What I Did Last Weekend….

 Shoulder Press 1-1-1-1-1-1-1

This past weekend I was in Columbus Ohio for the Ohio State University Football Coaching clinic. 3 days of guest speakers, vendors and watching on field practices.  I knew there would be a couple hours in the day to sneak away and get my CrossFit fix at Rogue Fitness, the Columbus CrossFit affiliate.  I had emailed them to notify my attendance a week early just in case they wanted to roll out the red carpet for an out of town

 CrossFitter.   I peeled out of the clinic on Friday to make the 12:00 pm group on a ridiculously hot 30 C afternoon.   I was so unsure of who I was going to meet, compete against and learn from that it felt like the first day of school on the drive over.  Am I going to be strong enough?  What if they don’t like me?  I think I forgot underwear and it’s hot. 

What I did know is that Rogue fitness is the home of the women’s 2008 CrossFit games winner, Caity Matter.  So far, our Fran times are the same.  And if you look at the “Our Staff” link on their website, there are some intimidating military dudes on staff.

I walked in around 11:30 to get some pics and talk a bit with Caity and Bill, which by the way are engaged to be married. Congrats you two!  They’re really working hard with both businesses, the CrossFit gym and Rogue Fitness equipment.

The Coach, Nate, is a student at Ohio State and in the Air Force.  He’s tall, his Fight Gone Bad is in the 350’s and he’s good dude.  He was in charge of 6 CrossFitter’s, ages ranging from 20’s to 50’s, but all enthusiastic about CrossFit.  We started with a warm up of 400m, 30 squats and 30 push ups. Our skilled lift was a 5 x 5 squat and then the bad news came.  5 k run.  I learned that they just finished “Hell Week” which was full of heavy weighted workouts with a lot of speed and were in need of a weightless workout. All I could say were swear words.  Apparently, 30 degress Celsius is “Great running weather!”  So after a few wrong turns I finally made it back to the gym with probably 7 k under my belt and a burnt forehead. 

I stuck around at the end of the workout to snap some pics with the group and chat about how CrossFit had sucked them in.  I met a great couple, Heather and Dan, which were practicing hard on their pull ups and learned that Dan had lost over 40 lbs since doing CrossFit.  Heather is doing CrossFit because she is competitive, real competitive.  Her hands were torn up but she insisted on working on her kipping. 

Having a commonality with a group of people, like CrossFit, makes it easy to make friends.  You’re only strangers until the workout begins and then you become teammates.  You get why they have callused hands.  You get why they keep coming back for more punishment day after day.  It was great to experience a new community and I appreciate them letting me in. 

Good luck to Caity at the 2009 CrossFit games and to all those who are going to compete in the qualifiers at Rogue Fitness!

Meanwhile, back at Catalyst Gym……