Play New Sports

"Regularly learn and play new sports” is one of those super-inconvenient Crossfit bylaws that I have quietly maneuvered around…like not eating dairy. I am not a sporty guy, and Crossfit alone pretty much exceeds my fitness limitations, so there’s never been room for anything else.

But last Thursday night my friend Alex invited a few of us to attend an adult gymnastics class at Elite Champion Gymnastics in Plano.  
I had no idea that such a thing existed – adult gymnastics.

Seriously, old people doing backflips.  I imagined that the liability waiver required just to attend such a class would be several inches thick.

When we walked into the facility, it was filled with ponytailed little girls doing some serious werk…floor routines, balance beams – I scanned the room expecting to see a panel of Eastern Bloc judges sitting behind miniature flags and scoring panels. I also started to look for the EXIT.

But just as the wiser angels in my head were beginning to whisper their cautionary warnings in my ear , a very friendly coach named Marcus came over to introduce himself – and asked us to sign a waiver (just a single page). 

The adult class was about to begin, and a graceful exit strategy for me no longer seemed to be an option. The class consisted of a mixed crew. There were the athletic former- cheerleader types as well as a few beginners . I felt an allegiance to neither of these groups – even the beginners seemed pretty athletic, and I was definitely the “old guy in the room”.

One of the first activities was a backflip. Yeah…we STARTED with a backflip. While this movement seemed like a deal-breaker to me, Marcus was very confident and had us use this giant foam roller that kind of guided you all the way through the movement so all you had to do was extend your arms until your hands reached the floor behind you. No problem , “I got this” (well, I shuffled around and stared at the floor a lot at first).

From there we moved around the facility which was filled with all of the traditional stuff that you would see on TV during the Olympics…parallel bars, trampouline, pommel horse, rings, etc. Our coach pretty much let us take all of the equipment for a closely-supervised “test ride”.

It was tons of fun trying the stuff that looked “cool” …but I also got ‘played’ into trying stuff that was way out of my comfort zone – like a backflip into a pit of foam cubes. I really almost walked away from this one, until I think someone called me a lil’bish. I am sure it wasn’t very pretty to watch, but I survived  my first journey down into to “the pit” with a lot of help from the coach.

This adult gymnastics class is held every Thurs night…since Thurs is our programmed “rest day” at CFDC, I am thinking that this gymnastics class might become a regular thing.  At 40+ years old, there are some realistic limits to what I can do, so the hard part will be to resist the urge to do the fancy, cool stuff.

But even during just this first class, it was easy to see how the movements and technical training would translate directly into some benefits at Crossfit.  Regularly Play New Sports was not one of my 2012 Crossfit goals, but I am going to pencil-it-in.