Shame.

Here's the thing: I love CrossFit and I love the community, but I get tired of the food shame that has taken over the entire organization. I love paleo but I also like channa masala. I like hummus.

But it's not the absence of certain foods, really. It's the shame that had invaded my very favorite community. Frankly, it pisses me off. This world is full of enough shame; why ruin my CrossFit? Jerks.

Shame ain't going nowhere, though. I suppose I should get used to it.

Love your body and it will love you back.

Paleo!

I love the Well Fed cookbook by Melissa Joulwan. Love. It. The food is amazing, and it's relatively easy to make. You aren't going to be making paleo chocolate chip cookies or paleo almond meal pancakes -- which I actually appreciate -- but you will be rewarded with complex flavors and substantial meals. After Whole 30, I've realized that making paleo versions of my favorite non-paleo junk food is not the way to change the way I eat. I don't want to eat regular junk food, so why would I make paleo versions of it? That's just me, though. I'm a bit intense, as anyone who knows me can attest. People who want to be nice call it "outspoken and enthusiastic." I like those people.

I've never been one for diets, really, because I'm usually hungry, which means I'm grumpy, or I'm eating disgusting crap. I don't think of paleo as a diet, because honestly, it just feels right. It feels like it's the way you should have been eating all along: unprocessed, real, whole foods that taste a heckuva lot better than anything you've ever bought pre-made before. My version of Joulwan's cinnamon beef stew is so much more satisfying than any canned or restaurant-prepared crap.

Your body thanks you when you eat like this.

Rowing is legit. Just sayin'.

I have bruises on my shoulders and upper thighs from using the 25lb body armor for "Murph" today. This marks the first time I've done it in more than 2 years, let alone with the vest. I rowed, on account of the bum knee, but I did it with the vest. And it was something special. My time was 48::29 and I'm damn proud of that. Thanks to Michele and the ladies of CrossFit Mission Gorge, I've been challenged and encouraged to be consistent and push as hard as possible in each and every WOD. I've got WOD buddies and open gym buddies and coaches to keep me accountable, which is what makes the difference.

And these guys haven't even seen me with a fully functional knee. I've only just started feeling better. I'm a complete nutjob when it comes to CF.

Every once in awhile, someone will ask me what I'm training for, and I'll say, "Nothing. Just life." Because ultimately, that is all we can do. I'm probably not ever going to make it to the Games, or run a marathon (because ew -- why?), or need to escape hordes of hungry, freaky fast zombies, (although the last one is debatable), but I still have to live my life. I still have to live in this skin for (hopefully) quite a while longer, and I would like to avoid falling apart or experiencing many of the less attractive consequences of aging. Like osteoporosis and heart disease. I'd also like to practice tenacity on a daily basis, and to continue to push my limits while also maintaining a grip on what humility actually looks like. Ain't nothing like a bum knee and a shaky overhead squat to keep you humble.

The CrossFit community is often misunderstood. We're seen as cult-like, (well...), cliquish, arrogant, and intense and yeah, we're all those things. (Who hasn't scanned the crowd at a bar and felt all that much better about herself?) But there's more to it than that. The shared suffering and genuine encouragement is much more common than high school cliquishness and superiority complexes. There will always be assholes at gyms. Fact. We can't escape it, but once a part of a CrossFit community, you see that gym jackasses are far fewer at your box than at Globo Gym or the Y. And though CF seems to attract a certain Type A personality, I'd much rather be around those types than hipster beta males and 30 year old girls with "Princess" license plates. I mean, come on.

No community is perfect, but there's no community like a CrossFit community either. The good outweighs the bad exponentially.

YEAH!

Remember back when "Annie" was new and terrifying? I miss those days. I rarely get pre-WOD jitters anymore, which is kind of like the first time you don't get a cigarette buzz tells you that you are an actual smoker. The only thing that scares me is handstand anythings. I have this mental block when it comes to handstands, and for years I've either refused to do them or told my coach to eff off. Which won't necessarily surprise any of you. But yesterday I was bossed into them by my coach, and I realized, as I was upside down against the wall with a hand around my ankle and my shirt gathered somewhere about my chin that in that moment, I was more worried about what my exposed torso looked like than fighting gravity.

And I thought to myself, "There is something wrong here."

We don't jettison our body image issues as soon as we get that kip situation handled. We don't just leave our fears of looking "fat" as soon as we PR on our overhead squats. Before my knee rebelled, I had a 245 lb deadlift, which is not too shabby, but I still hated catching my reflection in mid-squat. As my new friend Kirsten said, once you fully commit to CrossFit, your definition of beauty begins to change, but that doesn't mean we give ourselves a break. I can look at my fellow lady CrossFitters and see the beauty in each one of them, but there is no way in hell I'm cutting myself some slack. At the bottom of a heavy OHS, I see strong, beautiful women striving against the box this culture is trying to shove them into. But the second I step on that scale... my paradigm has not shifted enough to let grace come into my self-talk.

One of the things I love most about CrossFit is that the girls I come into contact with are genuinely less annoying than the girls on the outside, especially in SoCal. There is less pettiness, less bitchiness, less crap. If there is any, I am at a point in my life where I feel comfortable telling a b*tch to f*ck off, but I haven't had to do that. (Yet. You've been warned, ladies.) We have common goals, and a language that not everyone understands. A group of us can walk into a bar, look around and say to ourselves, "We are physically superior to 99% of the women and men in this dump." And it's true. Tell me that doesn't get you off a little! It does it for me.

Remember that the next time you're at the gym, feeling bloated or weak or inferior to the woman overhead squatting over 130lbs. (Cough, cough -- Tami!) Remember that we're all here for one reason, to get stronger and each of us have a different road there. But you are superior to the chick coming out of 24 Hour Fitness, the girl who hasn't broken a sweat after 2 hours on the elliptical, who got her hair done to come to the gym. She's never uttered a guttural scream trying to PR on her cleans. She's never even heard of Murph. She might wear smaller jeans, but you could totally kick her ass.

And her boyfriend's too.

Badass.

So it's been awhile.
I've been getting back into the groove of CrossFit after a long and frustrating recovery from knee surgery. As much as I miss coaching, I am thoroughly enjoying the coaching I'm receiving at my gym of one year, CrossFit Mission Gorge. The gym itself has doubled (at least) in size in the year I've been attending, and there's no mystery in that. The coaches are excellent, the community is wonderful, and the programming is challenging. I am extremely happy there, and the community I've found makes it difficult to imagine ever leaving San Diego, which may come as a surprise to those who knew me in my previous life as an Arizonan.

April 2013 will mark my 6th year doing CrossFit. It has been a difficult, humiliating, exhilarating, and ultimately wonderful experience. Before CrossFit, I was not exactly sporty. I jogged and restricted food in order to attain the size and weight I thought I needed to be. I was never small enough or toned enough to be comfortable in my own skin, and I had no idea how to have a healthy relationship with food. I hated food. I loved food. I was afraid of my appetite and afraid of my weight. I was convinced that I took up too much space in the world, which is an awful place to be.

I hated myself.

I hated the mirror, I feared the candid photo, I was so uncomfortable in my skin, I wanted to crawl out of it. But, as they say, wherever you go, there you are. I couldn't escape myself, and I couldn't escape my body, which I believed was continually betraying me. I was terrified of turning thirty, when the fabled metabolic slowdown was supposed to take place. I gained weight with pregnancy and had no idea how to lose it. I was a failure. I was disgusting. I was worthless. I was invisible.

During a relatively shallow conversation with an acquaintance, I learned that a guy from the church I was currently attending was going to be starting a CrossFit gym and would be holding a $75 intro class. (I know! Can you believe I paid $75 for my foundations class!?) So I went, more in desperation than anything else, and was intrigued. Steve said it was hard, that it was difficult, that many people were intimidated by it, If there's anything I love,it's a challenge, and the idea of being able to do pull ups and push ups like a dude intrigued me. Weightlifting? I'd never done it before, but it sounded pretty badass.

It is actually badass, and I love it.

So, long story short, my first several months of CrossFit were mortifying. I was humiliated by my lack of coordination and spatial awareness. But, gradually, I got a little better at the things we were doing. It seems like it took me ages to learn things other people picked up immediately, but I kept with it. No stupid workout was going to beat me! But it did, in a way. It broke me down into my component parts and rebuilt me. It took me from who I thought I was to something closer to who I wanted to be.

I almost liked myself some mornings. But I hated that scale. I still hate that scale, but I am strong enough to stay away from it now.

Do we ever break free of the fear of taking up space? Is it possible to break free of the societal constraints we so willingly accept? We take these shackles and put them around our own wrists and ankles. We buy into the lie of perfection as defined by the entertainment industry. We let ourselves become so twisted that we cannot recognize ourselves in the mirror. And don't be mistaken: there are other impossible standards of beauty within every movement and subculture. CrossFit is not immune. So we have to find the courage within ourselves to say "Fuck you" to the outside voices that attempt to steal our identities.

I have fought for every PR, every skill, every push up and pull up and lift. I've bled for them. I've (nearly) puked for them. I've pushed myself beyond what I'd ever imagined I was capable of. And you know what? I haven't even gotten started.

This is my life, and I am living it one second at a time.