There's No Crying in Crossfit

There's no crying in Crossfit...but yesterday I sure wanted to.  Not because the workout was brutally hard or painful--but simply because I sucked so. horribly. extensively. completely.  at it.

It was something called Angry Annie: 50 pushups, then "double under" jump ropes, situps, and push presses in sets of 50, 40, 30, 20, and 10.  And then 50 more pushups.  If you couldn't do double unders (I can't), you had to do twice as many single unders.  Oh, yeah--you had to finish all that in 25 minutes or less.

Now, I am not normally a cry-er.  Neither physical pain nor sappy movies typically turn on the waterworks (although the advent of the "hormones that happen when you're almost 50" appears to be changing that a bit).  But by the time I was five minutes into the workout, I was almost in tears.  Because five minutes into the workout, everyone else was finishing their set of 50 or starting their set of 40.

I still had 15 pushups to go before I could start my set of 50.

And by the time the 25 minutes was up, everyone but one older gentleman had finished the whole workout.

He was working on his final set of pushups.

I was finishing my "30" set of 60 jump ropes.

  When I thought about it later, I realized that if I'd wanted to craft a workout at which I would fail miserably, "Angry Annie" would be it.  Usually, in the Crossfit workouts I can "scale" (reduce the difficulty) enough that, although I'm doing much lighter weights than everyone else, I can complete approximately as much work as the fitter ones do.  "Angry Annie," though, seemed to be an endurance-type workout, which means that the weights should be fairly light so you can do many repetitions, fast.  The trouble is, though, you can only make pushups so easy.  In my case, I started with "toes on the way down, knees on the way up," which is how the coaches encourage us weaker folks to do them.  By the time I'd done 20, though, I had to do "knees on the way down and up," and by 25 I could only do two in a row before stopping to rest.  Same with situps; you really can't make them easier, you can just rest a lot between them. Jumping rope?  Well, I had to do twice as many as the coordinated folks who can do double unders, and although I was able to do at least 10 jumps in a row before missing (rather than my usual two), it still took me a long time.  And the push press?  Well, the lightest bar is 15 pounds, and that is heavy enough for me that I had do the work in sets of 10 (the guy in front of me banged out all 50 in a row with his 45 pound bar without even pausing).

So I sucked, and I didn't like it.  Which is weird, because I've sucked at a lot of athletic endeavors before (including speedskating, when I started) and usually it doesn't bother me much.  Still, I'm proud that I didn't quit (or burst into tears), and I finished as much of the workout as I could.  Cleary, though, I'll need to get used to sucking in Crossfit, because I have a long way to go in the strength department.