I Tried Crossfit ... Seriously!

This is a sentence I never thought I would utter: I went to a Crossfit session.

Yes, me.

Wow!

I follow so many people on Social Media that are Crossfitters that I had to give it a try.

I worked the Red Sox employee Wellness Fair for Weight Watchers earlier this month and my table was set up next to CrossFit Fenway. I got to chat with Eric, who ended up being the owner of CrossFit Fenway, and he let me know a lot about CrossFit and that you could try a class out for free.

He gave me his card and the seed was planted.

I decided that I had to try Crossfit before 2012 ended so last week I emailed Eric and let him know I was down for the December 26th 6pm "basic training" class, aka beginners.

Basic Training is:

"Our Basic Training class is an opportunity for new CrossFitters to work on building a solid foundation of movement, or for veteran CrossFitters to brush up on their technique.  It currently runs Monday through Thursday at 6 PM on a 2 week cycle."

I arrived at CrossFit Fenway 10 minutes early in order to sign the waiver and see what I got myself in to. ;)

After filling out the waiver, Eric had me wait for the instructor, Mandy to start.

It really worked out in my favor to pick a class the day after Christmas because it ended up just being 2 of us, Vida & I, in the "basic training" 6pm class.

We kicked it off with some great dynamic  stretching. I actually felt more flexible than normal and I think I owe a lot of that to Pure Bare Burlington and the techniques I learned in my month there that I still use now.

After the stretching portion, Mandy had us work on the correct form for squats. We started with air squats then worked on it using a pvc pipe instead of the bar.

But then it was bar time. :)

This was my squat station when we moved up to using the actual bar. :0) We did 5 reps of 5 squats. I decided not to up the weights as the reps went on because I really wanted to make sure I had the technique down.

Plus I had just done hill repeats earlier in the afternoon so I wasn't going to push the quads too much. :P

After squats we moved on to the W.O.D. (Workout Of the Day) and today we did the "Half Cindy," which meant we needed to do as many reps as possible of the workout in 10 minutes. A regular Cindy workout would have been 20 minutes.

Our workout was:

5 Pullups

10 Pushups

15 Air Squats

Here is where the pullups happened.

No no no I didn't do pullups on this with my own strength. Thankfully for weaklings like me they have bands that you can use to assist you with the pullups. As JT said "You can have the sensation like you're flying through the air."

(Note: since it was a slow post-holiday night, we ended up with man-on-man help during our class. Wicked beneficial for this newbie. Mandy helped Vida through the W.O.D. and JT helped me)

Since I also am new-ish to pushups (started regularly in November), I used the box below to assist me.

I owe a big thanks to JT for keeping me going and helping me with my form throughout the workout.

10 minutes passes really quickly when you are trying to fit in as many reps as possible. :P

This means I am weak. :P

Okay it means I completed the workout 5 full times plus 5 pullups and 9 pushups (hence 14). Vida dominated it.

Then before I knew it we were done.

It was over ... and I hit my snack! ;)

I want to thank Eric, Mandy and JT for giving me a great CrossFit experience.

I sucked. I felt weak. But I am proud of myself for walking through the door and giving it a try. As I said at the beginning, I never thought I would walk through the door to begin with.

This just showed me that I need to keep working, keep pushing and anything is possible.

Have you tried CrossFit? What did you like about it? What didn't you like?