Not class related, specifically. An aside.

Last night, I was having some difficulty being comfortable what with the way my calf no longer feels connected to the rest of what is inside my leg. As a result, I was up later than normal.
I binge watched the hell out of Sherlock. After that, after the end of season 2, I was in a bad mood.
Anyone who has watched all of Sherlock knows why I was in a bad mood.

So I went to bed in less than wonderful spirits.

My wife was at her mother's house. I was home alone with the dogs and my cat. As I laid my sleepy head down, a thought occurred to me. What if something happened during the night? What if, for some reason, I had to run or move quickly? What if there was a fire in the building? I would have a really hard time getting my animals out, or myself out, if there was a catastrophe of some kind or the other.
I won't even get in to how hard of a time I would have had given a zombie apocalypse. Man. That would have sucked last night.
If the zombie apocalypse happened last night I would be SO pissed off! Imagine the timing! You had to wait until I was incapacitated you damned zombie apocalypse!?

Seriously though, I was lying in bed, and, while this won't make me out to be the most macho man on the planet, I was a little scared. It made me feel, for the first time, what it might feel like to be old and ACTUALLY incapacitated and alone.

But it only lasted for a second and then I went to sleep. I was being stupid and allowing my brain to go off in directions it shouldn't and doesn't need to go. But I do that.

At 2 am, the son of a bitching building fire alarm went off. As incongruous as this is going to sound, LUCKILY I live in a building with a fairly unreliable fire alarm system. It goes off whenever it feels like, just enough to have created a Boy Who Cried Wolf feeling in the building. Which is awesome. Eventually we will all burn to death and our last thoughts will be, "Oh wait. There was an actual FIRE... cough, cough, sputter, (dead)."

So I hobbled my hobbled ass down to the end of the hallway and watched as newer members of the building population stood around the outside of the building, while old hands stayed in bed.

57 fire trucks showed up so one guy could go inside and turn off the alarm and then they all left and I went back to bed. I think the firemen actually do this to us. I think they have set up the alarm so it goes off once in a while so they can charge us the ridiculous amount of money it costs every time they all have to come out here for nothing.

I think they do this to keep them in pizza money. I am almost positive.

My leg feels moderately better but I still can't walk with anything that looks like ambulatory capability.

Now put the next season of GODDAMNED SHERLOCK ON!!

Sixth class... Grace.

There are many words that you should avoid. Like mealy. What a horrible word. If anyone ever offers you a mealy apple, you say no.  That's bad.
Another word to avoid is pop.  There are many reasons to avoid this word. If someone offers you a pop, they could be suggesting you might like a punch into your chops. Or, they could be from some other part of the country that is not the northwest and might be offering you some soda. The regions these people might be from are shifty-eyed and should not be trusted and soda, in general, isn't very good for you.
Someone could pop your balloon. And that sucks.
I guess there are a couple of positive ways in which the word pop could be used. Someone from an oldy-tyme comic strip could call their father Pop, and that would be okay. A person could pop a muffin into the toaster for you. That might be nice.
Someone from England might pop off and... whatever English people do.
I really prefer the way English people speak. I like their version of what is supposed to be our common language better.
"Chatting someone up" in a bar sound so much nicer than "hitting on them."

But back to pop.

You know what the worst way to use the word "pop" is? In a way to relates to something which just happened to your muscle. That's the worst way.

I made mention of this before, but it continues to be slammed into my face. I am without grace. Not totally, but substantially.
We were doing this exercise which has a name. The names of these exercises will never mean anything to me. They seem to fall into the same category in my mind as proper nouns, so I can't tell you what it's called. You lift a weight in a certain way. That's all you really need to know.
I was able to do this exercise without a great deal of difficulty as it was focused, so I thought, on the upper body which is the only place I have any strength.
While I was doing the motion the coach for that day explained that I needed to get the rest of my body involved in the motion and that I was making it much harder on myself than it needed to be. I tried to explain that it wasn't that hard, but that really wasn't the point.
The point of so many of the exercises in CrossFit is to use all different kinds of your body at the same time. Use momentum and leverage from other parts to achieve the thing you're trying to achieve.
It's why I don't end up with like burning so much in any one body time, but massive full-body exhaustion.
It's just different.
Anywho, he demonstrates the correct motion for the exercise I thought I was doing correctly. And, he might as well have just started moonwalking around the gym floor. I can conceptualize the movement he demonstrated and understand how it would make the thing easier, but I don't know how to make my body do that in that way.

In order to use your whole body like that, you need to be athletic to a degree which I am not. A degree which requires grace.

How much grace do I not have? I'll tell you. I injured myself again. I popped something in my calf and now I cannot walk correctly on my right leg and there is a fairly unpleasant level of pain. When I say popped, I mean one of those horrible moments where you actually feel/hear an actual pop.
And, you may ask, what were you doing to hurt yourself this time, Eric? What ridiculous, over-the-top exercise was it this time?

I was skipping. Skipping. Like you did in first grade. NO!  Wait!  Not like you did in first grade. I was able to actually do the skipping like what you would do in first grade. I need to be fair to myself.

This was EXTREME SKIPPING! Great bounding leap skipping...

But, it was still skipping.


So, you might say, well Eric, I guess this was a nice experiment, but maybe it's time you wrapped it up and moved on to something a little safer for you.
To that I would say, OH! Don't you think for a minute that that hasn't occurred to me. Because it has.
There are a couple of things keeping me from giving up and quitting.
First, everyone is being SO GODDAMN NICE TO ME. I hate it. It would be much easier if they were a bunch of pricks, and maybe, behind my back, they are. But they're doing a good job of being nice and supportive to my face, so, as much as I hate to feel things like this, I wouldn't want to let them down.
That's a minor reason though. If it were only that it wouldn't be enough.
Mostly, I am angry. I hate the fact that I keep getting hurt and I cannot accept that I might not be able to work through it to something more stable.
The other large thing is that, quitting now would feel like a very final step toward a sedentary middle-age followed by an unhealthy, short, old age. This, as well, I am not prepared to accept.

Man but my goddamn calf hurts, though. Jesus.

"It's not for you."

I had something specific and important to talk to you about after my... fifth? CrossFit class, but I forgot what it was so I will tell you about this instead.

Earlier this week I had a dream in which I was fired from CrossFit. I was in the middle of a class and a woman in a business power suit came in a pulled me from the floor.  She walked me down a series of corridors into a small office where she sat me down and told me, "This isn't working out.  We're going to have to let you go."
I explained that that did not make a lot of sense as I was paying to be part of the class.  She looked at me, over her glasses, mind you, like over the top where someone pulls their glasses a bit down their nose and then looks over them.  Like Huey Lewis did in the "I Want a New Drug" video only with less mischievousness.

Once she was looking at me good and well over top of her glasses she reported. "It's just not for you." and would hear no further arguments.
I was escorted from the grounds.

Recently, I have also noticed an escalation of violent content in my dreams where horrible things are happening to me on a regular basis.
I do not know if this escalation is related to CrossFit or not, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Class the fourth

Okay.  Nothing vastly interesting or earth-shattering to report.

I was able to pull myself back together and continue with class.  I only lost a week of ability to do anything.  Not bad.  Could have been two weeks, but it wasn't.

I am happy to report I can put on all of my clothes AND get into and out of a car without whinging.  I learned that word from BBC America.  Whinging.  I think I'm spelling it right.  It's like whining, but somehow seems to be even more of a spank to the person you might be using it against.
"STOP YOUR WHINGING!", is what you might say, and let me tell you...  THAT's a statement.

The only problem today was, after the WOD, which I completed adequately for a level 1, which I most certainly am, I stood up from a stretch a little too quickly and the world sort of... went whooooozzz... and kinda just drifted off.  For a couple of seconds it felt like I was looking at reality through a paper towel cardboard tube thing.  I suspect this was a blood pressure issue. Nothing to worry about, I'm sure.

And that's the extent to which I feel the need to whinge about CrossFit, at this time.

This picture came up in a Google image search for whinging.

Deadlifts?

You might remember how I mentioned I am not good at deadlifts and don't use the proper technique.  Well, it's worse than me being not good at them.  Apparently I am horrible at them and did them all totally wrongly and have managed to debilitate myself.
Oh, not 100%.  There are still lots of things I can do.  It's the short list of things I cannot do which are bothersome.  And really, you could extrapolate this short list into a much longer list, I'm just not attempting any of the things that might appear on that longer list.

Here are some things I cannot do right now, not without...  I think significant pain says it clearly enough.
I cannot feed my dogs because picking up or putting down the bowls is hurty.
I cannot, easily, comfortably, put on either my underwear or pants.  I am grateful that I don't usually wear socks.  Shoes are no carnaval, either.
Getting up or sitting down.  Both of those are bad.  The transition is bad.  Once I am in either of the up or down positions they are not bad, but getting to them is.
Getting out of the car or into the car.  That's a good one.  That takes a minute.  I have to psych myself up to pull my leg in or lift it out.

I have funked the hell out of something in my lower back.  So, instead of increasing my exercise I have decreased my exercise to NO EXERCISE.

This CrossFit thing is just doing wonders for me so far.  I can't wait to start telling everyone how great it is.  Unless they are upstairs from where I am.  Then I will tell them later.

Endorphins

Where are the endorphins, I say, where?  Isn't that one of the reasons why people do all kinds of crazy exercise, for the awesome endorphin rush?  The runner's high or whatever.

Although my legs were screaming at me, I went to damned crossfit again this morning.  I read on the internet that a little light exercise was good for getting the acid out of your muscles when they are sore so I though a nice WOD would help.

A WOD is the Workout Of the Day.  It could also be called the HHWAGTTTKYT.  Here's How We Are Going To Try To Kill You Today.

You do your WOD in a BOX.  Just let that roll around for a little bit.  There are all kinds of innuendo possible in the Crossfit world.  I watched a competition today and saw a person with a MASTER The SNATCH t-shirt on.

In any case, I completed the WOD but didn't get as many repetitions done as I would like.  Before we began the coach said not to really worry about the number of reps you were getting done, but to gauge your performance off the people on your side.  I was in the middle of  two guys with a total body fat percentage of 4, between them. They both had abs up to beyond their nipples.  I decided I would not be using either of them to gauge my performance.

It was pretty horrible and involved throwing a weighted ball up a wall and jumping rope and running.  Over and over and over.  The hell am I doing?  Seriously.

When we were done, one of the two guys kinda pushed his abs down off his face so he could talk to me.  I do have to say that, so far, CrossFit people seem to be very supportive and I don't get a lot of sense of being judged at all.  Anyway, he asked me what I thought and I told him I thought it was horrible and I hated it.

He laughed, because I am hilarious, then he said, "Yeah.  That's the way it is.  It's horrible when you start, but then you get used to it, and then, later, you love it and can't live without it."

Interestingly, after having smoked the half-cigarette that encompasses ALL of the cigarette I ever smoked because it was horrible, I had almost the exact same thing said to me by a kid I knew who had been smoking for some time.  I say almost, but really, the words could have actually been EXACTLY the same said in almost the EXACT same way.

When I was driving home it occurred to me that I felt like warmed-over garbage.  And not garbage warmed over by someone caring who was aware they were warming garbage and tried to do their very best with it, like slowly simmering in olive oil with some garlic.  NO. Not like that.  Like someone popped a plate of swill in the microwave for 10 seconds then threw it at me.  More like that.

Hmm.  This was supposed to be a short post but I just used a word that made me think of something.  Swill. Do you know what swill is? It's a real thing.  I think it's still kind of used from time to time to just refer to bad food, but do you know what it REALLY is?

Get this.  Growing up in the 70s in Fall River, when we would eat at my Grandmother Radcliffe's house, after the meal she would send me out to the swill bucket.  She would pile all the scraps from the plates, not leftovers, the food you would throw away, and I would take it out to the swill bucket.

The swill bucket was buried in the yard in like a cement cylinder. It had a heavy metal top on it with a lever you would press on with your foot exposing the old congealed swill.

This wasn't something they just cooked up.  This was an official thing, like from the city or whatever.

There was a SWILL MAN!  The SWILL MAN would come around in a special truck, like the garbage men and COLLECT THE SWILL!!  GAH!

They must have stopped this swill collecting at some point.  Can't still be going on.  Imagine how relieved you would be if you were the swill man and someone told you you had become redundant.

Bleagh.  Wish I hadn't thought of that.  You can Google swill bucket if you want.  I wouldn't, but you could.

Um... I have yet to experience endorphins from CrossFit, was my point.

Crossfit Begins

I should probably mention right off the bat that certain friends of mine think that Crossfit is a cult.
They feel like anyone who gets involved in the class becomes a Crossfit Borg who can only speak of the grandeur of the Crossfit collective and how much better everyone else's lives would be if they would only wake up and realize how awesome it would be if they joined, too. I am not the following kind and never really got into the mindframe of anyone else around me. I am so super individualized.
I have made a bet with these friends. Kind of a bet anyway. I told them, that if they felt, after six weeks, that I have become part of the Crossfit cult, they may freely kick me in the testicles at any given time. I don't wanna lose this bet. I like to keep my testicles as unkicked as possible. The thing is, I need them to keep and eye on me, because people who are in a cult, don't know they are in a cult. They think everything is hunky dory. So, we'll see.


I was supposed to go to a Crossfit welcome session this weekend for an intro class. I was not able to attend this class. Mostly because I was almost dead. I was dead-ish. Only mostly dead. Geh. A Princess Bride joke. This is going well. I was mostly dead for reasons that have yet to be defined. I either had some stomach virus, or I got lingering food poisoning from some undercooked pork that some asshole did not cook properly me being the asshole pork cooker. I felt bed. In the usual flu-like ways I won't get into. And then later, just generally not-well which presented itself with me sleeping a lot and not eating much of anything at all. This went on for a week.

THIS week, on Tuesday, I felt better. I still didn't eat as much as I normally do and was a little fatigued, but I felt a hell of a much better. So I went to my first class.

Whew... Whew doggies. That was a big, goddamn, mistake. My system was not prepared for exercise at that level. Honestly, I have yet to discern if I myself am prepared for that level of exercise, just on a general level. Remains to be seen. However, on THAT day I was nowhere NEAR prepared for it and made a bit of a silly goose out of myself.

In the middle of class I crashed, HARD. I turned whiter than... I hate these... I'm not good at them. I turned whiter than the noise you hear when a white noise generator is generating white noise. That makes no sense. I was really white. Oh! Like Todd (DAVID.  Who the hell is Todd, Eric?)  in Shaun of the Dead! He was pretty frigging white! I was white like that. Only sweating. And not in a healthy hey-look-at-that-guy-getting-healthy-exercise-working-up-a-healthy-sweat way. No. In a greasy rivulet streaming down all sides of my face like, maybe we should get that guy to the Emergency Room way.

They had to give me glucose and then emailed me later in the evening to make sure I was okay.

Anyway... I barely completed everything that was supposed to be done. The deal with the class is that you have these collections of exercises that you need to complete x number of times. X being as many as you can. I was happy to have x=1.

That was Tuesday. This is Thursday. I went again tonight. I survived. I didn't crash out. But I did learn that Crossfit is HARD. Bastards. Have me working to exhaustion muscles that I am not used to working because I've been doing the same two workouts for 5 years or so.

I learned tonight that I am bad at a couple of things. Figure I am going to have the fun of learning about a lot more things I am bad at. Tonight it was jumping rope and deadlifting. Neither of those things do I do correctly or with any finesse or what you would call proper form.

For me swimming is punching madly at the water trying to make it get out of my way. I kind of jump rope the same way. With any of the correct mechanics, it would probably be easier. I just don't have any of them.

Deadlifting isn't anything I ever got in to. Now I know why. In order to deadlift correctly, you need to stick your buttocks out straight out behind you. I have no buttocks. Therefore I am at a distinct disadvantage. Even after a lot of decent coaching, I could not do it properly and ended up using the very center of my lower back to lift the weight over and over again. Nothing else. It was not good.

During the section where you have to do a set of exercises over and over again, I did a little better, but not as well as I would like. That's okay. I expect to see improvement in that kind of a thing.

Tonight it was lunges with both legs, then ten standing broad jumps of six feet. This was especially difficult for me to have some difficulty doing. Like difficult in my heart because I USED TO JUMP OVER THE HOODS OF CARS AND GODDAMN SHOPPING CARTS.

I was looking over at the two blokes next to me who were able to get more sets done than me and didn't appear to be in any kind of amazing shape. I had to remind myself that the blokes in question were very likely 20 years younger than me and SHOULD be able to do more of that kind of a thing than me.

I can see the appeal of the class. It works all of you almost all the time. I get why people who adhere to it get results. However, the whole "Oh the class is so much fun!" aspect? I'm not seeing THAT.

It's less boring that lifting weights alone in a gym, but it still mostly sucks. I will also monitor to see if this attitude changes.


TRANSMISSION ENDS