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.