The Ascent Blog

Two summers ago, I was working as a raft guide on the Colorado River, and spent my days doing the best I could to keep myself covered and protected from the 100+ degree heat and sun. All of the river guides, male and female, would typically wear long board shorts, lightweight, long-sleeve button-up shirts, and big hats. I didn’t think much of it until one trip where a young woman from Salt Lake City approached one of our female guides. This particular guide was tall, slender, and had a great body, and the woman walked up and thanked her for dressing so modestly. “As someone whose husband is on this trip, I really appreciate that you girls keep covered up,” she said. “I think it’s a wonderful display of modesty and I just wanted to let you know that I think it’s wonderful.”

I remembered that conversation the other day at the beginning of a WOD, as I mentioned to a friend that I my new Lulu shorts were so short that I actually had to manage my bikini line before I could wear them. At the end of that same WOD, I pulled my shirt off and went for a walk around the block in the light drizzle, trying to cool down from a long chipper that had ended with 40 heavy Russian kettlebell swings.

When you’re in the box, it seems second nature for men to be walking around shirtless and women to be squatting and lunging in little more than their underwear. And most people in there put months and years into growing their muscles and reducing their body fat–they have earned the right to show off their bodies. And typically, it doesn’t bother me. I am the first one to admit that picking up a heavy bar makes me feel pretty hardcore, but wearing tiny shorts while doing it makes me feel, inexplicably, like even more of a badass. I am definitely proud of my body, and I am ok with other people paying attention to the way I look (just as long as they aren’t looking at my unibrow).

A few months ago, a girl joined the gym who would always wear spandex capris under her Nike running shorts (which are still a lot longer than most of the other shorts you see at the gym). I have to admit that I thought this was a little unusual, and wondered aloud with some other girls why she felt like she needed to be “so covered up.” As I got to know her a little better, I realized that she was a very dedicated Christian, and was maybe dressing modestly because of her religious beliefs. But why should someone have to have a “reason” to dress modestly at the gym?

Don’t get me wrong–if I walked into the gym tomorrow wearing long shorts and a loose-fitting t-shirt instead of my normal leggings and tank top or booty shorts, I doubt most people would notice, let alone care. But, they might. And here’s the kicker: I know that I would feel out of place.

When I worked on the river, being covered up was the norm. But obviously for the woman who went out of her way to comment on how impressed she was by our modesty, the norm was young women trying to get away with showing as much skin as possible just because they could. And that is definitely the culture I have noticed in the CrossFit world–almost every photo I’ve seen from Regionals this past weekend is of shirtless athletes doing muscle-ups or women in tiny spandex shorts doing deep squats. I have to imagine that they are able to do those movements wearing just about anything, so why did they pick those tight, revealing choices instead? Because they want to show off their bodies, but also because that is the norm. In fact, the competition uniform that The CrossFit Games distributed to last year’s female competitors were skin-tight performance t-shirts and tiny shorts with their competitor number on them. In some ways, it seems that if you want to be good at CrossFit, working out half-naked is something you need to be okay with.

I’m not really sure what conclusion I am trying to get at here, because honestly I believe that if you feel comfortable showing off your body by wearing tiny shorts or pulling your shirt off, then you should have the right to do so. And if you spend months and years eating healthfully and exercising regularly, you should be proud to show off the fruits of your labor. But for today, it’s just something to think about. Maybe it’s time to expand the culture a little bit.

Tuesday night’s WOD was a tough one. 7 Rounds: 400m run, 4 heavy power cleans, 14 wall balls, 24 horizontal jumps over the bar. Time cap: 30 minutes. My clean max is 100#, so I used 85# for the WOD, and it was so heavy that TJ was personally supervising my every rep. My wall balls were just miserable, and knocked me on my ass on more than one occasion. And in case you were wondering, no, I didn’t finish before the cutoff, and I came in at least 1 full round behind everyone else.

In the past 14 months, I have done almost 200 WODs, but as I began the run to open my 3rd round of this WOD, I started to feel like it might as well have been my first night at the box. Almost everyone else lapped me before I made it halfway around the block, and as they all casually jogged past me (or so it seemed from my perspective at the time), I started to get pretty dang frustrated. Why do I still suck at this? I thought.

I know, I know. I have heard all of the “It’s You vs. You!” and, “Just think of how far you’ve come in the past year!” lines. I’ve heard them a lot. Because I still have these experiences a lot. And in my better moments, I can and do focus on how far I’ve come in the past year, and focus on Me vs. Me and all the other inspirational one-liners of CrossFit. But sometimes, I just get really frustrated that my name still ends up at the bottom of the list every day. Should these things matter? No. But do they still matter sometimes? Absolutely. And this was one of those moments.

As the others disappeared around the corner, leaving me in their dust, I began thinking things like, “I mean, if I stopped now it wouldn’t technically be a DNF. I’d still have 2 full rounds finished…” and “I could just stop running and hobble back into the gym and say I rolled my ankle…”

And to be honest, 15 months ago, I probably would have done just that. I would have filed this experience under the “Stuff That Doesn’t Matter in the Long Run” category and walked the rest of the way, telling myself that it absolutely didn’t matter that I didn’t finish, and that this experience had no real bearing on who I am as a person, anyway. And at the time, those things would have been true.

But then, as cheesy as this sounds, a switch flipped in my brain. I took a mental step back and looked at the situation, and I literally thought, Are you seriously having a pity party right now? Do you seriously think it’s ok for you to just WALK back into the gym and sit down? If you really believe that, then what are you doing here? This internal voice was accompanied by a mental version of my infamous “You’ve Got to be F@#&ing Kidding Me” face, which I typically reserve for strong girls who use 20# kettlebells, and people who stop at the beginning of a quarter-mile long merge lane because they feel the need to immediately enter traffic.

And then the next thought that popped up was, You are better than this!

Wait a second, wasn’t I just thinking, Why do I still suck at this?

As I continued on my run (by the way, this was one of those things that takes 5 minutes to explain but happens in your head almost instantaneously), I tried to drown out the Why do I still suck at this voice with the hyper cheerleader You can do this! voice. I jogged back in through the door and weaved through the rest of the class, some of whom were already getting ready to leave again for the next run. I power cleaned my 85-pound bar, and slammed myself in the chest with it.

“That’s heavy!” said TJ.

“I noticed,” I replied.

In the next two rounds, I would be knocked over by the wall ball twice, and get lapped again by almost everyone else. With 28:02 on the clock, I headed out for my 6th 400m run. I can make this, I thought. I bolted out the door, determined to do whatever it took to finish my 400m lap before the 30 minutes was up.

I’m not sure that I have ever taken a 400m run so seriously. I used every technique I could think of–I even tried repeating a mantra in my head to keep me from focusing on the fact that I felt like my lungs were about to begin frothing. My mantra, repeated with every stride of my right leg, was this: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I rounded the final corner and sprinted up the hill (yes, the last 100m of our 400m course is a hill. it’s agonizing), pushing everything I had into the pavement. I collapsed through the doorway, gasping for breath.

But everyone was already done, laying on the floor near their barbells or hunched over a wallball. The 30 minutes had ended. I didn’t make it. No poetic justice tonight.

I don’t always like to end posts like this with a moral, because 1, I think it’s cheesy, but 2, there isn’t always a “bright side.” Sometimes, nights like this one just suck, and that’s that. But on Tuesday night, even though I finished dead last without even a Rocky Balboa ending to show for it, I left the box feeling pretty good. Because even though I may not be as fast or strong or flexible or powerful as I wish I was by now, I am no longer the person who gives up when things are tough, or convinces myself that I’ve done enough, even though I know I could do more. I am no longer that person I used to be, and that is more important than making it back through the door before the time ends (although that would have been nice, too).