My one complaint?
(just one? Oh come on, there's living out of a suitcase, sleeping in a different bed, being on a different schedule, and trying to get clean in soft water)
My biggest complaint? The food.
Oh, it tasted great; it always does. But we RARELY eat out at home. In fact, we cook just about every day, and we rarely eat “fake” food. We eat simple meals made with real ingredients. Unfortunately, even the simplest of meals in a restaurant has added preservatives and large amounts of extraneous ingredients.
The stress of travel + “fake” food = a miserable body and mind
One of the ways we are trying to combat travel bloat (as I like to affectionately call it) is connecting with local CrossFit Gyms in the area we are visiting.
(The stress of travel + “fake” food) / CrossFit = a very happy body and mind
The beauty of each CrossFit affiliate lies in their unique identity. Each box is a reflection of its trainers, its members, and the mindset of the overall CF community. In Birmingham, we headed over to CrossFit RPM, a box whose members are mostly athletes including Wes Helms in the off-season and high school students from Hoover High School of MTV fame (on a side note, a friend informed us that when he and his daughter visited New York City, complete strangers were asking to buy her Hoover High School Letterman Jacket off her back. We still find that odd because we're from Birmingham and to us, it's just another high school).
Blake is an amazing trainer who combines a thorough mobility warm-up with strength and met-con workouts. Even though we were just visiting for a week, he gave us individual pointers and encouragement through some tough workouts. He pushed our body to a level I didn't think possible at this point in my CF training.
In Florida, we found an absolutely wonderful box, CrossFit En Fuego. We dropped in one night after they had finished their workout and spoke with their trainer, Peter, a local firefighter. Before we left that night, he invited us to join some of their members on an Adventure Run in Tampa. He extended the CrossFit arm of friendship and welcomed us as long-time members. The workouts at En Fuego were unlike any we had done thus far. Like RPM, the members spend time focusing on strength and a specific skill before attacking a met-con workout that involves crazy skills like weighted tire pulls and drags and crawlers, a variation on the burpee which involved walking your hands into the push-up position instead of dropping into it. My favorite skill though? The pass throughs. Using parallelettes, grab the bars in the push-up position, complete a push-up, swing your legs through so that your body ends up in a dip position with your feet in front of you, complete a dip and then pass your feet back through in reverse so that you end up in the push-up position again. Did I mention those bars are only 12 inches off the ground?!?!?!
The new skills we learned will continue to push us as we incorporate them into our own workouts. The friendships, whether they continue or end here, will always remind me of “the time I sucked it up and ran in my first ever paid-for race.”
For your viewing pleasure, here are some of us before the race. Peter, the trainer at En Fuego is in the middle, the hubs is hiding in the back, and I am the pasty white chick on the end.
