Category: Call Me Crazy

Wherein I share my particular psychoses. Mostly food stuff, but also other crazies.

Times I Get Insecure at CrossFit… Am I Boring You? Because I’m Boring Myself

Wow. Context. Context is everything, isn’t it? See, because if you know me, you knew that my “Guidelines for Dealing with Fat CrossFitters” post wasn’t about not wanting people to cheer for me during WODs; it wasn’t about other people at all—certainly not about guidelines for dealing with fat CrossFitters. It was about my ridiculous insecurities.

So, some of you are asking yourselves, why did she title it such? Why did she frame it that way? Well, here’s a rewrite of that post:

Times I Get Insecure at CrossFit

1. When I’m running because I’m slow.

2. When I’m last during WODs.

3. When pictures of me working out get posted online.

4. When people lie and say I look skinny.

There is absolutely nothing funny or provocative about that version. Many of you told me you found the first draft funny, and it was definitely provocative. How do I know?

Here's a normal traffic pattern to my blog.

I usually get about 80 visits on days that I post, 30 or so on days I don’t.

Here's the one from last week.

Yep. One thousand, five hundred eighty visits.

More than 1,400 of those visits were referred by the CrossFit mainsite, who linked to my post on Thursday. And hey, yay! Of course I want people to read my stuff. But really? It was posted with another link, one published by an actual CrossFit franchise, with the question:

“These are two blogposts with strong opinions… Do you take a strong stance in your posts? Or do you try to stay neutral and not risk offending members or potential members?”

OK, valid question for somebody running a CrossFit gym, but for my blog? What the hell do I care about staying neutral? And besides, what stance? I was not actually arguing that these are policies that CrossFit gyms should adopt. Even when I post about CrossFit, my blog is not about CrossFit; it’s about me. “Guidelines for Dealing with Fat CrossFitters” was not about CrossFit; it was about me.

Some of you are going, “Hmph!, that’s kind of narcissistic of you,” and you’re 100% right. (But if you’re one of those people who got offended or angered by the post, guess what: you made the post about you… Hmph!, that’s kind of narcissistic of you. Ha ha!) One of these days I’ll learn how to write about other things, but right now I’m, as they say, writing what I know.

Anyway, do I wish that no one could ever see me run? Yes, I do. But I know people cheer because they want to be supportive.

Am I embarrassed when three people are watching within a five-foot radius as I finish the WOD? Yes, I am. But I get that they believe they’re being motivational.

Do I hate it when people post photos on Facebook and it turns out I look less like Annie Sakamoto and more like

Jiminy Glick?

Sure. But I know how to cyber-scream at them until they delete the most embarrassing ones. (I did that to Coach Dave just the other day: “What the HELL, Dave? Do you WANT me to have low self-esteem?” And he’s a shweetie and took them down.)

Do I wish people would not comment on whatever their perception of my weight is? Mos def. But I get it; our society says it’s OK to do that.

Despite all that, do I love CrossFit, in particular my CrossFit and the athletes and coaches there? Damn right.

The most remarkable thing about this whole deal is how little my feelings have gotten hurt. Ninety-nine percent of the people who condemned the post and me, they don’t know me, so big deal. The only hurty spot was that one of my coaches fell into the condemnation category, but I just had to readjust my perception of our relationship. A person I’m very close to called me early in the week and the first thing she said was, “Whoa. [That coach] really doesn’t get you, does she?” And I had to admit, no, she didn’t. Not in this case. But that’s OK. She’s still an incredible coach and a totally fun gal to hang out with. She gets me other times. We’re still friends. It’s not all about people getting me. It’s not even about me.

Except on this blog, where it is.

It’s all about me.

[ADDENDUM: The coach’s totally valid points are (1) I don’t get her either because, while I see how someone might not like the post, I’m still confused about how a person could have been offended by it (we’re going to talk about it), and (2) when I tell stories about myself that involve other people—even when they’re not named—the blog becomes not just about me, but about them too. I didn’t think about it that way.]

Guidelines for Dealing with Fat CrossFitters

[UPDATE: Read the post. Not the commentary in your head about the post. The actual post. Then read this. THEN, if you still feel like it, go ahead and comment. Some o’ yous are saying that I’m saying shit that I’m not actually saying.]

I am a fat CrossFitter. And I love it. Not the being fat. The CrossFitting. I love that I can clean and jerk 113 pounds and deadlift 213. I love that when I started, I was doing black-band (a.k.a. Johnny Jump-up) pull-ups, and now I use the blue. I love that I do nothing but bona fide push-ups. I love that I can hold a handstand against a wall for over a minute and a freestanding one for a couple seconds. I love CrossFit.

And I love you, my coaches and fellow athletes. Probably 94% of the reason I go is because I get to hang out with y’all.

But there’s some etiquette that I think is lacking in the community in general. It’s OK—don’t blame yourself—you didn’t know. I didn’t know not to drop an empty bar until somebody told me.

So here are some suggestions. And I think I speak for many fat CrossFitters.

1. RUNNING

See how I’m running half as fast as everybody else? Yeah, that’s actually my dead sprint. You’re thinking, “No…that can’t possibly…” Yep. It’s true. I’m pushing myself as hard as I possibly can.

Coaches, have some technical critique? Good. Say it. Keep it brief. Make it simple. And don’t give me more than one to think about. Just one. Remember, I’m about to die here.

Fellow athletes, think you need to cheer me on? If you really need to for you, go ahead. But if you don’t, that means I can pretend that nobody sees exactly how slow I am.

2. WODs

Notice how everybody’s finished with the WOD, and I still have an entire round left? At this point, in case you were wondering, I’m terribly, terribly embarrassed. As many times as this has happened, and it’s a lot, I still feel like hiding under a pile of ab-mats.

Do you feel like you need to run with me? Do kettlebell swings with me? Count for me? That’s so sweet. You don’t. Do you feel the urge to do solidarity burpees until I call time? That might accomplish the opposite of what you were intending. On top of my shame, you’ve just piled jealousy (fantastic—look how much fitter she is than I am) and/or guilt (oh shit, dude’s gonna have to do over two hundred burpees).

And imagine you decide to swing a kettlebell with me, the coach chooses that moment to watch and give pointers, and a third party is just staring and cheering. Three people studying my slow ass. That’s a good combo to make me spiral into a Cyclone of Despair.

Here’s what you do. You sit or stand far away. Across the gym. You pretend to talk to someone else. Once, just once, you look over and yell, “You got it, [fat CrossFitter]!” which makes you feel supportive and me watched, but not too much.

3. PHOTOS

Those photos you took of me working out? Restrain yourself from uploading them to Facebook. I’ll write my name and shitty time on the board. I’ll fess up to a measly 2-pound PR in the comments on your website. But despite all evidence to the contrary, I like to maintain a fantasy that I’m a badass when I work out. Your public photos show me how delusional I am and the internet exactly how many chins I have.

4. COMMENTS

Comment on my push press PR. Chat me up about my good back squat form. But please don’t tell me I’m looking skinny. We both know that’s a lie, so it just makes things awkward.

That’s it. Follow these guidelines, and fat CrossFitters everywhere will think you’re a sensitive, supportive, all-around-awesome person.

[UPDATE: Before you comment, please read this.]

[UPDATE: Also, follow-up post.]

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Harden the Fuck Up

I can’t believe how good I feel. I was cracking UP with my fourth period class today, and sitting here now, I’m just delighting in the color of my kitchen walls. Which is gray. But it’s such a cool gray!

It kind of pisses me off. I mean, clearly the amino acids work for me. But (a) I don’t understand why because I no goot at syintz, so (b) there’s a niggling little neuron in my brain that keeps saying, “It’s just a placebo effect.”

Even if it is all in my head, I shouldn’t care because I feel better, but I really wish I could conduct a controlled, double-blind study on myself. Because, if it turned out that a placebo cured my depression, then I could stop spending money on the amino acids and just harden the fuck up.

 

Making Things Better

When I was mowing the lawn yesterday, I thought, “Everyone should be outside right now!”

I went out to dinner last night with friends and wasn’t scared to come home to just myself.

I sat on the deck in the sunshine today and read the super-creepy Room by Emma Donoghue for book club and did not feel nihilistic.

As I walked the dogs just now, a monarch butterfly flitted across the azure sky, and I couldn’t get over how beautiful it was.

Two days, no episodes. Keep your fingers crossed.

Making Things Worse

I can see how people who’ve never been depressed dismiss it as a figment, because when I’m not depressed, I can actually talk myself out of the idea that I ever was. You just needed to buck up. You were being dramatic. You should’ve gotten more exercise.

But depression is real. It’s real, and it’s not sadness or histrionics or lethargy. It’s an uncontrollable, unrelenting all-of-that, mixed with something else. The only term that comes close is bleakness. A sense that nothing’s working out, nothing will ever work out, why even try?

Events can aggravate it: an internet troll trashes your work; your 92-year-old uncle’s cat gets killed by a coyote, and you realize he can’t get another cat, he was hoping to die before that cat; the touch-screen on the grocery store credit card keypad won’t register your finger’s warmth. You watch the movie About a Boy and, as Toni Collette’s character bursts into tears when she can’t quite reach to put a bowl on a high shelf, you think,

Yes.

Exactly.

But there need not be an event. Circumstances can be perfect. You can be on vacation, walking the dogs on a sunny-but-cool day after eating your home-cooked breakfast at the picnic table on the deck, and it comes. The bleakness. Your cheeks and temples tighten. You have thoughts like, “I’ll never [do X] again because I’ll never be really good at it, so why bother?” Then you beat yourself up for feeling this way on such a perfect sunny-but-cool day. Which makes things worse.

And you can be Sunny Smiles-a-Lot in public. So people never have to know. Which makes things worse because alone? Alone, it’s bad, so you kind of feel like you’re lying all the time.

Three weeks ago, I stopped taking the amino acid supplements I started a year ago. Why? Because I talked myself into thinking maybe I could. Because they cost over two hundred dollars a month. Because I wanted to use that money to get a different car. Within days, I started having depressive episodes.

I had asked my osteopath a long time ago if there were a cheaper brand. He said the ones he sold were the ones he’d found to be of highest quality. But last week, I thought, I’ll try some others. I looked at labels and did some math and got on the internet. I ordered L-tyrosine, L-lysine, 5-HTP, all of them—plus calcium, selenium, all the -iums—for about half of the cost. Still expensive but better. I filled up my

gargantuan geriatric pill organizer.

I’m on day 5, and so far I feel no change. I know I need to give it some time, and I’ll go back on the super-expensive ones if the others don’t work. But right now it’s bad, and all I can do is worry it’ll get worse. Which makes things worse.

The Nighttime

Interesting things happen when it’s nighttime. To wit: my friends and I threw a prom of sorts on Saturday night. It was nominally a birthday party for me (36) and Anna (three-oh!) but, as I said in the invitation, mostly an excuse for us to get dressed up in fancy clothes and sway to the musical stylings of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Of course, we also told people they could wear pajama pants if they wanted to.

In the planning phase, we tried to come up with a suitable venue. We weren’t sure how many people would show up. I didn’t trust my mansion to hold the crowd so we asked the owner of CrossFit Durham if we could have it there and, being the coolest ever, he said yes.

Do you remember going to your elementary school at night, like when your mom had a PTA meeting or something? Remember how weird it seemed? The light was different, no lines of second-graders waiting to put their germy cheeks against the water fountain spigot. You’d pick up a pencil, and it just wouldn’t seem like the same implement as it did between 8:00 and 2:30. That’s a little how it was being at CFD without the overheads on, without the grunting.

Four of us had spent an hour hanging up glittery stars and white Christmas lights on the pull-up bars. Anna had had the presence of mind to bring floor lamps, so we could turn off the fluorescents, thank god. Lindsay made an awesome polaroid frame (see pic below). And that was it! We were ready for prom.

Now only 20 people came—I don’t know if folks were scared off by the prom theme or what—but those of us who were there had a ridiculously fun time. The equipment we use for WODs? Suddenly it all became props in our prom farce.

That’s not how you hold a sledgehammer; I just wanted to make sure my corsage was visible.
(Something jokey jokey joke. Pull-up bar while wearing a push-up bra. Nope. I don’t have it.)

That big open space we use to do burpees? Well, that was the dancefloor.

I lasted 57 minutes in the heels before I took them off. That’s 37 minutes longer than I promised.

Anyway, IT WAS SO FUN.

All because it was nighttime in the gym.

Of course, last night, I woke up because my foot was all sting-y. I got out of bed and went into the bathroom to look at the sore spot. The underside of my ring toe was cut, right where the toe meets the foot. I washed it, slathered it in Neosporin, stuck a band-aid on it, and crawled back in bed.

But just as the elementary school library looks like a labyrinth after 7:00pm, ideas take different shape in the nighttime. I started spinning tales in my head. See, my friend M had a blister about this time last year, and maybe it was the State Fair and maybe it was the gym, but somehow that tiny foot wound sent her to the hospital with a staph infection. In the nighttime, with me in my bed, it seemed not only plausible that that would happen to me but an absolute done deal.

But nighttime doesn’t stop there. In the few months after her hospital stay, M’s house got robbed, and she got breast cancer. (Talk about all-time worst years, right?) So there I am last night, in the fetal position, certain that I’m going to lose everything I own and need a double mastectomy. Stupid nighttime.

This morning, after my coffee, I soaked my foot in salty water and applied more antiseptic cream, and I sit here pretty sure that I won’t be coming home to a pillaged house after my chemo treatment in a few months.

But I’m still worried I’m headed for the ER in a day or two.

Daytime. Bah!

Very Superstitious-UPDATED

A bird shat on my head at lunch today. Twice. One bird, twice, or two birds, once each. Either way, I got shat on two times.

Then, on our walk just now, Redford came this close to getting bitten by a snake.

After that, an owl started out of a tree ten feet from us and flew away.

A little while later, Violet nearly tore my arm off because a cat streaked across our path. It was dark so I couldn’t see it very well, but I’m 1,000% it was a black cat.

If anybody needs me, I’ll be under my bed.

UPDATED: At 11:00pm, my car’s panic alarm started going off intermittently and wouldn’t stop when I pressed the button on the fob. Until it did, and then after a random interval (three seconds to four minutes), it would start again. I finally got in and started the car. That made it stop. Except that it would start again when I turned the engine off. I finally drove down to the pawn shop on the corner—I figured my neighbors might be a little perturbed by it—and called Durham PD. Four officers showed up, witnessed the poltergeist, and removed the horn fuse. If it starts up again, I’m not sure what I’ll do.

(I came home, not having locked the dogs up in the spare bedroom like I usually do because I went running out of here so fast. Violet had clearly collected a bunch of my shoes and cuddled with them at different spots around the house. I think she was nervous. Me too, mama.)

The Formula

Thrice in my life, I have fainted. Long about the third time, the cause/effect relationship was easy to identify. Here it is.

If I am:

  1. standing
  2. on a moving train
  3. in the morning
  4. without having eaten breakfast

I will faint.

Weirdest thing. I get all woozy. My vision narrows to nothing. And then I find myself supine on the train floor with a bunch of startled passengers wondering if I’m preggers or ODing. Or my sister does her best to carry me off the T, but I manage to get my shoe caught between the train and the platform and fall onto the marble floor.

Anyway, point is, it’s a formula; these circumstances lead to my faintage. Now I can avoid the situation by, say, eating breakfast or taking a cab. (Or moving somewhere with a really poor public transportation system therefore having to drive to work. Ah, done.)

I just wish it were easier for me to delineate other cause/effect relationships.

Like, for example, the one that led to my epic fucking temper tantrum at the gym tonight.

Is it that if I:

  1. spend two days untagging myself from Fight Gone Bad photos on Facebook because I am just goddamn enormous,
  2. eat two pieces of sheet cake at my principal’s goodbye luncheon,
  3. take a two-hour nap,
  4. watch all the other females in class do some semblance of handstand push-ups while I still struggle with the hands-on-floor/knees-on-box/ass-in-the-air variety,
  5. and finally, not be able to do any double-unders during the WOD (seriously, after getting 32 in a row last week, tonight I was getting two or one or none),

then I will have a big ol’ crying fit and storm out of the gym without saying goodbye to anyone?

Is that the formula?

Did I figure it out?

‘Cause if that’s it, maybe I can circumvent the Grand Tanty by drinking a cup of coffee or not eating Harris Teeter bakery products.

Or maybe I’ll just send out an invitation next time: Come to Amy’s Low Self-Esteem Day at CrossFit Durham!!

It was probably pretty entertaining to watch.

You & the Night-Swimming

You’re not an exhibitionist—the opposite really, both you and your friend are, if anything, too modest—but there’s really only one way to go night-swimming, isn’t there?

Besides, it’s pretty dark—no moon or stars to speak of—so the two of you run down to the water’s edge, peel off your clothes, and dive, giddy, into the Atlantic. The waves are tumbly and fun, the temperature perfect: seemingly chilly at first until, at some point, you realize the air is colder than the water and you just want to stay in forever and become a mermaid.

But eventually your eyes get burny and your knees are bashed up from being tossed into the shallows, and you want to get out.

And that’s when three people come and situate themselves in beach chairs between you—butt nekkid—and your condo.

At this point, if you’re my sister-wife, you begin to giggle uncontrollably. If you’re me, you spin paranoid fantasies about how they’re voyeur/entrepreneurs, who’ve positioned themselves there with night-vision cameras, and your bare-assed jiggliness is gonna be on YouTube tomorrow, followed by a string of less-than-complimentary comments.

Eventually, you sprint out of the water at a half-crouch and wrap yourself haphazardly in your towel, or maybe that’s your T-shirt—whatever—and scurry up to the boardwalk over the dunes, hoping you managed to pick up your underpants in the kerfuffle.

The next day, you learn it was just the folks in the condo next door who had come out to sit and drink some beers, and who had set down their chairs there because they mistook your squeals of delight for dolphin calls. No spy cameras, no Internet-wide embarrassment. The neighbors didn’t even really see anything.

But that’s when you realize, it didn’t even matter if they did, because the previous evening’s blood pressure spike and worry and insecurity won’t stop you from skipping down the beach that night and doing it all again. And it’s a good thing too because

the stars are out,

the half-full moon has propped itself on the roof of a villa down the beach,

the tumbling waves are phosphorescent,

and there is just nothing,

nothing,

nothing,

like skinny-dipping

in the ocean

at night.