You didn’t look like you were trying very hard. ![]() I had seen him watching over the top of a book while I struggled by with the sandbag. Luke, my twelve-year-old son, approached cautiously. When I finished, finally, mercifully, that mile in the sand, I doubled over at the knees and watched my dripping sweat form miniature concretions on the sand underneath me. A man, much older than I, who smiled at me and said, Not bad for an old guy, huh? It was agonizing, and agonizingly slow, as I was at first lapped by the race leaders and then passed by people who, in my alternate reality, had no right passing me. I would run as best as I could from one barrel to the next, then walk to the next one. So I took up a strategy I had come to employ the last few years: I would chip away. When I reached the point where I had started, a far-too-enthusiastic volunteer told me I could ditch the bag and Really go for it! It sounded like a good idea, but my legs, my lungs, and, increasingly, my mind would not comply. On the other side of the row of barrels, the leaders were running the second of their two laps, but without sandbags. That lasted another two hundred yards, until the walk became much less brisk. That jog would last for four hundred yards, to the turnaround point, where my ragged breath and aching legs suggested I take it down a notch, to a brisk walk. We went at various paces, some at what sure looked to me like a dead sprint, some at a trot, me at a jog. We set off down the beach along a row of orange barrels that stretched for a quarter of a mile. I was about to dive into the deep end of the sport of fitness as a participant in the second annual Warrior Challenge, a competition designed to test the overall fitness of its contestants with feats of endurance, strength, and speed.Īfter the presentation of the colors and the singing of the national anthem, an air horn blared and the first event, the sandbag carry, was off. But now, among the hyperfit, I was reduced once again to being the fat kid on the playground, a twelve-year-old who wants desperately to play but has trouble getting in the game. It was one of the first times in my life that I looked in the mirror and truly liked the body I saw. Gonna look great at the pool club this afternoon. All those early morning workouts are paying off. ![]() Not looking too bad for a forty-eight-year-old. Just a couple of hours earlier, safe in my suburban home, I had caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror and thought, Hey, hotshot. That the spare now resembled more of a bicycle tire and less of the tractor tire it had a few years ago was beside the point. Their mere presence made me self-conscious of the gray tufts of hair on my chest and the spare tire of fat around my waist. I was among two hundred people, most of them half my age, overwhelmingly male, astonishingly fit, breathtakingly tattooed-many with Semper Fi and FTW, a veteran’s mark of honor. On a warm, overcast Saturday morning in July 2012, I stood, shirtless and barefoot, in the deep, dry sand of the beach in Avon, New Jersey, a 25-pound Tyvek bag of sand draped across my shoulders and neck in the same manner some other beachgoers that day carried plush towels. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.ĥ A Few Words About Pain, Fatigue, and Nausea Who show me every day that love, strength, and Read moreįor Winifred Shannon Madden and Anne Thompson, ![]() Whether you are a CrossFitter or a nascent athlete, you will come away from this book understanding the limitless potential of the human body and mind, and will learn what it takes to welcome and defeat any kind of suck. Along the way, he explores the culture of the sport, his experience of becoming a CrossFit coach, and some basic questions about himself, his past, and his athletic limitations-and why something so difficult and punishing can be at once beautiful, funny, and rewarding. Madden chronicles the year he devoted to trying to master all the basic CrossFit exercises, like double unders, muscle-ups, and kipping pull-ups, and immersing himself in the Paleo diet that strips weight from its followers but leaves them fantasizing about loaves of bread. In Embrace the Suck, the former editor in chief of Bicycling magazine explores with irreverence, humor, and soul-touching candor the fitness revolution sweeping America. Madden is just one of more than two million athletes worldwide to do so. Lifelong amateur athlete Stephen Madden immersed himself in the culture, diet, and psyche of CrossFit-the fast-growing but controversial fitness regime that’s a stripped-down combination of high-intensity aerobic activity, weightlifting, calisthenics, and gymnastics.
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