Holiday Chronicles #1
A common question that gets kicked about on the www.crossfit.com message board (http://board.crossfit.com) is “Why would I pay to go to an affiliate when I can do CrossFit at my local gym”. It is a fair question … the WOD is available on the internet, there are heaps of instructional videos, and there are certainly plenty of gyms around.
Well, it is day one of our annual camping holiday and already I miss CrossFit Brisbane. We journeyed into town today to find a gym, and well, I think we found one. It has been so long since I have been in a commercial gym that I actually wasn’t sure if I was in one or not when I walked in the front door. I was greeted by a “tanorexic” girl (skinny fat with a very deep artificial tan) who stared blankly at me for about 15 seconds when I asked if they had free weights, before responding that no, I had to pay to use the gym. Bemused, I asked to have a look around.
Hmmm … not really anywhere to train. The place was full of machines which were all variations of a leg extension for different parts of your body, a heap of mirrors lining the wall and people standing around not working out, and not talking to each other. As I was standing in the middle of the weights area a patron walked up tanorexic girl and asked where the preacher curl machine was. She struggled with this question as clearly her training didn’t include the king of isolation exercises. In his disgust he turned and asked me if I knew where it was, to which I replied “they have been banned”. OK, so there is not much humour in this gym. Patron man looked mortified, so I suggested that he position the swiss ball in front of the mirror and do his preacher curls on that. He seemed very satisified that he could combine two stupid pieces of equipment and the mirror in a single exercise and trotted off to happily hammer his guns.
Not to be deterred by what I had seen, we turned up at 4pm for a training session. Tanorexic girl had left for the day and had been replaced by Figure Competitor girl who was in the middle of a PT session when we arrived. She was helping some poor soul bench press one and a half times what he could actually lift by curling the weight above his face. I bet she knew where the preacher curl machine was hiding. After finishing the standard 3 x 8 they moved to the lat pulldown for some partner assisted heaving pulldowns so I seized the moment to steal the only 20kg bar in the place from the bench press and setup to do deadlifts. I soon discovered that deadlifting in a commercial gym is really hard. Apart from the fact that there is not much weight in the place (finding enough for a 150 dead is a real challenge), people seem to have absolutely no respect for the fact that you are picking up something really heavy. In the middle of the first set a girl in a mini skirt (??) wandered past the end of the bar coming very close to hitting it mid-lift. During the second set a couple of young lads set up a bench about a foot from where I was lifting. And it just got worse. Before the start of the third set I had to ask a punter to take his foot off the end of the bar where it was resting while he was spotting his mate do quarter range of motion, far too heavy, dumbell press. How do people train in these places? After the fourth warmup set it became very clear that my proposed wod involving heavy deads and pushups was not going to happen because there simply was no space.
As an amusing aside, at one stage during my warmup deads I needed more weight so I pinched a 10kg from the smith machine. When I went back for the other, the girl who had been using the machine (and whom I thought had finished) stepped under the bar and proceeded to knock out a set of some form of lunge. When she had finished I apologised for stealing her weight and gave her back the 10kg plate. The funny thing was that she hadn’t noticed it was gone. You know your training is pushing serious boundaries when subtracting 10kg from the bar makes no difference to the amount of effort required. This pretty much sums up the experience. No-one in the place was raising a sweat.
So being adaptable, I changed to a max dip/max pullup wod. Hmmm … no pullup bar. I asked Figure Competitor girl if there was a pullup bar in the place and she lead me to the gravitron, explaining that I could add as much assistance that I needed. So, being inventive I set the smith machine to the top position and started the WOD. I discovered that knocking out 30+ dips unbroken is a great way to ensure that you have the dip machine to yourself. The two lads doing 3 reps of partner assisted dips decided not to work in with me anymore. Unfortunately by the time I got back to the smith machine, said lads had positioned an incline bench underneath it and were happily benching away in revenge. And so it continued until I had haphazardly completed in just under an hour what should have been a 10 minute workout.
However, as I left, I had a moment of clarity. What we have created at CrossFit Brisbane is an amazing thing. And I had an answer the why pay to train at an affiliate question … affiliates are a great place to do CrossFit, and that is the reason you shouldn’t struggle at your local commercial gym. At CFB, when you walk in people say hello. There are no fake tans, no ipods, no machines and in our case, plenty of space. It is easy to warmup. People respect effort and importantly respect that you need room to breathe. At CFB when I want to do pullups I simply walk to the bar and fire away. When I want to deadlift, there is plenty of weight to play around with, heaps of bars and chalk. There aren’t any 16 year old wannabes wandering around in gangster hats. People know if you take 1kg off the bar that they are using (let alone 10kg) because they are working to the best of their ability all of the time and taking weight off would be obvious. The people who work at CFB know where every piece of equipment is and even know how to use it. At any one time there are more people training than resting. There is an atmoshpere in the place that makes you want to join in, makes you want to try that litle bit harder. I love CFB, the people that train there and everything that it stands for.
So tomorrow, I will wander to the park and crank out Angie and wish that I was doing it with the crew at CFB. When I finish I will post my time up on the comments as a challenge for others to beat it, read the comments from the day, check out crossfit.com and be glad that I found the CrossFit community. Never again will I question the value for money that we provide as an affiliate. We have a great place to train and we have great people to train with. It is that simple, and that good.
