Thirty minutes of torture

There’s a pain in my side, my lungs are begging for oxygen and I’m not sure if I want to throw up or not. This was a description of me earlier in the week as I came to the finish of a Crossfit workout.

Crossfit is not a new phenomenon, but it is for us. Per the recommendation of a friend, Lisa and I have been training at the location in Green Lake in order to get in better shape and improve our tennis game. But this is no ordinary gym or fitness class. You don’t go in and start doing your own workouts. Crossfit is 20-30 minutes of panic-induced hell, where the workouts are written on dry-erase boards, led by an instructor and everyone competes to see who finishes first. 

An example of a workout is: sprint 200 m around the block, do 21 swings with a kettlebell weight, do 12 pullups. Repeat 3 times. This was what we did the first week — we didn’t even have to do REAL pullups, and we were still dying.

Most recently we did a workout alternating burpees and hang power cleans. 15 of one and 1 of the other, 14 of one and 2 of the other, and so on until it was swapped. Suffice to say we are still both sore a full 3 days later.

We feel this type of fitness is better than, say, paying $100 a month for health club privileges. In the past, when I’ve gone to gyms, I notice there is a lot of standing around, sipping water and fiddling with a few bench press sets. At Crossfit, it’s all business. You’re in and out in 30 minutes, give or take, but its an incredibly efficient ass-kicking workout.

We’re going to try out going once a week for now. The hard core devotees go 3 times a week or more. Not sure we can fathom that, physically or mentally. But from seeing the muscle tone on the Crossfit veterans, there’s no denying it gets results.