Crossfit Life

For the last year or so I've been in the habit of using Crossfit as an analogy for life. It's worked surprisingly well, but tonight I realized there's one thing about Crossfit I've been overlooking: no matter how good you get, it still kicks your ass.

I've been doing Crossfit on and off for almost two years, and seriously for almost two months. When I first started I could do about two pullups and then I'd start doing negatives. I don't think I did a workout as prescribed for the first six months. Earlier this week I did 99 pullups over seven rounds, the first 24 of them without letting go of the bar. I can still only do about one workout in five without substituting something, and my times on almost all of them are pathetic. I'm still failing: but I've improved.

It seems like the better you get at life, the harder life becomes. Today, I can do things easily that I could never have pulled off in high school; I can endure handily what would have broken me two years ago. But of course, I'm not dealing with the old stuff any more: I've moved on to new, and harder, challenges. My grades are still slipping, I'm still behind in my classes, just like I've always been. I'm wasting too much time and not doing work that needs to be done--even down to cooking, and cleaning. But the classes I'm behind in are Ordinary Differential Equations and Thermodynamics, not Precalc and Latin; I'm failing to clean up after a life lived on my own, not one where my every need is provided for; what I'm failing to invest enough time in is a business I'm starting around an algorithm I wrote, not a job at the retirement community. I fail: but already I have done so much more in this semester than in any before.

I think it's the same thing for everyone. C.S. Lewis says that when you've mastered one lesson, the teacher moves you on to the next. When you've learned how to add you don't keep doing addition problems; you learn how to multiply. Or with Crossfit: first you scale the workouts down to your level, and do more and more and more of them until you can do them as prescribed; then you do them faster, and faster, or heavier, and heavier, and then you learn to do back levers or flags; but at every single step of the way, what you need to do next is harder than what you can do already. Because that's how you get stronger.

All of which is great for gaining strength and increasing your skills, but it works out to an awful lot of work, and while we may get better at life in general, we will always have to deal with things that are harder than we can handle.