Around a year ago I started to feel different. I began to start well, feeling older. For the first time I looked in the mirror and started to not see my youth anymore. Most of you who know me, know that I am an avid cyclist and cycling had always been the center of my overall fitness program. I was a classic middle of the packer. On group rides I fell somewhere between the slow group and the fast group. I've spent a lot of time riding alone in my life.
Despite this fact cycling remained one of the great true loves of my life. In August I trained and rode with a group from Steamboat Springs, CO to Park City, UT. We journey'd over four hundred miles in four days. While I had a great time on the journey, I remained at the middle to the back of the pack most days. When I came home to the oppressive Texas heat at the end of August I just hit the wall. I knew the facts. Cycling is entirely about strength to weight ratios: I needed to simultaneously loose weight and get stronger.
Believe me, I've chased a few fitness fads over the years trying to accomplish this. Since the end of high school my work outs had literally been all over the place: heavy lifting, running, swimming, cycling, climbing, Body for Life, the South Beach Diet, an ab machine, and P90x just to name a few. Always chasing.
In my mind I kept thinking to myself, there is a way that I want to train. Every time the olympics would come along I would see highlights of olympic skiers or runners training. Their workouts looked like olympic weight lifting and plyometrics and other wild movements with medicine balls and kettle bells. I would see this and think to myself "I wish I could train like that." But how does one begin to train like that in a public gym? They just aren't designed to be used like that. And most of us don't have the equipment or the motivation at home to go it alone.
Then I found Crossfit. Customers started coming in the store telling me about Crossfit Waco and it sounded exactly like how I wanted to train. It also sounded exactly like what I needed to do to become a better cyclist. So in October I enrolled in the onramp class at Crossfit Waco. (This is part one of a multipart series. More tomorrow.)
