In September 2015 I walked into a Crossfit gym for the first time and I was absolutely terrified.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. My interest in Crossfit started with my involvement in rugby. In 2014, coming from a non-athletic background and having not exercised in at least 10 years, I decided to join a local women’s rugby team and found myself huffing and puffing my way around the field. I am 5′ 10″ and once I started college I had been packing on the pounds, being well over 200 pounds. While my coaches liked that I was big, having to chase people down a football-size field was not easy, or very fun. I made it through my entire first season, but I still found that I was the slowest person on the team and every game was enjoyable but also frustrating because I wasn’t fast enough to lay the smack down on the fast girls on the other team.
This was when I made the commitment to myself that I wanted to be buff.
I looked around at my teammates and figured out who was the buffest and fastest, and then inquired about her workout routine. I found out that she frequently worked out at her local Crossfit gym, and that’s when my cyber stalking of Crossfit started.
I found the closest gym to me because let’s be real: I’m not going to actually go to a gym that is more than 10 minutes from my house. I drove to the gym and I walked up to the front doors but I couldn’t go inside. I was SUPER intimidated just looking through the windows because I saw all of these super buff people lifting weights and jumping on boxes. I slowly slinked away hoping no one noticed that I was creeping on them and promptly drove home wondering if this was a good idea.
Even though my initial approach to the gym was a massive fail, I was committed to at least trying Crossfit and I reached out to the gym via email to attend an introduction class. I had invited some girls from my rugby team to also attend so the three of us got our Crossfit on and learned the basics like kettlebells swings and squats.
One thing I really liked about my gym was that they required you to complete a fundamentals class for 3 weeks before attending the normal Crossfit classes. This was EXTREMELY helpful because we learned the basic movements and I felt a little bit more confident in my own ability to participate in a class even if that meant I had to scale all the exercises.
It’s been about 6 months since I first started Crossfit and I still can’t do a pull up, I’m deathly afraid of box jumps, I’m still well over 200 pounds, and I am also still huffing and puffing on the rugby field. That being said, I’ve gained an incredible amount of strength, I’m running faster (although I’m still in the 5 slowest of my team), I’ve pushed myself both mentally and physically further than I thought I could and I haven’t died yet in a Crossfit workout. Even though I feel like the changes in my life haven’t been that noticeable I receive comments all the time from people at work that I’ve lost weight and my coaches could not be happier with how much my fitness level has improved.
I still have a long way to go to being the rugby player / athlete that I want to become but Crossfit has definitely helped me get closer to the beast I want to be.
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