Thinking out-of-the-box

Get used to being uncomfortable.

Become comfortable with uncomfortable.

You hear a lot of that in Crossfit. And I get it.

I can remember when I was uncomfortable with just showing up at CFDC for a WOD. Now it’s like a second home to me.

I can remember when the idea of doing some impossible number of just about anything made me sick and nauseous. I am now able to breakdown even the nastiest WODs into manageable units and can usually find a way to get it done.

My comfort level with Crossfit has definitely increased, especially within the safe, familiar zone of CFDC.

But after all of this time that I have been doing Crossfit, I had never visited a totally foreign box…with unknown coaches and WODs and expectations. I have friends that visit boxes whenever they travel all the time. Like it’s no big deal.

It really shouldn’t be a big deal. I have never experienced any element of the Crossfit community that is not extremely positive, welcoming and supportive.

But I am very good at maintaining a regular routine; and breaking that routine always requires some mental gymnastics from me.

So I was definitely uncomfortable about visiting Crossfit Fresno when I went home for Christmas. Although I had been following their website and had even exchanged a couple of emails with the coaches in Fresno before my visit, I kinda started to freak out a little before their WOD on Christmas Eve morning…

What if I can’t keep up during the WOD?

What if I unwittingly break some kind of obscure Crossfit code?

What if they have to call paramedics?

My dad came along with me to watch the show. Honestly, even though I was nervous, I wanted to show off a little for him. I was hoping that the WOD would be an old familiar friend…Cindy, Barbara, maybe even Helen? (OK…..not Helen.)

No Such Luck. The Christmas Eve WOD at Crossfit Fresno:

For time: 21-18-15-12-9-6-3 of

Wall Balls, 20/14 lbs

L pull-ups

So, wall balls maintain a suck factor that’s right up there with thrusters and burpees for me. And L pullups? I had never seen this in a WOD before.

This was not how I had planned this.

Besides this curve-ball WOD that I was trying to deal with (with my dad in the audience), there was another layer of pressure that was becoming increasingly uncomfortable when I arrived at the Fresno box. When you visit a box that you do not belong to, you kind of have to inform the coaches where you are from…it’s called a drop-in, because they just don’t want people off the street who have never done Crossfit before trying to matriculate into a group WOD without some basic training. You can only “drop in” if you are from some other box.

So when I met the coaches at Crossfit Fresno that morning…who were both very nice and totally cool, I let them know that I was from CFDC.

Their follow-up question was logically “how long have you done Crossfit?”…when I said “almost 2 years”, I could see the coach doing some form of Crossfit algebra in his head about what my fitness level “should be”. I quickly backpeddled and explained that I was really just at the beginner level on a lot of the skills and was gonna do my best not mess up the pace of his class. My response was panicky, nervous and unnatural. Like a teenager trying to use a fake ID for the first time. I was in total freak mode at this point.

The coaches, John and Rosanna took us through a nice long warmup. Lots of stuff that I had done before. They kept the class together and focused. It felt good. They explained the WOD and let us find some “real estate” along the walls and at the pullup bars. They also let us have some time to practice the movements.

Once the timeclock started, there was a comfortable familiarity that clicked inside of my head. I’d been here before.
I started the first round of 21 wallballs…hell, I’ve done a lot more than 21 wallballs before at CFDC. And a California wallball is the same as a Texas wallball.

I got this.

I transitioned into the first round of L-sit pullups. OK, so I had never done a WOD that included L-sit pullups before…but we had practiced them at CFDC and I knew that I could do them. None of this was foreign territory.

John and Rosanna were full of encouragement and energy throughout the whole WOD, just like the coaches at CFDC. It was all very familiar. And comfortable.

My final time for the WOD was 17:35. Rx’d.

And I managed to get through all of the L-sit pullups. It was a great WOD.

The coaches at Crossfit Fresno were great and I am looking forward to visiting them again the next time I go home. But I also think that some of the credit for getting through the WOD in Fresno goes to the coaches back at my box in Dallas. I am clearly stronger now than I’ve ever been, physically and mentally. And during the toughest moments of the Fresno WOD, my CFDC friends and coaches back in Dallas were all in my head. I couldn’t be the guy from CFDC who DNF’ed a WOD in Fresno.