A Good Fit
These first few posts will be an overview of how I got to where I am today. After that I’ll take a deeper dive into specific times and adventures and see what I can unearth. If I’m feeling it, I may even come back and link those to the proper spots in these overview posts.
At a fitness competition at Proehlific Park in the early 2010s.
Cross-Fit*, at it’s most basic, is a system based on combining movements into a workout to maximize work and efficiency. For example, you might do 5 rounds of 10 pushups, 20 sit-ups, 30 pull-ups. There are different ways to combine the movements, and there is a focus on using weights as well. It all boils down to an efficient way to work muscles and elevate the heart rate. It’s nothing new, HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) has been around forever, but it put a fresh spin on the concept.
RJ had been studying it, and started incorporating some of the workouts into our training. I got hooked almost immediately. Because the other thing Cross-Fit does is add an element of competition to working out: you can set time goals and try to beat them; or try to do better than your workout partners; or lift more weight the next time.
With a good coach, this element is awesome. Without a good coach, injuries happen as athletes push themselves without proper form or focus. Fortunately, RJ is an excellent coach, and I really began to thrive in the system.
My leg began to feel good most of the time. My stamina was rising, I was learning new exercises but something else started happening, something I had given up on years ago: I started putting on muscle.
It was gradual, but after three years, I noticed that my weight had climbed up nearly 20 pounds yet I could still fit in all my clothes. I didn’t think it was anything that anyone else could notice, and for me the main positive was that I was feeling better.
I had also recovered enough from my knee surgery that I was playing ultimate better than I had before. I was getting older, but not getting slower. I think my vertical may have increased a bit with the training, but for sure I didn’t lose a step. There were several tournaments in the late 2000s where I played 90% of the points in six to eight games a weekend. Just for a frame of reference, in an average tournament weekend (say 6 games), playing between 50-60% of points, people started logging around a marathon of running on their fitbits.
Now, this amount of impact on my legs meant I would come back from these weekends and really feel my knee. I would limp around for a couple days, and then workout and it would start to feel better again. I just assumed, again, that since I’d had the surgery this was the new normal when I played tournaments. Since I would get over the pain after a couple days, I was happy to live with it. And then I discovered a piece of equipment that completely changed my life.
*2020 was not a good year for CrossFit or its founders. I’m grateful for the system and the contributions it made to my fitness, but I’m also grateful we were never affiliated with it officially. They really stepped in it.
