In December 2018, I joined a CrossFit gym in my community. I wrote about it on my blog. You can read it here.
A friend sent me a question in reply:
I have heard from several people that are completely unrelated to each other, that their friend or family member had joined a Crossfit gym and, as they started getting fitter, their relationship with their spouse went downhill. Their spouse was not in Crossfit. All these people ended up divorcing.
My reply to her was along the lines of:
I can imagine that if someone is limping along in an unhappy marriage with a spouse they feel disconnected to, they will want to address that. If divorce is how they address it, that's obviously a problem with their relationship, not with their fitness program.
(In other words: the principal cause of divorce is marriage, not physical fitness.)
When Paul and I separated I remembered this message and chuckled bitterly.
The CrossFit-to-divorce pipeline was a plot point in This is Us: it’s a thing. But I stand by my answer: Marriages end when people find the belonging and connection lacking from their relationship in something or someone else. The space in the relationship comes first. New jobs, new hobbies, new friends and new communities can all have the effect my friend ascribed to CrossFit.
It’s like the “sauce béarnaise effect”: if you get sick after eating a new food (like sauce béarnaise), you will associate the illness with the new food regardless of its actual cause. If someone’s marriage starts to be visibly ill, the most recent new friend, hobby, or job will be associated with the breakdown. In all likelihood, the new friend, hobby, or job was sought to relieve the pain of an ailing relationship. At least that’s my experience.
Yet, I can also say that CrossFit did contribute to the end of my relationship with Paul, almost a year after we separated. CrossFit (the workout methodology) and CrossFit (the gym near my house) helped me understand why I wasn’t recovering from my separation and what I had to do to get there.
Here’s a shocker for you: a marriage doesn’t end when the spouses separate. The attachment born of 25 years of marriage has to be meticulously and deliberately undone. The CrossFit gym we attended unintentionally provided an environment, a backdrop, for me to learn the importance of respecting my body’s distress signals. At a physical level first and at an emotional level later.
Before I get to the meat of it, I need to explain how CrossFit at my gym works. I promise it will be relevant to the themes of this bloggy newsletter.
In general, a CrossFit workout can be described as « high intensity, constantly varied, functional movement ». Workouts take place in a class setting and are programmed by coaches. Following the programming with more or less regularity provides a mix of cardio, strength and mobility unique to CrossFit. CrossFit tends to attract very fit and competitive people with normal jobs and families. Local gyms and scheduled workouts make it possible to fit high intensity training within the constraints of work and kids.
To manage progress you need to measure progress. CrossFit’s insistence on measuring and tracking progress creates a competitive environment that is generally friendly (in my experience). You can compete against yourself or against other gym members by comparing your performance against theirs. At my gym, members use an app called SugarWOD to input and share their workout results. SugarWOD also functions as a form of social media for gym members, employing time-tested practices like push notifications, comments, social reciprocity and streaks to keep users engaged. I have a love/hate relationship with SugarWOD because it ranks gym members according to results by default and I’m always scraping the bottom. Once, my daughter Marie got tired of hearing me complain about always being last on SugarWOD so she switched the ranking from “results” to “alphabetical” and I was still last because my name starts with V. Anyways.
Because gym members come in all shapes and sizes, CrossFit workouts are endlessly adaptable. Workouts are posted on SugarWOD “as prescribed” (RX) and members — often with the help of a coach — decide how they will adapt the workout to their level of fitness and skills. The workout RX specifies the movements, number of reps, load and time for any given workout and is meant to provide measurable, observable, and repeatable data. In theory it provides a benchmark for members to measure their progress over time. For most people, the benchmark is measured in how far you are from the benchmark.
What is rarely explained in a CrossFit class is that RX workouts are aimed at the fittest tier of athletes at any given gym. RX workouts contain highly technical gymnastics skills like kipping or handstands, and body weight movements like rope climbs and pull ups that are not accessible to an average adult of average fitness. People who regularly RX their workouts usually add extra skills training and weightlifting over their regular class attendance. When members adapt the prescribed workout , it’s called “scaling”.
Why am I telling you all this? Because for the average human, language matters. When you call a workout that is aimed at the fittest tier of your membership, who has the time/inclination/means for extra skills training, the “prescription,” and adapting the prescription “scaling”, you send a strong suggestion that the prescription (and what it takes to get there) is the norm. Even when coaches remind members that “there is nothing wrong with scaling” they signal that scaling is a lesser version of RX.
Feeling “lesser than” is not in itself toxic. Where the notion of RX-as-norm becomes toxic is when it is paired with CrossFit’s emphasis on functional fitness (training the body for activities performed in daily life). When workouts that are only accessible to the fittest, most privileged members of the gym are set as everyday fitness, it tells people that the level of skill, abilities and physique of the fittest members of the gym is everyday fitness. People like me often get caught in an injury and inflammation cycle trying to graduate from “scale” to “RX”. Our performance suffers, our fitness suffers and our body image gets completely trashed.
Are you seeing where I’m taking you yet? In my first CrossFit testimony, I wrote that CrossFit taught me to find my edge and push against it. But women like me don’t need to learn how to push against their edge. They need to learn where their own edge actually is. Pushing against norms that destroy our hearts, mind and bodies is all we know. We’re really good at encountering resistance and putting up a fight. We don’t know what feeling safe feels like. We use norms learned from culture, religion, peers and our environment to tell us what our edges should be. We do not know it in our bodies. Women like me need to learn how to stop pushing. And I learned how to stop pushing at CrossFit.
Part 2 coming soon! To be continued.