Personal Blogs

Earlier this year, not at new years, but maybe February or March, I set myself two physical goals. February and March are dark and cold and windy and winter seems always to have gone on forever in New England. Even though I was off sailing in the Caribbean and trying to power through mentally, I couldn't shake the winter blues. Even my light therapy lamp wasn't helping.

I decided that I wanted two things before I left for Ireland. Before I officially turned 60. Before I switched my life up yet again.

1. Deadlift my bodyweight. 

2. One unassisted pull up.

So I started working with my coach at CrossFit Merrimack, once a week, in addition to my regular WODs, then only about 3 x per week. Each week he'd put me through strengthening or mobility or technique exercises and sometimes they were nearly impossible for me to do and left me gasping in a hot sweat, and sometimes they were terrifying (sits ups on a GHD) but most times they were exhilarating. 

I learned so many things but the big one was this: I won't break. As I've gotten older and then with two years off CF because of the pandemic, I had this irrational fear that if I lifted too much, I'd hurt myself. Maybe it was loss of confidence; maybe being away for too long; maybe not feeling like I had a CF home. Hard to know but it doesn't really matter. 

During this time of coached sessions, I upped my attendance from 3 x a week to 5 x a week plus the coached session, and usually yoga or active recovery on another day. One full day of rest. Over time I realized I didn't need as much recovery time as I thought. That I wasn't sore every day from hard workouts but my body was tired. That I could lift so much more than I thought I could. 

So today, my nearly 60 year old body, on a 6'2" frame, lifted 173 #, which is what I weighed when I stepped on the scale this morning.

I am a Glamazon. 

The pulls up are still a stretch, but I didn't think I'd get to my body weight inside of 8 weeks, so who knows? I know I often undersell myself, even to myself. 

As I sit down tonight to fill out an application for a writer's residency, I remind myself that maybe not today or even tomorrow, but maybe in six weeks or six months, I'll be lifting my pen in a room overlooking the Pacific Ocean, one of a select few accepted. I just have to do the daily lifting. 

Nearly every Tuesday, in addition to my regular WODs, I have a coaching session with the box owner. Often I find myself doing exercises that aren't what are on my 'To Do List', i.e., 1 bodyweight deadlift; 1 unassisted pull up. He has me doing things like GHD sit ups, 12 reps x 3 sets interspersed with KB deadlifts, 44 lb. each hand, 10 reps x 3 sets. As I move back and forth between those two exercises, I find little muscles in my body that I didn't know existed. I think back to my first round of GHD sit ups, and I thought I was going to fall off the machine and the muscles that cross my hip bones were sore the next day. 

Tomorrow, I'm sure I'll wake up and some weird muscle I didn't even know existed will be sore but I won't notice it immediately. I'll do some usual task, like taking the trash to the dumpster, and when I toss it in, I'll feel a tug and go "Ah hah! That's what he was working on with those KB deads."

As I'm working around my EMA, I find the same 'Ah hah' moments. Today as I was researching what it meant to be a laundress on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1880s, an entire scene came to me of my great-grandmother. She's in her late twenties, but only married a little over a year and heavily pregnant with her first child, hauling buckets of water up and down the tenement stairs. Sunday was the soaking day. Monday washing day and drying. Tuesday ironing and starching day. I picture her trying to wring out clothing by hand, hang it on the line, reel the line in using the pulley, reaching, wringing, bending again and again. 

I am writing around the central part of my EMA, strengthening all those writing muscles with research and flights of fancy so that when I do sit down to concentrate and pull all this material together, I'll have that solid core, where everything is working in unison and has been strengthened and is ready for that final, heavy lift.

In the last few months, when I am not traveling, I have been doing 6 CrossFit workouts a week at CrossFit Merrimack in an effort to achieve the above-mentioned goals of deadlifting 170# and doing one unassisted pull up. The first goal is within reach. The second one is...well...the corporate term would be a "stretch" goal, a term I always found idiotic but then I find most of corporate-speak fairly idiotic. 

The first one is doable.

The second may be - or it may not. I'm 6'2" tall, female, 170#. That's a long muscled body to pull up a long way. My arms are - from gripping palm to arm pit - 2 feet long. I have to lift that straight up, no kipping, no assistance bands. .

Today was what I euphemistically term my rest day or alternatively, active recovery day. No weights. No burpees. No sprinting. 

But I did spend 4.5 hours slowly walking, bending and picking up trash with the Lowell Litter Krewe. We look like convicted miscreants, orange vests, those metal grabbers for picking stuff off the ground, pulling a trash bag behind us or carrying our five-gallon plastic bucket, picking up other people's trash. For fun. For our city. Because we live here. Our vests don't say "community service" but that's what we are in the truest sense of the word. We have not been ordered by the courts, but only by an internal moral compass and a chance to give back to the community where we all live. To see an immediate improvement in our environment and our neighborhood.

Regardless, after 4.5 hours of picking up trash, I come home and sit down and will rest the remainder of the day. The most demanding activity I'll engage in is this: writing, thinking, writing, thinking. That will tire me enough. 

20 Toes to bar, 12 push jerks @35#, 50 double unders, 25 wall balls@8# 

After a layoff of nearly a month, it was fantastic to be back in the chalk scented, sweaty infused box and doing a WOD. I was slow, not surprising, and went light on the push jerks, also not surprising, but managed to finish in a reasonable amount of time without thinking I was going to vomit. I've often felt like I'd vomit but never actually have. For someone who was never an athlete in high school or college, and who identified as a runner until my mid 40s, finding CrossFit was enlightening. And I'm glad I found it when I did. I like the power, the feeling of the cold, gridded metal bar in my hands, the thwack as the medicine ball smacks against the 10 foot mark on the wall I even like the burning sensation on my palms as my hands slip a little on the pull up bar as I try to at least get my knees up over parallel - unlikely I'll ever get toes to bar, but I keep making forward progress. Good to be home.