Embrace the Suck Page 5

  One Friday night, she dropped me off behind a school on Neponset Street. Now, in the modern age of parenting, when every parent stays for every practice and goes to every game, I have to wonder if it was hard for her to let me go, alone, into a group of kids and coaches she and I had never met, thinking it would be good for me. Or if she thought, That little shit has been a pain all summer. Have fun.

  Whatever she thought, by the time she came to pick me up, I was a different person.

  What I had learned in the previous ninety minutes changed everything. I was the fastest kid on the field. Not just fast, but big, too. Big in a good way. Not fat, but tall and strong. The tryout had consisted almost entirely of running, calisthenics, and catching passes. We ran sprints, and then we ran some more, and each time we ran I finished a little farther ahead of the kids who came in second and third. I had speed and endurance. Each time I ran, the coach, a short lawn maintenance guy named Eddie, would look at his stopwatch and ask me, “What’s your name again?” or “Where did you say you were from?” The other boys, none of whom I knew, all of a sudden paid attention to me. The new kid in town was fast. I still don’t know if the kids in Dorchester were a superior race of athletes bred to toughness by having to walk everywhere, and the suburban kids were weak and slow because their moms drove them everywhere, or if, more likely, the two months of working myself had finally developed in me a leg strength I was never going to get playing with Legos.

  But that Friday night, I became an athlete. I was no longer fat. I wasn’t slow. I wasn’t uncoordinated. All of that had vanished in the first forty-yard dash, when I sped up the field, looked left and right and saw myself all alone. No Hatfields. No Husky Boy clothes. I had left that all behind on the track at Blue Hills Regional during those hot, solitary summer days.

  Two weeks later, surrounded by new friends who had spent the last two weeks calling me and inviting me to their houses and to swim in their backyard pools, I found myself in the backfield during a scrimmage against the Norwood, Massachusetts, eighth-grade team. It was early evening, and the setting sun cast long shadows across the grass, making us all seem like the giants some of us were in our heads. I had no idea what I was doing beyond the fact that I was to take the handoff from quarterback John Homer and charge through a hole somewhere to the right of the center, near the tackle, Scott Sullivan.

  John called the signals, the center snapped the ball, and suddenly it was in my hands. I ran toward Scott but there was no hole. So I ran to the outside. And ran, and ran. I was petrified someone was going to catch me, and that fear fueled my legs better than double espressos. Touchdown. The first time I carried the ball. The first play of the game. The first snap of the first game I had ever played.

  I don’t remember what happened on the set of defensive downs we ran next. I was too stoked by having been pummeled on the back by my friends and thinking, This is what it feels like to win. I had never felt it before, not to this degree. We were winning because I was fast. And I was fast because I had worked hard all summer.

  On the next set of downs, Eddie called in the same play I had scored on. Only this time they were waiting for me and I had my head taken off. “Get down!” Eddie yelled. So the next time I got the ball, I stayed lower and got outside. First down.

  Then Eddie called a play that had me going up the middle to the left. I was more tired than I had ever been in my life, but I knew it was coming to me and I wanted to keep the feeling alive. I got the ball, bounced off someone, headed left, and ran downfield.

  Norwood chased me. The Hatfields were chasing me. My teammates, my new friends were chasing me. But none of them caught me. They couldn’t. I was fast now. I was an athlete. I was winning. And if I was winning, I must be doing something right. Touchdown.

  Later that hot night, I stood in the shower of that new-to-us house on Randolph Street, letting the water rinse away mud and grass stains and marveling at the bruises and welts on my body. I was too tired to lift my arms to wash my hair. I had never felt such fatigue, but nor had I felt such a happy feeling of knowing I had given everything I had to give, and of seeing—feeling—such a rich reward for the effort. It wasn’t just the winning; it was knowing that I had tried my hardest and that what was inside was good.

  So I pursued it with a fury. In high school, I continued with team sports: Football, more hockey, then track and soccer. I started bike racing in high school. And each and every time I started a new sport, I pushed the wedge between my parents a little deeper. When I announced I wanted to do a fifty-kilometer bike ride in Salem one Sunday in June 1980, my father flipped out. “Twenty bucks to do a bike ride? You could just ride from here for free!” he yelled. He had two speeds when it came to this stuff: redlined and stop. He was redlining now. The thought of spending money on something like exercise was enough to explode his Depression-era mind. I didn’t blame him, not really. My father had known true hunger as a kid during the 1930s. But times had changed. Surely he could give me twenty dollars to do something healthy. It’s not like I was going to blow it on weed and beer.

  My mother stood behind him, silently waving a twenty-dollar bill, letting me know it was okay, she had me covered.

  “And we’ll have to get up in the middle of the night to drive you,” he said.

  Ma pantomimed driving a car. She’d take care of it.

  “What makes you think you can ride fifty kilometers, anyway?” he finally spat.

  “What makes you think he can’t?” Ma suddenly snapped, outrage in her voice, as if the answer had been primed on her tongue since 1955, left unused during previous fights and previous sons on this very topic.

  “What makes you think he can’t?” she said again. There it was. The difference between the two people who had, together, defined me. She wanted an answer and he didn’t have one. One of the core differences between my parents was being played out over me, in the kitchen. For the first time, I saw my parents not as a unit whose job it was to raise me, but as two individuals, with separate personalities, goals, ambitions, and styles. When I got older, I would wonder what the hell had ever brought these two very different people together. But for now, I simply marveled at the thought that they would fight over this, and in front of me, a kid.

  They didn’t speak for a couple of days. But all three of us drove to the race. I felt free and independent pedaling my Schwinn Varsity around Salem Green. The Olympic speed skater Eric Heiden, who had retired from that sport to race bikes, was there, and so was I. I was in the game.

  It went on like this for years. Dad never accepted why I wanted to do this stuff, but as I did more of it, I grew bolder. When he grumbled about driving me two hours to the state championship track meet, I told him it could be worse—he could be driving to bail me out of jail. Here I was, an honor student going to the state championship, and all he could do was complain. “I’m so proud of you,” Ma said, rubbing my knee. Whether it was for standing up to him or making the meet in the first place, I still don’t know for sure. I imagine it was both.

  Years later, as an adult, free to make my own decisions and pay my own way, I stopped to see my by-then elderly parents when I was en route to a climbing trip in Nepal. During a pre-departure dinner, Dad listed all the reasons why I shouldn’t be going to Nepal: There were communists there. Why did I want to sleep on the ground for a month? He had slept on the ground for almost two years during World War II and it was no fun. Nepal had only one phone for every two hundred people. I ate my pie and told him I didn’t know anybody there anyway and so had no need for a phone. Mom laughed. He scowled, and asked me how much my fancy new North Face jacket cost. I lied. “Send lots of postcards, okay?” Ma said, hugging me at the airport. “Have fun. And please come back.”

  4

  Finding a Box

  If I learned anything at the Malvern certification weekend, it was that I needed more coaching, especially in the Olympic moves, the more complicated kipping style of pull-up that is a staple of CrossFit worlds and which w
ould become my white whale, and of course the muscle up. I needed to find a box. Crossfit.com had a list of affiliate gyms where I could get the specialized coaching I needed, but most of them seemed to be on the West Coast. There were a couple in New York City and New Jersey, but none were close enough to my home to make joining practical. With three little kids and a full-time job, I needed to find a box (CrossFit-speak for a gym) within a fifteen-minute drive from my house in Chatham, about twenty-five miles west of New York City.

  Until then, the closest approximation to CrossFit I could find was an early morning exercise class at Chatham’s Annex Sports Performance Center. The Annex wasn’t a gym in the traditional sense; you couldn’t just walk in there and get on a StairMaster and go at it for thirty minutes. In fact, there were no StairMasters. Rather, the Annex was a serious training place for serious athletes run by a serious guy named Mickey Brueckner. A former major-league pitching prospect, Mickey is huge: six foot four and at least 250 pounds. If haberdashers should look fresh from the pages of Esquire and music store owners be able to pick up a guitar and play the beginning of “Stairway to Heaven,” then gym owners should be as physically imposing as Mickey, who came equipped with muscular arms and legs and a barrel chest and back. He was fastidious to a fault, with never a hair out of place; any dumbbell left not racked in the proper ascending order of weight would cause him disgust, and, I suspect, some anxiety. He wasn’t bulbous and cartoonish like a body builder; he was built to work. He looked as if he could do everything in the gym, and everything in the CrossFit playbook, even if the Annex weren’t an official CrossFit affiliate.

  Mickey could do everything except talk at 5:30 in the morning. Get him later in the day and he’d crush you with a handshake, call you his buddy, and warmly talk your ear off. But at this time of day, the best he could do was stand, arms crossed, and stare at us while we struggled to get our legs and hips to work in concert so early in the morning, mustering, at the best of a times, a brusque “Get that butt down there now.”

  Brueckner had found a sweet spot in the suburban economy, training high school kids whose parents had dreams of college scholarships for their budding lacrosse and baseball stars, or even bigger payouts in the pros, and the money to try to make those dreams reality. (He also trained a few professional athletes; their framed, autographed jerseys adorned the walls.) When school let out, the Annex was a hive of activity as kids arrived to lift, stretch, and bound their way to scholarships under the cold, analytical eyes of Mickey and his staff. A bulletin board bore testament to his work. Covered with newspaper clippings describing the achievements of his kids—championships, all-star teams, college scholarships—it was the first thing a prospective client and her parents saw when they came in the door of the Annex.

  But at 5:30 a.m., it was the province of a few middle-aged men looking for nothing more than a way to beat back time and to stay in shape. We had all, in some way, heard about CrossFit and were looking for a way to get the benefit. We knew next to nothing about training, especially lifting, which was one of Mickey’s specialties.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but the guys who showed up at the Annex for those workouts would form the core group of the 5:30 a.m. class, a core that endures to this day. Most of them had known each other for years. They were all successful, very fit, and hypercompetitive. Leo, a commercial real estate broker enshrined in the Lacrosse Hall of Fame and seemingly as fit in his late forties as he had been in his early twenties. Joe, my cycling buddy, who made up in power what he lacked in form or finesse and who had introduced me to this group. Jerry, a Master of the Universe who was once the Ivy League shot-put champion. Dave, a rabidly fit trash-talking CEO who thought nothing of getting off a red-eye flight and coming straight to the Annex for a workout. Steve Gephart, a former marine built like a fire hydrant, and who could throw around massive amounts of weight and preferred to do it to a deafening sound track of speed metal played at full blast.

  When I first met these guys, I immediately had that familiar, sinking feeling that I was hanging around with the Hatfields again.

  Mickey started us out with very basic exercises, the things Tony Budding had called “any-asshole” moves because any asshole off the street could do them. While the asshole part was not entirely true, they were the exercises in the CrossFit playbook that required the least amount of skill and coordination. These were familiar body-weight exercises like sit-ups, push-ups, air squats (an unweighted exercise in which you lower your butt to a medicine ball placed just behind you), and walking lunges. Working them into combinations, done at flank speed, could mess you up, and doing them properly, so that you got the full benefit and didn’t risk injuring yourself, was way harder than it looked.

  Take the walking lunge. Pretty straightforward: You shoot your right leg out in front of you, flexing the knee so that you drop your hips, descending until your left knee just kisses the ground. Be careful to keep your forward knee above the foot; if it goes too far in front, you could hurt the inner workings of the knee. Keep your upper body upright, and your hands off your legs—no leaning. Bring the left foot forward so you’re standing straight up. Now shoot the left foot forward and repeat it. Sometimes you do this for 10 yards, sometimes for 50. Sometimes you do it while holding a 45-pound plate straight up over your head.

  Devilish spins could be put on sit-ups and push-ups, too. Handstand push-ups are just that: you put your hands on the ground in front of a wall, flip yourself up so that your body is flush against the wall and you’re in a handstand, then do push-ups while your butt and back slide against the wall. Or push-ups with your hands on gymnastic rings, your feet up on a box, maybe with some chains around your waist, just for a challenge. I could do them all, but not always as fast as the other guys could.

  Any asshole? Any strong asshole, maybe.

  Still, I found the skilled and semiskilled moves more intriguing, and some of them really hard to master. Like jumping rope, a foundation of many CrossFit WODs. I could jump rope all day long, as long as I wasn’t trying to do anything fancy. Just bouncing along on my toes, hands down, lightly swinging the rope, no problem. But Joe could skip rope as well as any boxer, doing all sorts of tricks like holding the rope handles with a baseball bat grip and swinging it side to side. When I asked him where he learned to do it, he just shrugged. “I wrestled in high school,” he said.

  Joe was also the first one to master double unders. A CrossFit WOD never asks its athletes to jump rope. Rather, it asks them to perform a double under, which means that for every time you jump in the air, the rope passes under your feet twice. Sounds simple, but for some reason, I was confounded by it. While Joe could make the rope—really just a thin bit of plastic-covered wire with long handles—hum with the distinctive buzz of a double-under master as he pumped out 10, 20, 30 in a row, the rest of us would get one or two before slashing ourselves with the rope. While Joe’s rope buzzed in taut circles, the other main sound in the room was the rest of us yelling variations, some of them operatic, of the F-word.

  The trick to a double under is to bounce a little bit higher than you would when doing a standard rope jump, and to move your hands as fast as possible. Bending the knees as you jumped, into a tuck squat, didn’t work. So you kept your legs pretty straight and you had to jump higher to clear two rotations of the rope. It was all about bounding high off your toes and moving your hands fast.

  It took practice. Within a couple of weeks, I was able to string together 2, then 3, then 5 or 6, consecutive double unders. Rather than letting us scale—CrossFit-speak for reducing the workload by decreasing weight, bending the rules, or using some sort of mechanical aid to help an athlete perform an exercise—by performing, say, three regular jump-rope reps for every double under, Mickey insisted that we count attempts as reps. “If we stayed here until you guys got in all the reps,” he said one morning, “nobody would get to work today. Just count your attempts.”

  That sort of practice is fundamental to the art of chippin
g away, a habit I learned early on, and one that helped me develop, if not perfect, the skills we were after. Rather than looking at a workout and thinking, My God, this is impossible, we’re supposed to do one hundred burpee box jumps, I’d break it down into smaller, more manageable chunks: groups of ten reps with a three-breath rest in between, for example. Chipping away is so fundamental to CrossFit that “chippers” are their own category of WODs, usually composed of 25 or 50 reps of as many as 20 different exercises. You just chip away at a WOD like Filthy 50 (50 reps of 10 exercises) until you’re done.

  Some exercises and movements, however, seemed to be immune to the chipping away, at least for me.

  I’d always had a problem with pull-ups, going all the way back to junior high. Pull-ups differ from chin-ups in that the hands face away from the body, pretty much eliminating the biceps as a source of power in the move. Like most people, I could always do more chin-ups than pull-ups, but try as I might, I simply lacked either the coordination, the upper body strength, or the willpower to perform more than a few pull-ups in a row before having to let go of the bar and drop to the ground. I had read once in Outside magazine that the great American alpinist Alex Lowe would do four hundred or more pull-ups a day, but his nickname was the Mutant, so that put him out of my league. And when I found an article online that doubted the value of pull-ups as a measure of true physical fitness—the physiologist argued that you could either do them or you couldn’t, depending on your God-given morphology—I figured that was all the license I needed and dropped them altogether from my fitness routines.