America Peals

So, I’m back to the city that shot me directly into the arms of CrossFit and clean living. New York City.  I have to admit the first two days blinded me with the hustle and bustle. I also clearly remembered why I left NYC. It is is heroin. It has the power to excite you into manic thoughts of world domination and cocomittantly throw you into a wildy ocean where you are but krill for the blue whale ( major tanget here…upon watching a recent video on the Blue Whale, the largest mammal on earth, I discovered that said whale is longer than two back to back basketball courts and has a penis that is 8 feet long. Ah…did I miss this in Oceanography 101?)

Thankfully, I had an appointment with Allison Bojarski, CrossFit Coach at CrossFit NYC: The Black Box. As mentioned in earlier an earlier post, Allison and I were already connected via the six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. We exchanged a few texts this weekend and were fairly certain there was some doppleganger action at play. Both Allison and I left lucrative writing/publishing jobs to pursue fitness and holistic living (one much more successful than the other at this moment in time), we have degrees that have nothing to do with what we love know and both have taken an enormous risk to pursue that which makes our hearts sing.

The Black Box in Manhattan is on W26th Street in an innoculous old building. You take a tiny freight elevevator to the third floor (and you are normally sharing said space with one or two lean boxers to the top floor boxing gym). When the elevator opened on the third floor, CrossFit NY was empty save for a tall, lithe woman doing front squats. Per CF etiquette, I allowed Allison to finish her set before we began to kvetch.

Now much of what we discussed remains in a dreamy portion of my mind as Allison and I couldn’t stop talking about the philosophy of excellence at CrossFit, the motivation to pursue such a hard and oft perceived cult like passion, and more personally how we are both deeply committed to CrossFit.

Allison, having worked on a PhD for several years, decided that she wanted to work as a trainer. With a background in dance and movement, Allison first became a trainer at a NY Crunch gym. It wasnt long before Allison disovered CrossFit in a NYT articles which she intially thought was a crock of shit. Though in time, she began to hear more and decided to give it a whirl. Several years later, Allison is now a certified trainer at CrossFit. And, this girl knows her shit!

Allison of course relayed that when she was a trainer at Crunch she thought she was pretty fit. However, after months at CrossFit her notions of fitness changed dramatically. We began talking about how we both valued the strength compent of CrossFit Fitness. I will tell you that my deepest interest in CF is amassing strength as I believe that WOD’s and overall fitness are supercharged when you are ridiculously strong. Allison discussed how amassing strength for women is not a prohibitive endeavor. In other words, contrary to popular belief, women can get strong, VERY STRONG. As Allison noted, when one does a deadlift part of our brain just recognizes the DL as a movement we do in the gym. The primative part of our brain is saying “Oh F$@k!  I need to do better in order to survive.” And, that is how the body grows stronger.

We also delved into the import of Robb Wolf’s Paleo instruction and Ripptoe’s Starting Strength philosophy.

Allison and I both had a lot to say about CrossFit and feminism but that will be for later in the week. I am trying to set up a time to meet Allison today. So stay tuned.

Also of note, I will be interviewing Robb Wolf hopefully this week. He graciously agreed to sit down by America Peals campfire and chat all things Paleo for the novitiate.