I've been gone for awhile. I'm saying this just in case you just woke up from a coma and don't know what year it is. If there's anyone left to read this, I'll be quite surprised. Why the long absence? Well, the usual excuses about being busy and boring and all that crap, but I've also slowly fallen out of endurance sports in the past couple of years. I've been fraught with quite a bit of frustration, and then depression, and then resignation with maybe a bit of shame that I didn't quite know how to reconcile. Who the hell am I if I don't spend my whole life going long and slow and racing on the weekends? Life was getting in the way of my training, but the truth was that I was so far beyond burnt out that my bike seat became a very tedious place to sit.

After a year of gradually quitting (without even really noticing), frenzied fits oftrying to care coupled with the disgruntled realization that when you don't train you can't expect to be as fit as you used to be, I finally gave up. I was no longer at the top of my sport, and I didn't like the feeling. I gave myself permission to hang up the bike, say no to running races, and try new things that there was no way I could be good at.

A thing that I'm really, really bad at: Brazilian jiu jitsu

I got into Brazilian jiu jitsu (BJJ) reluctantly. I was at the world's most boring staff meeting and while the HR director was going through a powerpoint presentation of all the emergency exits in the building, the guy sitting across from me wrote me a note that said, "What are you doing on Tuesday from 10-11?" Since my superpower is an inability to say no, even under the most extreme circumstances, I turned up the following Tuesday at an MMA gym across town without even the vaguest sense of what jiu jitsu is. I'll spare you the mystery, it's basically wrestling in a funny karate robe called a gi ("ghee").

It was only me and one other girl at that class, and at least she was kind of cute. I just thought I would be punching and chopping stuff. I did not yet know that I would be rolling around on the floor with this girl for the next hour in the most intimate of positions. "Today we're going to learn choke holds," my colleague/instructor said. Wha-whaaaaat?! "Claire, start lying down with your legs wrapped around her waist, Claudette, put your hands on her chest." So we got into this overtly sexual position and she laid her hands on my boobs. I could grow to like BJJ.

I spent the rest of the hour alternately getting choked out and doing the choking. I was trying very, very hard to be professional about the whole thing, but I won't say the human contact didn't feel good... or the getting thrown around. It had been awhile. This only made me feel more like a sexual predator and made me more uncomfortable, but I've been going every Tuesday since.

Of all the new things that I've tried, I suck at BJJ the most. Memorizing complex sequences of movements and then applying them when someone is grunting and sweating on top of me comes to me about as easily as peeing standing up, but there's something so gratifying about using my hips and core muscles at 100% of their power in 360º. It is the most gratifying and stress-relieving activity that I've ever done. And I do feel the difference in core strength in my running.

Most of the time I'm the only girl in class, which leads to an interesting dynamic, not only because I'm rolling around for an hour with my head between some guy's legs. I'm also learning to throw guys around who are nearly twice my size. Or more accurately, I'm learning how I could throw those guys around if I didn't suck so horribly at it. And since it's a martial art, there are strict rules of conduct that prohibit any of the guys from getting all pervy about it. To be fair, I'm probably the most titillated in the class about acting out the karma sutra through violence, and I have a lot of trouble not giggling sometimes. For about a month I was a little skeeved out because I thought I felt the guys' erections every time we rolled, but then I figured out that what I was feeling was the knots on their belts and I chilled out. 

Since most of the guys are Brazilian, they don't speak much English. I usually get paired up with a guy named Paolo who is one of the guys small enough for me to fit my legs around his waist. He is considerably more experienced than I am, has better-than-average English, and is very patient at explaining things to me. On Valentines day we were doing something where he was lying down while I had to put my hips next to his chest on my way to fucking his shit up. But I was bringing my hips too high, near his head so he offered me the helpful suggestion, "Don't come all over my face." Then he couldn't figure out why I spent the next 2 minutes rolling on the mat laughing.

After a few weeks I just started changing in the changing room with all the guys, taking off underpants and all. Hey, I'm usually in too much of a hurry to wait, and after you've spent an hour with your ass in someone's junk throwing them over your shoulder, who really cares if you show them your butt crack?

Another thing that I'm really bad at: Rock Climbing

My actual rock climbing gym

I first started rock climbing over a year ago, but since it's one of those things that is much better with a partner (or impossible without one in the case of top roping on the big wall), I hadn't done it much. I am deathly, not funny, "I can't get myself off the top of this building because I need to lie down on the floor and touch every inch of my frontal surface area to the ground to keep from falling off the edge which is 10 yards away" scared of heights. About a year ago my friend set me up with a girl who was a climber and she wanted to take me top roping on our first date. "I'm really afraid of heights," I told her, "like not funny for real afraid of heights."

"You'll get used to it," she told me.

"No, I'm really afraid of heights," I told her. "Can't we just go bouldering?" (Climbing without a rope on a wall that's only about 8 feet high).

"No! I'm going to teach you to top rope," she insisted. There's no motivation like trying to get laid to convince you to do something colossally stupid.

I went on said date the following week, and of course she took one look at my big and useless upper body muscles and put me on one of the tallest walls. I got about halfway up before my mouth went dry, I couldn't breathe, and every instinct I had said to hang onto the wall tight and cry for help. "C'mon, Claire! You can do it!" she said.

"I'm coming down," I said.

"No, you can reach, keep going!"

I climbed another 10 or 15 feet, hyperventilating, the wall feeling wavy, and every muscle in my body shaking from fear. As my arms got more and more tired, the terror of slipping off without any warning or control got even stronger. "I'm coming down."

"You can do it!"

"No, I'm coming the fuck down!" I screamed. Paradoxically, letting go is no problem at all, and she slowly lowered me down to the ground. When I got back onto solid (foam-padded) ground, I tried to say, hang on a sec, but when I opened my mouth I almost threw up. I thought I was going to cry and tried to walk away so I could compose myself in private, but I was still tied to the damned wall. It took me several minutes to pull myself together.

It didn't work out between that girl and me, but we remain friends and when she hears people telling me that top roping will help me overcome my fear of heights, she's quick to jump in and defend me. "No, I've NEVER seen someone as scared as she is. I don't know if you can get over that kind of thing."

So I boulder. Every week I spend an hour or two on the bouldering wall climbing 8 feet (often less if I can't complete the route) and then dropping happily back to the ground. It has massively improved my upper body strength. I can now do 4 strict pull-ups in a row (no swinging) which is more than 4 times what I used to be able to do when I first started.

Something I'm so-so at: Crossfit

Aaaaahhh, Crossfit. Crossfit is the new polarizing issue of the fitness industry. Is it the best thing to ever happen to sport, or dangerous and overstated? It is undeniably an ingenious business model... If given a scale of 1-5 where 1 is "Crossfit is evil" and 5 being "I drink the Kool-Aid before every WOD" I tend to be about a 2 on the Crossfit Kinsey scale. I believe it's got its place as part of a well-balanced fitness routine, just like Froot Loops are part of a well-balanced breakfast (just as long as you've got the turkey sausage links, nonfat milk, and a piece of fruit sitting alongside the bowl of sugar, processed carbs, and artificial colors and flavoring). Crossfit does teach excellent technique, when they take the time to do so, but they distill what should take years of establishing base strength and technique and boil it down to a handful of sessions that they call an "onramp program." Then they hand you your barbell and they say, "Here, perform these dangerous lifts, pick your own weight, and we're going to time you and pit you against everyone else in the room and hope that you don't lose your form or put on more weight than you can handle to try to impress the bro next to you." 

Also, since everything is timed, many of the exercises that form the basis of the WODs (workout of the day) are full of so many workarounds and cheats to increase the weight and number of reps that you can perform to exhaustion that they are barely related to the original motion. For example, a pull-up and a kipping pull-up place completely different demands on the body. While a pull-up is a fairly straight-forward (or straight up and down) and challenging exercise for the traps, rhomboids, lats, and biceps, the kipping pull-up uses more abs, hip flexors, and even some chest, adding the back muscles as nearly an afterthought (and mimicking the movement of a row much more than a pull-up). But no matter, kipping allows you to perform more repetitions, so Crossfitters will hang from a bar wriggling like fish on hooks to get through their WODs at lightning speed. 

And dedicated Crossfitters are annoying, just like tri-geeks are annoying. The similarities are actually striking. Tri-geeks and Crossfitters both have an unhealthy attachment to compression socks, wear nothing but t-shirts and paraphernalia of their sport, have a cult-like mentality, and believe that they are the fittest people in the world. The fact that each does so much trash-talking of the other's style of fitness is another irony that I find delicious.

So why did I walk into the Crossfit gym in the first place? Because I was looking for the Froot Loops to add to the center of my strawberries, fakin' bacon, and low fat milk breakfast. It had something that I wanted. After several months off the bike, I turned around one day and my butt was gone, replaced by a deflated and planar thing restrained from falling to the backs of my knees only by the sausage casings that I called pants. This was definitely counterproductive to my life-long goal of achieving a Tour de France ass. I knew that if I wasn't going to be riding 15 hours per week, then I would need to do squats and deadlifts with some regularity. But knowing myself, I knew that I would never actually do squats and deadlifts with any regularity. I would need to increase the odds of deadlifts and squats finding their way into my life by leveraging myself with some accountability. At Crossfit I would have someone else writing my workouts, I would have other people in the room to feed off their energy, and most of all my best fuel: Competition! Crossfit would also develop an aspect of my fitness that I had never tried to improve before (strength, agility, fast-twitch fibers, and top-end aerobic capacity).

But there was another reason, too. Around the time that I started this whole new fitness project I had also decided that I no longer needed to be single, and I wanted to join Crossfit to meet chicks. I'd watched all the Crossfit ads on youtube with beautiful women in booty shorts and sports bras doing thrusters (a squat with an overhead press) in slow motion while their glutes and abs rippled under their 12% body fat. I wanted to meet those girls and sleep with them. 

When I told my clients that I had joined a Crossfit gym one day a week, many of them were shocked. "It's like you're telling me that you're becoming a Muslim," one client said.

"But I'm doing it to meet chicks!" I told him. I felt that this was the best justification of my lame decision and would keep me from having to go back on all the trash talking of Crossfit I'd done over the years. "I want to meet girls like on Youtube."

"And do the girls there look like that?"

"Well, no. Most of them are kind of fleshy, dumpy, and not particularly good looking. They kind of look like the people you see walking around the 'hood."

"You fell for the 'light beer commercial' ploy!" he pointed out. "You bought the product because you thought it came with beautiful women!" True words.

How is the Crossfit going? Fairly well. I excel at some things like the squats and deadlifts, but I have surprisingly little upper body strength. I am the most uncoordinated human being on this earth as well, so while I can teach a snatch and a power clean I am having a lot of trouble actually doing them. When I am having a particularly bad day, I have them put a different name on the board next to my results, like Igor, Wilbur, or Petunia. For the time being nobody but the people who work there actually know that I work in fitness, and I appreciate that. Although some people give me dirty looks for insisting on being called Thaddeus or Norbert, I like being able to work out in a place where I don't work and nobody is going to ask me questions.

The most surprising part of Crossfit is that it has been a boon when I write the workouts for my own clients. While I don't train them in the traditional Crossfit style of warm-up, dynamic stretching, strength component, metabolic conditioning, Crossfit does have a wealth of sample couplings of full-body movements that fit well together and creative structures to their workouts. Every week when I have to come up with 25 unique and challenging workouts for my clients, I have Crossfit's WOD shop open in the background and I'll flick through until I find a workout that inspires me, and then I'll flesh it out (sometimes replacing every element in the workout) for that particular client's needs, abilities, goals, and personality.

My next goal: Men's gymnastics

I've been following my routine now for about 3 1/2 months, and I have become somewhat capable in each, but it's time to find a new challenge before things get stale. One of my clients (the same one who said I was becoming a Muslim because of the beer commercial trick) came to me a few months ago with the goal of doing a muscle-up on the bar (the bar is much more challenging than gymnastics rings). Since I cannot do a muscle-up myself, it has meant many hours of reading blogs and watching tutorials in order to be able to coach him. Once we achieved 3 bar muscle-ups in a row, he selected his next goal to be the human flag. Time for more tutorials.

When you look these things up on YouTube, there are always half a dozen suggestions on the sidebar of videos by tattooed shirtless homies on playgrounds doing gymnastics over a gangster rap background. Every once in awhile when I needed a distraction from work (and when I had run out of Crossfit porn to watch) I would watch these homies on monkey bars or competitive men's gymnastics routines. But it was always, always, always dudes. Of course a chick could never do a Maltese or an iron cross on the rings like a world-class gymnast, but surely a girl could learn to do a muscle-up on the bar, a human flag, or a planche push-up. Women's gymnastics, pole dancing, and yoga all incorporated similar moves, so why weren't chicks out on the playgrounds too? And to be perfectly honest, I still wanted abs like those that popped out on those shirtless thugs as they did L-pull-ups.

So I have decided that my next project will be to follow my dream of becoming a male gymnast. It's actually not out of line from what I have already been doing with the upper body strength from rock climbing, the core strength and agility from jiu jitsu, and the brute strength of Crossfit, so the workouts will only be an extra 20 minutes or so a day to build up the specific strength for the movements I want to work on.

I have put together a base strength program and have selected 5 movements that I want to learn to do in the next year.

1. Muscle-up
   
   
2. Human flag
   
   
3. Planche push-up
   
   
4. Handstand push-up
   
   
5. Flare
   

I'm going to try to resurrect my blog as I work on these goals. It'll be the same Claire and the same writing that you know, and movements and skills that are probably totally foreign to you. I'll see you on the bar!