Malingering’s World

… but not this.

However this shit is so fucking funny I can’t let it go. Thanks to my friend for sending this to me.

Thank you, thank you, thank you James for showing me this. I love you.

Crossfit is imploding. It’s even on Wikipedia!

CrossFit has been criticized for its perceived “cult-like” mentality.[1][6] Some fitness professionals[2][7] and a senior officer who commands the U.S. Navy’s Center for Personal and Professional Development[8] believe CrossFit workouts are so intense that participants risk injury or even death from rhabdomyolysis. Mark Twight, Mark Rippetoe, Dan John, Robb Wolf, and Ross Enamitt are trainers once very active in the CrossFit community who have either reduced or ended their association with it. Some of them question CrossFit’s management practices and say it is not truly an open source movement open to change. [5]CrossFit has also been criticized for lax certification standards and for failing to provide any oversight of affiliates. Everyone who pays $1,000 to attend a weekend seminar is certified as a CrossFit trainer; there are no pre-requisites or exams.

Apparently ALL crossfitters are not afraid of blood-bourne disease.

Man how I love cults.

Shortly after they kicked me out of the gym, CrossFit LA posted this on their website (thanks to a reader for alerting me to this yesterday). They are really proud of themselves for throwing me out.

Can’t wait till I find out who said they wished they’d thrown me out earlier. What an impressive way to run a cult business. If only we all had such business ethic.

I can’t help but wonder why there is such a resistance to professionalism. I can’t imagine this sort of thing happening in other businesses. If you wrote something about your blog about your doctor or dentist, does that person have the right to refuse your business? If you complained about filthy conditions at 24 Hour Fitness, would they cancel your membership? If you went online and said your stockbroker was a moron, would that give him the right to retaliate? And if you did seek revenge by throwing someone out, would you go announcing it on your business website and then encourage other business owners to do the same?

How does one resist acting like a business while charging over $300/month for membership?

(I am going to Google myself and see if anyone has written anything negative about me, and then “fire” them. I may be firing you, blog readers, so you may as well censor yourself.

P.S. The ethics are even worse at Crossfit NorthWest Tucson. Check out the comment at the bottom. And they continue to malign this woman on the CrossFit LA site this week as well.

Crossfit = professional.

(Original post)

So I’ll just let him say it.

Patrick, on CrossFit and CrossFitters (and the cult they believe in)

It is not my intention to be a dick, but at the same time I am a big proponent of telling the truth. This leaves me conflicted here but as always, the truth wins out so here goes.

As it turns out, I didn’t have to make a decision about what to do about CrossFit LA because the next day I got an email telling me that my contract had been canceled and I’d been “removed from the system.” I didn’t get a phone call, or a “we need to talk,” or a “this is a warning,” or even a “Merry Christmas,” I simply got an email stating that my membership had been canceled. The explanation is as follows (I would paraphrase as I don’t particularly like cutting and pasting directly, but in order to avoid being called a liar or anything else, I’m going to print the words straight from the gym’s mouth. Of note, this is not gossip as it is my own personal affair and gossip involves the affairs of others and not oneself.):

I’m thinking now that it’s best that we just part ways… you obviously don’t want to be here. Or, maybe you do, since it seems to give you regular material for your hate blog… In either case, it doesn’t support you, me or our community. I don’t want you here against your will or better judgement [sic]. I would much rather have you leave us on somewhat good terms rather than continue down the road you are determined to go down and have you burn all your relationships here.

You know, you’ve had every opportunity here to be a contributing, inspiring, motivating, and positive impact on our community. You have chosen time and again NOT to do that… and now for the past several months, have chosen to take the low road – publicly complaining, gossiping, lying, and generally spreading hate… rather than choosing to be responsible and helping to change or improve the environment you chose to be a part of.

I take full responsibility for what I write on my blog. I feel these are my honest and extremely candid opinions and I will stand behind them as truthful and genuine, albeit often silly and purposely over-the-top. And if being honest and critical gets me kicked out of Crossfit LA, well, so be it. I’ve never been one to pretend things are okay when they aren’t.

Basically, I’ve been gym-dooced.

We all might be happier living in a delusional world, where we can eliminate criticism and ignore dissenting opinions and make-believe that everyone around us is in complete agreement with our own beliefs. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been tempted to delete comments which insult me and call me a sexless ugly cat lady, etc. And I certainly have the power to, because it’s my blog. But I don’t, because I think there is room for everyone to have a voice regardless of whether or not we share our opinions. I feel if you truly believe in what you’re doing, then it should stand up against criticism and defend itself.

Which makes me wonder what Crossfit LA is so afraid of.

Regardless, they are a private community and have the choice to do whatever they like. If removing anyone who expresses a dissenting opinion or questions the validity of certain practices from the gym is what they need to do to survive, then I respect that. I would have expected that at this point they would have had the confidence to believe in their program and have the faith that they could flourish despite criticism, but we all have our insecurities and have the right to act accordingly. Unfortunately with this move they’ve slid out of the realm of business and professionalism and into the realm of cult behavior and childish retaliation, and I find this to be disappointing (yet not surprising to anyone who has seen how mild criticism is attacked on the Crossfit.com message boards).

I know I’m not the only one who has criticisms about Crossfit. This is not to say I don’t believe it works, obviously I wouldn’t waste 18 months of my life ( which is over $3000 in membership fees) at Crossfit LA if it didn’t. Nor would I have blogged about it positively and brought in 8 new members in my first 6 months. But there are two sides to every coin, and I’m not alone. I have received emails and messages from Crossfitters around the country who have the same opinion as myself, that Crossfit has immense benefits and a number of risks (as well as douchebags). Interestingly, the majority of the people who wrote to me recognized that the Crossfit community is not mature enough to handle a dissenting opinion and will throw insults right and left when threatened, or better yet, delete them from the system and for this reason chose to stay quiet.

I suppose we can all try to create our own isolated delusional systems. The world will seem like a better place if we eliminate everything and everyone we are unable to tolerate and surround ourselves with our own self-created bliss. We can label everyone we disagree with as negative or a liar or spreading hate, and then remove these toxic individuals from our environments to make everything all happy-slappy again. Why bother accepting that people have different opinions when you can simply abolish them? Sure, maybe it’s overly simplistic, intolerant and self-deceptive, but it’s a hell of a lot better than accepting reality.

After all, reality bites sometimes.

So this is me. I’m overhead squatting 125lbs, which is well over what I weigh. And as you can imagine, that feels pretty awesome. I can do things that I didn’t think I could do (yesterday I almost bench pressed my bodyweight, which has been another goal of mine). I’m stronger than I thought I could be. I’ve met some people who are really cool. Some of my closest friends are people I met at the gym. I work out consistently because the thought of losing any sort of money by not showing up to class just pains me. I like showing up and being told what to do by an instructor rather than wondering what I “should” be doing. There’s a (for the most part) good staff on hand who knows and loves CrossFit. The non-douchy people are encouraging and helpful. I’ve learned a lot about fitness. And for that reason, I stay at Crossfit LA.

But then, of course, there’s the other side of things. There’s the elitist attitude held by some members. There’s the sloppy conditions. And then there’s the general competitive nature of CrossFit which has people bragging and boasting and sucking each other’s cocks about how freaking awesome their Nancy time was or whatever.

I was doing a workout the other day, and we were doing one of “the Girls” which are these standard Crossfit workouts that are on the website and people use as benchmarks to try to test their progress and such. I think originally you were supposed to see how much you improve, but at my gym they post the results of the top 5 people on the wall for everyone to see, so of course for a subset of people, it’s all about beating those times. Anyway, a relatively new and incredibly strong gym member starts doing this workout. He’d never done it before, and he’s kicking ass and everyone’s encouraging him because he’s a machine and it’s awesome to watch. But (and this is what ruined it for me) one of the members of the staff was standing next to him, with a stop watch glancing up at the wall and shouting what the current time was and then what the “time to beat” was, over and over and over. He’d say “finish in 30 seconds, you can beat Andrew!” “You’re one minute ahead of Bob!” “Forty-five seconds and you’ll take down John!” Continuously. For the entire 4 and a half minutes it took for this guy to finish the workout. It wasn’t about HIM anymore, it was about who he could beat and how he could get his name on the wall. (The somewhat ironic part of this story is that this person ended up beating almost everyone, getting the 3rd fastest time in the gym, and they never put his name up on the wall. It’s been like a month and his name was never put up there. So the whole cheering and rooting on thing was a total cocktease.) This is how it’s been recently, more so than before. Now whenever we start a workout, the instructor tells us the “time to beat.” And really, some of us just want to work on our own personal goals because making your gym-time into a constant competition is more stressful than it should be. Obviously you can use other people’s times and weights as a reference point, but does it need to be all about beating people?

The other interesting thing is that every instructor at CrossFit LA has been going to the Landmark Forum (the awareness program started by the EST people back in the 80s). Do what you wish, if it works for you, that’s great. But don’t use your influence as an instructor to try to recruit gym members to your Landmark meetings, because it’s not really cool. I had one instructor come up to me before class and tell me to leave the gym and join him at a Landmark meeting rather than work out that day. And then people get all Landmarky on you and start making comments that they NEVER would have made before going to their Landmark meetings, like when I said I was sore from yesterday’s class, the instructor replied “the workout didn’t make you sore, YOU made you sore.” Everyone’s getting The Secret for Christmas.

The thing that’s getting to me (and the one thing I simply can’t ignore, that other bullshit I can block out or roll my eyes at, but this thing I can’t), is that I get injured. A lot. My back, wrists, knees, shoulders and feet take turns at causing me agony depending on what I did at the gym. The Olympic lifting seems to fuck my shoulders and back. Now every time I lift my arm over my head I get a loud clunking sound and a sharp pain. I can’t sit for more than 30 minutes at a time because my back spasms are so bad. My neck is always stiff and by the end of the day I have a tension headache. My old gymnastics injuries get aggravated, and even though I had wrist surgery, I still have pain when I lift weight overhead. And this doesn’t affect me just in the gym, it affects me all goddamn day. Sometimes it’s just annoying, and sometimes it’s freaking terrible.

So what to do, what to do, what to do? The cost-benefit analysis is making my head hurt even worse.

The pull-up bar at my gym.

This is my gym, CrossFit LA. Maybe I’m a pussy, or maybe I’ve been to one too many lectures on universal precautions, but the sight of dried blood on the pull-up bars, barbells, and dumbbells really makes me stop and ew. Though I pointed this out to someone today (another gym member) who responded “who gives a fuck?” He clearly isn’t in a job that requires latex gloves.

Well, according to the CDC, HIV survives in dried blood for “several hours,” Hepatitis C lasts 4-7 days and Hepatitis B lasts for 7 days. So I’m a little wary of ripping my hands open on pull-ups, and then holding onto this shit and ending up with lord knows what. At least I have my Hep B vaccine.

Sadly, something has happened at my gym (Petranek Fitness or Crossfit LA: Los Angeles – they changed their name to this redundancy a few months ago) recently and there’s been an epidemic of arrogance and egoism which continues to grow. I’m not exactly sure what’s happened, but I’m pretty certain they should change the motto from “Forging Elite Fitness” to “Forging Elitism” as it’s truly terrible. The other day someone got very irritated with me for sharing his/her equipment during the warm-up. Like I was interfering so dreadfully with his/her warm-up that I shouldn’t even exist. And then there was the person who finished the warm-up a good 3 minutes before everyone else in the class and started loudly complaining about how s/he has to wait sooo long before starting the workout and “why is it taking so long??!?!” People post diet logs online which are becoming reminiscent of those anorexia nervosa message boards where people encourage each other that being hungry and depriving yourself is a good thing. Jokes are made about getting “rhabdo” (rhabdomyolisis has happened in a number instances in CrossFit workouts, and is the leading cause of kidney failure in this country), creating a culture where pushing yourself too hard is glorified. There is no room for moderation, and safety often goes by the wayside. The whole place is so full of ego, there’s hardly any room to work out. A few days ago we were in class and two people from the previous class sat inside the gym and loudly chatted away, bragging about their scores for Fight Gone Bad and their times for this and that and their strategies for so-and-so workout and in a furious tornado of self-promotion, managed to distract everyone working out. I also heard someone say to another member “yeah, but you only did the intermediate class” with such scorn that one wondered why an intermediate level person even bothered working out at all. The other day someone called another person a pussy for lifting less weight than him/her, even though the person lifting less weight had a serious injury and was adjusting appropriately. And then (my favorite) was the person who pointed and laughed when I dumped the bar on a failed clean. S/he laughed so loudly that about 5 people silently turned and looked at him/her and this person then shouted “nice ass plant!” at me as I tried to get up (fortunately the other 5 people did not join in).

Sadly, this is not the gym I joined 18 months ago, which was a supportive and positive environment. People are becoming quite concerned with their weights and times and records, and much less cognizant of the community itself, which is deteriorating rapidly. People are so worried about “the board” (a whiteboard listing the top 5 students/instructors results in various exercises) that they’ll sacrifice form and dignity to get there. People even come into the gym when there’s no class going on to do special workouts to “get on the board.” Not to mention it’s a near impossibility for most people to “get on the board” because the top 3 spots are invariably the names of the gym employees so it becomes this elusive space for only the most, well, elite. The other day I saw a group of people spend at least 5 minutes gazing upward to the leaderboards in the sky, calculating how they could lift more weight than so-and-so and what it would take to “get on the board.” Ugh. Just focus on your workout and worry about yourself. It’s not worth it to compare yourself to everyone else, especially these people who live, (don’t) eat, and breathe CrossFit.

I’ve been faced with the dilemma about what to do about all of this, as I feel the once positive and nurturing community that I wrote about last year is a mere shell of itself today. I love being in shape, and I love working out, and I love the pressure of pseudo-personal training to keep me in check. I have made some amazing friends at the gym and I’ve learned a lot about fitness, diet, and exercise (a lot of which I’ve outlined here on the blog). On the other hand, I see the hegemony emerging and I don’t want to be a part of the elitsm, arrogance and self-promotion that is only getting worse. For a few months I thought it was just me, that maybe I, was the one who was becoming overly competitive or arrogant and this was how it was manifesting. But the more people I talk to, the more I realize it isn’t just me at all, in fact it is noticed by almost everyone I’ve talked to. I keep hoping things will turn around, that at some point it will come full circle and we’ll be back to where we started. Occasionally I catch a glimmer of that old environment and it keeps me going, because those days were pretty damn cool.

Turkish Get Ups

2x right/2x left 30#
1x right/1x left 40#
1x right/1x left 50#
1x right 60#
1x right 65#
1x right 75#

Shoulder press
5x 45#
5x 55#
5x 60#
5x 65#
3x 70# (didn’t quite make it to 5)