"Regularly Learn and Play New Sports"--Greg Glassman

The one part of CrossFit that many of us may neglect, myself included, and in the words of Greg Glassman, is to "regularly learn and play new sports". To ensure that I was adhering to CrossFit methodology, I decided to choose a sport to learn: golf.

Okay, so it may have been a bit of a bold move to choose golf as my sport of choice; however, I consider myself a fairly well-rounded athlete, so I figured golf was the appropriate choice. And besides, my house is on a golf course for crying out loud! Lakewood Links to be specific. After a couple of outings on the driving range, I felt that I was ready to hit the links! Now, please understand that I have previously attempted to golf on many occasions. In fact, I have been "golfing" since I was a teenager; however, I never did it often enough to become any good at it.

Take the "accuracy" aspect of CrossFit and multiply that by about 10! That is how fine-tuned you must be to excel at the sport of golf. Needless to say, my accuracy was very few and far between. I decide to play only nine holes today; my score: 53. Multiply that by two and you get 106--nowhere near "par for the course". In a word, my experience was: humbling. However, I did have a handful of "good" shots--these will be the shots that will keep me coming back for more. And that is the lesson learned today: just because we suck at something, doesn't mean we should give up; no, it should drive us to learn from our mistakes, and improve upon them next time!

Box Jumps

PJ executing the famed box jump (21 June 2009)

CrossFit programming, when done right, will expose our weaknesses. If we, as CrossFit athletes, have a say in our own programming, then we will gravitate to the things that we are good at doing. However, if we remain true to the CrossFit method, then we will invariably be faced with a WOD that will incorporate (in some cases, more than one) weakness. In today's particular case, I was faced with one of mine: box jumps.

Agility is one of the 10 general physical skills that we strive to master. My power is good. My explosiveness is good. However, when it comes to box jumps, I am simply not efficient. My rhythm is off, my pace broken. I have been following CrossFit programming for over five years. I should have this box jump thing mastered by now, right? What (or who) else to turn to for answers, but Google, right?

I typed into the Google search bar the following words: "the trick to box jumps". To my delighted surprise, the fourth Google "hit" was from none other than the CrossFit HQ Queen herself: Lisbeth Darsh. I followed the link to one of CrossFit Watertown's (Lisbeth's formerly-owned affiliate) older posts, entitled: Conquering Your Fear of the Box Jump. Now, do not get me wrong: I am not afraid of the box jump; nay, I just suck at them.

I have sworn to adopt Tip #5 of Lisbeth's blog post (you'll have to read it to find out what it is).

What is your weakness? Are you going to shy away from it, or are you going to face it, challenge it, and overcome it?!