i think the comment from your husband is telling – i have a husband who played football in university and has always been the biggest, strongest athlete with the best attitude and the most endurance.

I, on the other hand, was not! LOL!

but after my sixth baby was born, i asked him to help me get into shape, and he just started including me in his runs and crossfit workouts, and feeding me zone…

Do i do the hardcore WOD? No, especially at the beginning – he scaled it back (WAY back) so i could work out with him at my own level.

But i think having a coach who is also my best friend and who loves me, and who makes Friday date night at the Marble Slab Creamery … helps immensely.

If i were a single woman looking at the CF website, i know for sure a/ it would not interest me and b/it would seem hostile to me, in my 5′2 girliness…

Second point – don’t you DARE call yourself a “fake” crossfitter! If you do the WODs, whether rx’d or not, and you see gains in your strength and conditioning, you are the real deal in my book. 3-2-1-go!

Everyone should watch this video and then go to try to lift heavy things.

As a fake crossfitter who has never been to a crossfit gym, but has obsessively watched the videos and trained to be able to do WODs from the website at my school gym (subbing DB swings for KB swings, annoyedly waiting for the single pullup bar, etc.) I can say that it has brought me to a level of fitness that I haven’t had since my teenage years. And that’s just in terms of endurance and power – my pure strength at deadlifts, squats and such has gotten well beyond what I ever dreamed it would.

It’s an awesome methodology. It works.

But it can have a bit of a dark side, which is perfectionism. Some people seem to think that if you’re not doing four WODs a week, and maintaining some sort of perfect diet, whether it be Zone, paleo, or whatever, you’re not doing it right. This may be true for anybody trying to get so elite as to compete in the crossfit games or whatever, but for the average person who is just trying to achieve amazing fitness and enjoy their body, not so much. I take great pleasure in drinking my wine just about every night, and in the occasional candy binge when I get baked. Clamping down aggressively on that sort of thing is not how I want to try to control my life – it is a negative. I have found that I get great results by focusing on the positive changes I can make – viz. doing WODs when I can, going at them hard as hell, and enjoying the hell out of the improvement in my fitness that comes so amazingly quickly from them. Although my diet has improved to include more fiber and vegetables during the time I’ve been crossfitting, this hasn’t been the main thing at all – the main thing is always the workout.

As to the relationship between crossfit and feminism, I point the reader again to the Man Grace video. Strong women rule. Yes we can!

But just to offer a counter-point: the body is one of the most powerful symbols and sites of human/feminist agency and expression…in that sense, a healthy body gives us greater resources to live as full agents. The question quickly becomes one of the good and the beautiful as well as the good life as opposed to just one of social empowerment and liberation. (ie…one can live as a full agent in all kind of bodies…are strength and energy really the goal?)

Please do share what you end up writing – I’m very interested!

For the record, I definitely think CrossFit seems like a very positive thing for most people, men and women alike. My husband actually reads a bunch of the blogs and does many of the CF workouts on his own. He showed me this video of 2 women doing an intense lifting workout at the men’s recommended weight a few months ago, and it was unbelievable!

My concern was definitely more about eating and food restriction stuff, which, as I understand it, sometimes goes along with CF but is not strictly a part of the program. The McDonald’s story on Amanda’s blog got me concerned, and I am especially wary of the “internal war” metaphor when it comes to food and eating.

I think as Americans we’re extremely attracted to fast, high-intensity change. Be hardcore! Quit whining! No excuses! Etc. Sometimes that can serve to stoke the flames of the all-or-nothing thinking so prevalent in our culture. For some people – in fact, for most Americans – a 30-minute walk a day would be a fantastic step in the right direction for their physical fitness. And for some people (myself included), very strict rules about eating can activate disordered eating and food-obsession.

As for the gender issue: I have known a lot of high-achieving women in my life, and I see many of them trapped in a cycle of intense dieting and intense comfort eating. I know this applies to lots of men too, but I’ve personally seen it more in women. I remember growing up with this idea that some day I would go on an incredibly strict diet and stay on it for the rest of my life. That doomed every diet to failure AND drove me to eat junk food like every day would be my last chance to do so. It wasn’t a very balanced or realistic ideal, and a LOT of women were raised on it. It can be a difficult cycle to break.

Just my thoughts.

~Erin