Eyes on the Prize: Part I
Admit it: most of your close friends are CrossFitters. Or you're on your way to convincing them that they should be.
There's something about CrossFit that so emboldens, so enlivens you, that you feel compelled to tell others about it — even if it's the cashier at the supermarket or the hygienist cleaning your teeth or the guy pumping gas next to you at the station.
Did you ever feel this way about any other fitness activity?
If you rode the elliptical in your old globo-gym days, did you ever find yourself handing out elliptical cards and watching elliptical videos on YouTube? Did you order t-shirts and sweatshirts that read "Elliptical" or "My cardio machine is cooler than your cardio machine"?
Maybe, if you were a free weight lifter, you did watch video clips to learn new movements, but usually only once or twice through, right?
And, on a sleepless night, you didn't find yourself getting out of bed, that same video clip playing over and over in your head, and grabbing a PVC dumbbell-size pipe and then practicing the movement again and again, until your eyelids became droopy and your head was no longer spinning, and you were convinced that you had finally achieved triple extension of your ankles, knees, and hips.
CrossFit gets inside your head. Plain and simple.
If you're not tackling the Olympic lifts, then you're struggling with the muscle-up demons, or you're simply squatting correctly to pick up that fork that you just dropped on the kitchen floor. You know, the fork you need to eat your hamburger with, since you decided not to eat those processed buns anymore.
And, if you're lucky, CrossFit changes not only what you do, but it changes who you are and what you expect out of this life.
It stretches your limits and shows you what you're really capable of doing — and it makes you no longer content to accept mediocre . . . in anything. If you're willing to give 110%, then most things really are possible.
So, it follows that, having found this crazy sexy workout/community/revolution, that you want to tell everybody you meet about it, simply because it has come to mean so much to you. And what's wrong with that?
But what happens if your spouse or friends or family members don't CrossFit or just don't "get" what it is that you do and how important that it is to you? What happens then?