a variety of reasons, often over-diagnosed and argumentative, most of us tend to get this bass-ackwards. We look to strong figures in our life for guidance in how to be. We argue from our favorite sources of authority (Scripture(s), especially) so to argue for how human being should look. Shaped to honor the strong man, no matter how incompetent he may be, we hope he will take the heat for whatever pains our group may be suffering. Or we look to previous generations with an accusatory eye for the pain and challenges we face today. We construct our purpose toward relieving pain and finding pleasure, shaped by external sources and customs.

When one of us actually stumbles into the mysteries and graces of deep inner work–contemplative practice, embodied disciplines, communal witness, accountability and celebration–the whole world shifts open in ways wisdom traditions have been saying for generations. The pathway toward wholeness in both body and community begins within, at least for today. Our imbalances mean a strong focus on looking within. 

Looking to your own core to learn what’s there. And as anyone who hasn’t done a lot of core work can tell you, when you begin, you find muscles you didn’t even know you had. Core to extremity means stabilizing and making peace with all that is in conflict within you. Stabilizing your midline gives you a place from which power can radiate outward, not needing power or insight to come from out there, some formal authority, some historic Authority of Tradition. All that will remain where it is–out there–and it can then become a conversation partner. But looking to you own core is where the power begins.

Core to extremity. Inner work to outer learning unto excellence.

If CrossFit is Not For Everyone, Why Bother Here?

Even if CrossFit isn’t for everyone, these words flow forth because CrossFit is for more of us than you might think. 

We face a tremendous number of seemingly insurmountable challenges today, regardless of how you politically affiliate or whatever your body has had to navigate in the course of your life. Even if you might be suspicious of the “we” in that sentence. Chronic diseases run rampant and are increasing rapidly. The capitalistic or late-capitalistic forces we’ve co-created mean that our bodies face the incessant drive of more, better, faster. Many of us have to work innumerable hours to insure basic needs of our families are met. Our food sources are run by this pace and efficiency: fast-food, processed foods for convenience, marketed “health” on labels of foods that actually drive cravings, hunger for more, with less and less nutrition for what our bodies need to survive. The Surgeon General has pointed to our “loneliness epidemic,” how we increasingly live in isolation (of our own making and not), with fewer and fewer remembering the gifts of community that come alongside the work of community. Algorithms of our lives built around anger and fear drive many of us into less awareness and detachment, simply to feel normal.

Amidst all this, life beckons in all its mystery, wonder, gratitude, love and delight. If you don’t become intentional about finding beauty and reverence every day, it’s easy to miss out on the larger purposes and possibilities that could become collaborations amongst us, in the things we call mundane, like wellness. As a spirituality scholar, the language I use for this beckoning of life, this greater purpose that could goad us forward, is called a horizon of ultimate value. What drives your life, when you’re at your best? What heart-yearnings are you afraid to name but that do live within you? Those will give you clues to what drives you, what your own horizon of ultimate value actually is. Not what you feel it should be, undergirded with religious language and often a sense of shame/guilt...but what it actually is...what you were born desiring and yearning to be. (Sometimes in contradiction of socialized norms...)

Early on in my own sacred work, after years of steeping in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, some language dropped into me for what I wanted my life–and my contributions to communities in which I live–to be about: an expressive delight, able to companion the suffering of self and others. In religious environments, I sometimes narrow it to an expressive theological delight, but it need not be associated with any religious or secular stance in the world.

Human beings thrive when they can express freely and experience an overwhelming and visceral joy, what I here call delight. To give voice to your own experience in a community that yearns to see you, hear you, know you creates a web of belonging and connection able to hold more pain, sorrow, or challenge than you can possibly imagine. Togetherness is an incredible force of life, when healthy and for the common Good. Most of us have never experienced that freedom to express, however, nor togetherness as a liberating force. For a variety of reasons, internalized and external.

But once you’ve experienced it, you yearn for everyone you know to know it too. This leads to greater capacities to companion others in the pains and unavoidable sorrows of being human. Once you see someone else's pain or grief as something you could imagine, maybe even viscerally feel in your own body, you increase your capacity to be-with-others. Life is suffering quip the Buddhists. No one escapes it, though we try with drugs and avoidance. Demonstrably true to my experience.

No less true, human beings–conscious to it or numbed to it by now–are evolutionarily and/or divinely created for loving and being loved. Without social connection, we wither. Even die (or kill). We yearn for the positive-easy of this force of Love, but suffering is unavoidable, even deepens our capacity, when we're willing to do the Work. Inextricably intertwined, then, love and suffering, being able to withstand and grow through suffering in Love–for oneself, in oneself, surrounded by other human selves–is part of this horizon of ultimate value. I love watching human beings flourish, expressive in delights, companioned in sorrows. Because while we hope for the first and try to avoid the second, each is part of the one coin of human life. Sorrows deepen our delights, when held in belonging and connection; delights expand and flourish because of the suffering we’ve known. [I don’t know why it’s like this, of course. In my moments of hubris, I imagine co-creating a world in which suffering could not exist, but that is not what human beings do with one another.]

All of which brings me to an elemental question that has driven all of my sacred work in the world: How do I live in the body I have, becoming as conscious and intentional as I can toward an expressive delight, able to companion the suffering of myself and those around me? How does my body invite me to visceral delight, even as that means overwhelming sadness and grief too? What would I need to grow toward this horizon of ultimate value?

Well, I would need a disciplined way of being in my body toward its own good that would often be fun, invite laughter as much as lament. I would need a community of practice and learning in which I could face my own insecurities, fears, and the sadnesses my body carries, even if I never spoke about any of them aloud. I would need companions who know more than I do, particularly about healthy movement and good fueling for all this fun. And I would need a deepening level of practice in which I never mastered it all, could never master it all. All this would provide me with deepening wisdom in my own body, opportunities to express my own passions and fears with curiosity and courage, and a community in which I could continue to learn from those with more knowledge-experience and a devotion to excellence that has us always learning more. Hopefully, even a community in which I can be regularly seen and heard, feeling a sense of belonging and yearning to contribute back for all I receive within its wisdom(s).

Not everyone needs CrossFit to live toward an expressive delight, able to companion the suffering of self and others. But in a decades-long clawing my way back into my own woman’s body, it has provided me an integrative, gifted and challenging, always changing pathway toward such a horizon.

I hope to CrossFit until I’m eighty (and beyond) because it helps me live into my deepest values of being human, as the spirituality scholar that I am. 

CrossFit is Not For Everyone

CrossFit is not for everyone.

Case in point: my soul-hitched beloved who will not step foot into a “box” unless it is to support me, or the physical therapists he visited for rehabilitation of his foot-arch happened to be in one. A lot of friends and colleagues who know I’m immersed in this activity (Pastime? Sport? Practice? Cult? Community?) smile and nod at me, as they should. CrossFit is simply not for everyone.

It aspires to be for everyone, of course. Its methodology is grounded in the motion of human bodies–which every one has–and open-sourced communal wisdom–which we are experimenting with on grand scales these days. Think social media, AI, etc. Brainchild of original founder, Greg Glassman, CrossFit is a complicated mixture of empirical formulation and study, experimentation and skill development, fueling-wisdom for physical and emotional needs/desires, and the camaraderie human beings can share when at their best, suffering their worst. Participants often become CrossFit evangelists–Everyone should do CrossFit!--because it scratches so many fundamental human itches at once. It’s natural and beautiful to want to share what we love with those we love.

My own entrance into CrossFit was rather utilitarian. A dear friend was undergoing double hip replacement surgeries in 2018, making me exquisitely aware of aging, now and to come. I had been seeing a personal trainer for several years by this time, knowing that my discipline and accountability required a relationship to show up in. She was marvelous and just who I needed, for how my body needed to move at that time. But the surgical journey of my friend and the prospect of aging hit home in a new way that summer. “I need to do something more intentional,” I said to myself. My trainer had flirted with a local CrossFit gym, adding some of the movements into our workouts. Feeling courageous, I put "CrossFit" and "Dayton, Ohio" into a Google search, identifying a “box” close to my work place. I could stop by for classes on my way home from work, I reasoned.

The box had a weekend schedule conducive to fitness and tending to community: an early WOD called “Bootcamp” that was largely core-strengthening, static holds, and mobility-flexibility activities. 15 minutes after that finished, the Saturday “Community” workout would begin. It was an unplanned WOD (workout of the day) which would get planned by those who showed up–movements, duration, partner WOD or no. Everyone got a thorough workout–if they scaled themselves well–and the camaraderie was fantastic. Friendships began here. My relationship to the box began there. It was open to anyone who would show up (and sign the gym waiver), giving a weekly opportunity for folks to sample what CrossFit might be for them.

A circle community practicing around fitness? I was all in. Relational base. Coached movement. Structured WODs so all I had to do was show up and be around people? Perfect. 

The head coach walked me through three ‘on-boarding’ sessions, familiarizing me with basic movements and assessing how to best support me in my “body of the moment.” I remember feeling challenged–unable to do an air squat without knee pain, at first–so I was also a little ashamed. How could I be this weak? Would others laugh at me? Judge me? I already had an overwhelm of body issues, after all–ingested shames, fears, insecurities, self-judgments, even sometimes a dash of self-loathing. But the coach gave me courage, encouraging me, correcting my form, easing me into the functional movements that my body was actually built to move in. I’d just not had any external awareness about how my body could move. I was beginning to learn things I didn’t know one could be taught.

The body issues were real though. I grew up in an intense, Puritanesque Protestant home where church was the social center. I ingested all the socializations that held that way of life together, rooted in a deep body-dissociation and run by engines of shame, all of which said conform or you will be unsafe. [To be fair, this home also demonstrated the deepest wisdoms of my root tradition, which hold these pages together too]. But my earliest toddler self has visceral and rather dramatic memories of white boards and erasable markers. A natural idea for young parents, a “chip system” aimed to motivate us to do our hygienic tasks and domestic chores for a family of four. I can understand this as an adult today, smiling about it all, but as a toddler? Evening “chip counting time” was nothing but shame, embarrassment, failing, lack of performance, achieving less. My one older sister loved it, of course, because she won every night. She was a born rule follower, so this was her bliss. Simply to be seen or heard, however, my task was to be not her. It was almost as if my toddler self simply refused on principle to be charted, achievements counted, assessed or judged as lacking in comparison to my sister every night. All this erupted in me in my first formal CrossFit WOD, when the coach wrote my name on the white board and then asked everyone in the room to yell out their time. Not only was my time one of the slowest, if not the slowest (I don’t actually recall), I was in a shame-fest flashback of gargantuan proportions. 

I doubt the coaches were remotely prepared for the long email that arrived in their boxes the next morning, itemizing a) how much I was loving this new thing for me, b) how much I knew I had to learn, but also c) all the things I needed to request now so to make the space a safer one for me. “Don’t write my name on the board,” I began. “Second, I don’t want any coach of any class to ever ask me for my WOD score.” I knew I wanted to do this, but I also could not stomach the body and emotional issues that were arising with this assumed practice in CrossFit boxes. Many, many years later, the other head coach (who I affectionately refer to as my CrossFit Mama) laughed with me about this exchange. “I gave you 2-3 months before you’d leave,” she told me with a smile. The irony being that if I hadn’t defined the space for what I needed, I most likely would have. But I’d been on a path some folks call a “re-mothering” one–learning to tend one’s own needs because one’s mother did not or could not, for whatever reason(s)--so I knew how to name what I needed to continue to learn, be challenged, grow. Within 8 months, my name was back on the white board and I understood the judgement was coming from within me, my stories, my inheritances...which I could re-story toward my own flourishing.

A good eight years later now, well-immersed into the methodologies and practices of CrossFit by means of three solid “boxes” in the Dayton area and multiple “CrossFit Tourism” box-experiences, I have become nearly completely disentangled from all the ingested shames, insecurities, even most fears because of CrossFit’s formulation, methodology, wisdom and community. The freedom and delight I know about movement, nutrition, community and transformation overwhelms me some days. Each week, I sip my "cup of courage" in my own box, and each week, I learn what the "daily learning" of the WOD can be. I am extraordinarily comfortable in my own skin, curious about what I am always learning, will come to learn, as I practice being in my body through functional movement and human camaraderie for years to come. "I want to being doing CrossFit when I’m eighty," I often say. And...

CrossFit is not for everyone–demonstrably true. The question is, might it be for you?

The only way you can answer that fully, truly, is by experiencing it yourself, for a duration of time, with coaches who can scale well and support your best self–physical activity toward wellness, perhaps even fitness, but also the psycho-spiritual and developmental gifts and challenges that come with being in a body that ages more every day.

These pages to come will explore a more holistic portrayal of CrossFit not only as a communally-grounded methodology toward wellness-fitness but as a pathway into a more deeply embodied spirituality, translatable into today’s wisdom traditions or into none. An expressive delight, able to companion the suffering of self and others is the horizon here. What I think human beings, healed and whole, can come to know best, if they are willing to learn.

I am a spirituality scholar and seminary professor, after all. It's what I do...as well as CrossFit.