I found ways to deal with Molly going off to college and the loss (my grief) by focusing on myself and losing weight with Weight Watchers and escaping reality through my writing.
And Crossfit…
I hadn’t planned to be part of the CrossFit cult. After spending twenty years, six days a week, two hours a day in some kind of gym, I’d been a gymfly. I’d done more than my share of aerobic classes, step aerobics, kick boxing, nautilus weight machines, and other workout of the moment regimens. All this torture had set me up. I realized, after two decades of working out in the gym, I hated it. I’d burnt myself out, and vowed to never step foot in another sports club (aka gym) again. At thirty-five, I started running, and while this form of exercise kept me thin, I never once got the runner’s high. Plus I was a horrible runner, and as slow as molasses as my Texas grandmother used to say, running the mile in fifteen minutes.
One day, when Jack was two, I complained again to my friend, Kimberly, about how bored I was with running. Plus I wasn’t losing any weight. This could have been because of my lack of commitment to running, getting out there maybe three days a week and leisurely jogging two miles in the hills around my house, the same routine, the same gait. My body was so bored it took a nap and refused to lose weight. And there was no doubt my calories in were exceeding my calories out.
Kimberly said, “You should come to my gy—”
“Don’t say that word.”
“Give it a try,” she said. “This gym is different. It’s helped me get back into shape.”
I scanned her body. Kimberly and I had gone to Valhalla High School together, and even though she’d given birth to twin girls right before Jack was born, she was back to her high school weight with toned arms and legs.
“Easy for you to say,” I said. “You have great genes. Your mom is naturally buff—”
“I promise it will work for you, and the people at the gym are cool.”
I knew a cult recruiting strategy when I saw it, but I fell for it anyway. I wanted to have a physical (if not spiritual) transformation and I wanted to be part of a cool group of people.
Like an alcoholic who tries just a sip of tequila, I was hooked the minute I stepped into the gym. I breathed in the smell of hard work, sweat, and hormones. What I loved the most was the variety of activities. Every day was different. We did push-ups (real ones that didn’t use your knees), sprints, balance exercises on the Bosa ball, and strength exercises with weights. In that first year, I lost ten pounds and firmed up. My body never got used to the workout which was key. And for the first time I was sweating.
While these classes were hard, I recovered from them as soon as I got in my car, the workout forgotten. After a couple of years of these personal training classes in 2006, Paul, the owner of the gym, discovered CrossFit.
All of us, his clients, were all too willing to follow him, to be the masochists to his sadism. The workouts became hard. This is an understatement. There were days I couldn’t lift my arms. I winced when I walked, and breathing became a chore because my ribs and core muscles hurt like hell.
This was how CrossFit was introduced to us in October of 2006.
“Gather ’round, Losers, half of you won’t survive CrossFit.” All of us losers circled around Paul. Even though there was a chill in the evening air from the opened doors, I began to sweat.
Paul looked fierce. I don’t know if it was from his recently shaved head or his new Superman or flame tattoos on his right forearm. Maybe it was the fire, the zealousness, burning in his dark, brown eyes that intimidated me. “Drink the Kool-Aid,” his passion said since he’d been initiated into CrossFit. I swiped the sweat from my brow.
Paul said. “By the end of the day, only a few of you will be standing. The rest, ha, will be at the hospital or running home to your mommies. This is not for the weak of heart.”
“You have the capability to be performers,” Paul continued. “P-E-F-O-R-O-M-E-R-S.”
Was he looking at me? Capability? Performer? I didn’t feel like much of a performer. I identified more with the running home to mommy category.
“I’m not going to lie.” Paul said with a smile-sneer on his face. “This is going to hurt.”
Tears came to my eyes.
“We’ll practice and train major lifts: deadlifts, cleans, squats, presses, clean and jerks, and snatches. Master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climbs, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstands, pirouettes, flips, splits and holds. Bike, run, swim, row, hard and fast. Five or six days per week, I will mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is our enemy.”
Oh, routine is our enemy? Who was he kidding? I was staring into the dark eyes of the enemy: Paul. But I couldn’t look away.
“CrossFit is about survival. We’re going back to the days when we needed to lift tree trunks, carry a deer carcass on our backs, sprint after a buffalo or run from a bear.” Paul grunted, or at least I think he did.
At this point I expected him to bang on his chest, grab his wife’s hair, who stood next to me, and wrestle her to the ground to drag her back into his cave. Paul went on to explain how we should be eating like our ancestors, the hunters and gatherers. The Paleolithic diet is meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, a little starch and no sugar. We needed to keep our caloric intake so they supported exercise but not body fat.
Weak in the knees from the information Paul piled on us I backed up to the wall and raised my arms above my head pretending to stretch out my back. The support of the wall felt good.
Paul continued, “I will be there every step of the way. But I’m not going to coddle you.”
Had he been? I missed that day. I pushed my back against the wall feeling the roughness of the stucco through my sweats.
“I want you to be the best you can be.”
I joined the army without knowing it.
Over the months, through Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas of 2006, and into 2007, CrossFit caused testosterone to ripen in the air at the gym, seep into the rubber flooring, and make us all a little mad with power. The smell of sweat greeted me at the door of the gym. Heavy metal music played on the speakers. Soon Bosa balls were replaced by black padding where we could drop our heavy weights without damaging the floor. Rings and ropes and pull up bars (to hang ourselves?) replaced the Universal weight machines. Spin bikes were dumped for rowers. I bid all these friends adieu as they were unceremoniously sold on Craig’s List.
CrossFit’s workouts are named after women. But these are no ladies. The developer of CrossFit followed the lead of hurricanes being “honored” with women’s names, and like these storms these workouts leave you wrecked.
Examples:
Chelsea: 5 pull ups, 10 push ups, 15 squats. Perform each on the minute for 30 minutes.
Fran: Thrusters (a combination of front squats to overhead presses) using 135 pound bar and pull ups in 21-15-9 for three rounds.
Helen: 400 meter run, 21 kettlebell swings, 12 pull ups. Three rounds for time.
I’d come home crying from these CrossFit workouts. I could barely get through the rest of the day; my body broke from “performing.” Was this unhealthy? Maybe. But I find physical pain from sore, bruised muscles easier to endure than the emotional or psychic pain you can’t put your finger or cure with a few days of rest and a couple of Advil.
Before Molly left for college that summer, I’d push myself extra hard, and David would ask, “Explain again why you’re doing this?”
I mumbled something too exhausted to enunciate anything.
“Seriously,” David said, shaking his head, a look of worry settling in his golden-brown eyes. He raked his fingers through his thinning brown hair. “This working out is for crazy people.”
When I could speak this was what I told him. “I do it because for an hour, I don’t think about Molly leaving, about Jack growing up, about Kelly getting her license soon and driving away. I don’t think about money, or the lack of it. I don’t think about my obsession about finding an agent and having my novel published. I don’t think about how messed up my sister and her family is. I don’t think about time and how fast it goes.” I stopped, exhausted. “I do it because I can’t think about anything else but working out.”
My pain and fatigue left me little time to ponder Molly leaving. In a matter of days, Molly would be gone. My quads are locked up. Soon I wouldn’t see Molly every day. I need four Advils for my sore shoulders. Why does Molly have to go to college so far away from me? I taped a band-aid for the cut on my chin. Nothing stays the same.
“Michelle, what am I going to do with you?” David said, as he hugged me. I tried not to yelp at his warm embrace. My lats and biceps were killing me.
Another CrossFit workout at 5:30am…In the stillness of the dark morning, the clunk of weights being wracked on the bars echoed in the gym. A few of the guys stood in a circle patting themselves on the back, as if they were shoring each other up to do battle. On the whiteboard, Paul wrote our names, the twelve people who crawled out of bed at this insane hour to wreck our bodies and leave our minds behind for an hour. Even before the sun was up, the gym felt warm and muggy.
“You, clowns, ready?” Paul shouted in the quiet.
God, what was I doing here?
I picked up the bar with a hundred pounds of weights to power through twelve deadlifts, and then to lift the bar over my head for push presses.
What was my obsessiveness over CrossFit and muscles? Over power? I knew David would protect me and the girls. He loved me, fat, thin. He loved my curves. I was the one who had trouble accepting my body. I’d gotten better. I’d mellowed during my pregnancy with Jack. But for years after his birth, all I saw was my size D breasts staring back at me. matronly. And four years later, as I started losing weight on Weight Watchers and getting strong with CrossFit, I was floored at my core that underneath my size D breasts I still had the mania to be strong.
I realized as I pressed sixty-five pounds of weights over my head, Molly leaving for college had thrown me back ten years. Actually Molly leaving fanned my abandonment embers to a full born fire. I felt six years old again. If only I could have bigger muscles…If only I could find a way to hang on… And if Molly decided to move away from me, could there be a way my muscles, my strength could protect Molly when she left?
I knew there was nothing logical about this. The logical side of my brain, the part that seemed to be getting smaller the closer we got to Molly leaving, laughed at all this emotional shit, my fantasy thinking.
Still I had it in my head that if I got stronger I could protect my heart; I’d be less vulnerable. Somehow I equated muscles and strength, and the physical pain of getting there, as a shield to my emotional pain, to loss.
I picked the bar off the ground. I concentrated on holding it, keeping a firm grip, using my gluteus maximus muscles. I skimmed the bar against my knees, bent them, and lifted it to my thighs, one dead lift. I set the bar down on the ground.
None of this made sense. Not the workout, not the deep muscle pains, not how obsessed I’d become with CrossFit, not Molly moving away. None of it. I lifted the bar again. I felt the weight in my hands. My mind went blank. All that mattered was eleven more dead lifts, twelve push presses above my head, and then another round, and then another. The dawn broke, turning the sky a pinky-gray. I chalked my hands preparing to lift the bar again and again.
