Right this minute, though, that voice in my head was shouting through a megaphone aimed at my good ear, and it was very much coming through on digital FM. “You’re not a Navy SEAL,” it said. “You’re a desk jockey. You’re old. Just bail now and go home. You got a workout in. If you leave now, the other guys won’t even miss you. Besides, you were dead fucking last in the mile run. You suck.”
That’s true. I do suck. But that doesn’t mean I was ready to quit just then. Maybe in a little while. But not now. Who knew what else the day had in store. Besides, I had nothing left to puke.
“Let’s go,” I told Jim. “I got this.”
Spend any amount of time on Crossfit.com and it becomes very apparent that there’s a strong connection between the program and the military. Not an official link, more like an affinity. The daily WOD posted on the site often includes a photo of an athlete in fatigues doing, for example, muscle-ups in some remote province of Afghanistan, or of sailors pumping improvised iron made of water jugs and rebar on the fantail of a ship at sea. CrossFit features a series of named workouts called “Hero WODs,” standard workouts named for service members or first responders who have died in the line of duty. They tend to be the favorite workout of the people, almost all male, for whom they are named, and they can take on lives of their own.
“Murph” is a benchmark CrossFit workout named for Michael P. Murphy, a SEAL killed in Afghanistan in 2005 and posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for valor in the operation described in Marcus Lutrell’s book Lone Survivor. “Murph” goes like this: run one mile. Do 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, and 300 air squats. (You can partition the exercises and do 10 triads of 10 pull-ups, 20 push-ups, and 30 squats.) Then run another mile. The preferred method of completing Murph is while wearing a twenty-pound weight vest or your body armor. Before Murph became Murph, it was called “Body Armor,” and became Murph after the SEAL’s death. If you do it with the weight, it’s called Heavy Murph. Either way, it offers a lot of suck to embrace, and it’s at least part of the reason the CrossFit community has embraced Murph as a WOD to be done on Memorial Day to honor veterans. (To commemorate my fiftieth birthday in a few months, I will do Aquatic Murph, which replaces running the miles with swimming them, and substitutes a twenty-pound vest for six pounds in the pockets of my fatigues.)
It’s not surprising that soldiers and firemen like CrossFit. It allows them to develop the intense, high-output, and brief bursts of power they need to do their jobs. It’s far more likely that a fireman will have to run up a flight of stairs carrying a hose than it is that he’ll need to run a 10K, or that a soldier will need to sprint across a field, drop to the ground, get up, and sprint again, the move at the base of a burpee.
I have to admit that the fact Navy SEALs were so into CrossFit was a big part of its appeal to me. SEALs are the ultimate cool guys, professional badasses, especially to someone who goes to meetings for a living. They’re in great shape and get paid to stay that way. They jump out of airplanes and swim across open oceans, go scuba diving and ride around in minisubs. They pass insane physical and mental tests to get where they are, and have to be as tough inside as they are out. They blow up shit and hunt down bad guys and have every conceivable type of weapon known to a teenage boy. If they used CrossFit to maintain their impossibly high fitness standards, then it could be just the thing to vanquish once and for all the nagging voices in my head.
Of course, there’s one massive, fundamental difference. Where the typical CrossFitter will do a daily WOD and then spend the rest of the day behind a desk or chasing around after kids, the SEALs’ lives are one giant WOD, an endless series of burpees, runs, swims, and pull-ups, combined with a lack of sleep and hot food. Granted, they are superb specimens, mostly young men with energy to burn. But I was in pretty good shape, and I had a lifetime of training and muscle memory. If I could find a group offering a SEAL experience, I thought, maybe I could finally prove, once and for all, that I was good enough. It wasn’t like the world was looking at me—friends, colleagues, and family—and saying all this. It all was within me, that voice inside my head from long ago, one I should have quieted by now. I was fucking sick of it. I was pushing it off with each WOD I completed. If I could get through the 20X, chances are it would be gone for good. Or so I hoped.
The day had started innocently enough. It was foggy and dark in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with cold rain in the forecast and standing puddles of water on both the pavement and the grass around the gym, tucked away in an industrial park. Fourteen people had gathered at the box, dressed in the required fatigues, boots, and white Tshirts with our names scrawled in Magic Marker across the chest and back. Be ready to go at 6 a.m., the “warning orders” email had told us, so at 5:45 a.m. we stood in loose circles, checking each other out, idly stretching. The average age of the participants was about twenty-eight. Most were barrel-chested and thick-armed. A single woman stood out, her hair pulled into a tight double braid. At forty-nine, I wasn’t the oldest person; that honor belonged to a guy who loudly let us know he was both a doctor and a captain in the National Guard. Clearly, I thought, he was angling to be the guy everybody would fall in behind and follow for the rest of the day. While I wasn’t looking to lead, I wasn’t about to blindly follow someone I didn’t know, someone whose primary qualification so far seemed to be a big mouth. I was more likely to follow someone who over the course of the day would prove with his actions that he or she knew what he or she was doing. I gathered from snatches of overheard conversation that at least some of the younger guys, including a cadet from the U.S. Naval Academy, hoped to become SEALs.
This is the point where I had my usual pre-event “What the fuck am I doing here?” moment. Whether it’s looking over a body of water I was about to swim across or at a distant mountain peak I was about to climb, an empty office at a start-up or at a bride walking down the aisle toward me, the thought that I have well and truly finally gotten myself in over my head has been a constant in my life. It was certainly the case this morning, as I looked at the far fitter people around me, at the pull-up bars and weights and tires and massive logs and sandbags and rucksacks that I knew we would be impaling ourselves on here today. It’s a shitty way to start a day. This will be the last time I ever ask myself this question, I thought. When today is over, I’ll know exactly why I’m here. I came for answers.
At 5:59 the big-mouth doctor had us come to attention in neat military rows, anticipating the prompt arrival of our instructors. This is why they draft young guys, I thought. Old dogs don’t like being told what to do.
We stood like that, quietly, for five minutes. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. Doc told us to stand at ease, still military style. More time passed. All part of the head games, I thought. Keep us waiting. Make us get all squirrelly, thinking, dreading. Well, it worked. I was thinking, and I was dreading. Use this time to get your shit together, one side of my brain thought. Use this time to panic and think of excuses for why you should bail and go to a Starbucks, came the reply from the other. All the while, my stomach gurgled. Against my better judgment, and all my experience, I had drunk two espressos at 4 a.m. before I left home, figuring everything would be digested by the time we got to the rough stuff.
Then, about 6:45 or so, the door opened and two guys, both very fit looking, one looking to be just a little bit older than the other, calmly and quietly entered the box. They wore standard-issue cool outdoor guy apparel. The older one was in a puffy down jacket, sweatpants, and army boots, and had sunglasses perched atop his head despite the predawn darkness; the younger had on a black watch cap and a fleece jacket, and wore shorts and running shoes despite the chill. The older one was pretty big. The other was surprisingly short. They immediately circled us slowly, telling us how out of shape and undedicated we were. I didn’t need to pay four hundred dollars to learn that, I thought. Then they had us drop into a push-up position and stay there.
That’s when Mark Divine walked through the door. I don’t think it
’s possible for me to describe Divine without sounding like I have a boy crush. Tall, ramrod straight, impressively built, and oddly ageless, Divine moved silently and with complete control. If he said anything at that point, I don’t remember what it was. I just recall being struck by his command presence. Forget the loud-mouth doctor; this was a guy I’d follow anywhere. This was a guy who had seen shit. Who knew shit. Good, I thought. Here was the sensei I had come to learn from.
Divine walked around our group and explained how the day would go. We’d work out, a lot. We’d get some instruction on keeping our focus and remaining strong, both physically and mentally. There wouldn’t be a ton of yelling, he said, because we were all adults, and they had plenty of ways to get our attention without yelling. They had some surprises for us, and we had some surprises for ourselves. If we paid attention, and gave ourselves over fully to the process, we’d get what we came for.
They then proceeded to yell at us. A lot. Stand here. Do this. Do the push-ups as a group. As a group, goddammit. Every time someone screwed up because he or she wasn’t listening, we did push-ups.
We did a lot of push-ups. There was more yelling. Keep your head up so you can look around. Keep your ass down. Feet together. Hands in.
But because I knew it was coming, and because I wasn’t tired, I didn’t care about the yelling, and I certainly didn’t take it personally when the instructors yelled at me or criticized me. All part of the process, I thought. Plus, when it’s all over later today, I get to go home and sleep in my own bed. It’s not like I’m really in the navy, or a SEAL.
Before signing me up for the 20X, someone at SEALFIT headquarters had emailed me to be sure I could pass the minimum fitness standards: run a mile in army boots and long pants on a road in less than ten minutes; do at least forty each of push-ups, sit-ups, and air squats in two minutes or less. So one Sunday about a month before the camp, I went out to the garage and knocked them all out. No problem.
Oh, one other thing: men should be able to do eight dead-hang pull-ups. Problem. Just like at last summer’s Warrior Challenge, I still sucked at pull-ups. I worked on them, using bands of varying strengths to provide a boost, buying a contraption made of surgical tubing to help, pulling myself up whenever I walked by a suitable bar, reading about tricks to use to incorporate other muscles into the lift. My dead hangs had, in fact, improved, from a maximum of three to a maximum of six. But six ain’t eight. The simple fact was that until I could figure out a way to use my quads and my ass to do pull-ups, a long shot, or until I lost another twenty pounds, a longer shot, I was going to be pull-up challenged.
So I told the people at SEALFIT that the dead hangs could be a problem, the other stuff was fine, and they said okay, come on down anyway. I kept doing CrossFit to prepare for the camp, and everything seemed fine.
Until our instructors told us it was time to demonstrate our proficiency at the fitness standards. Both instructors started yelling about how it pays to be a winner and that standards are just that, bare minimums, and did we want to live a life of bare minimums? Didn’t we want to excel, not just at this but at every thing we did? In fact, a life devoid of dead-hang pull-ups was fine with me, but if today I was supposed to do as many as I could, then I’d do as many as I could. Hell, one of the other guys did seventeen.
Once again, I did three.
The shorter instructor came over to me. “What’s the problem”—and here he looked straight at my chest to read my name—“Madden?”
Here I was tempted to say, Fuck off, there is no problem. But images of a day spent on this guy’s wrong side, of a day of punitive push-ups, flashed through my head, so I thought better of that, and said, “I did three pull-ups, coach.” (There was no way was I calling anybody sir.)
“That’s it?” His eyebrows arched above the rims of his horn-rimmed glasses, the ones that made me think of David Byrne in the video for “Once in a Lifetime.” I was scared. It was the first and only time David Byrne has ever scared anybody.
“Yes, sir,” I stammered.
“You know you were supposed to be able to do eight? You had all this time to prepare and you come here not ready? What else can’t you do, Madden? Why are you even here?”
This I was ready for. This I had thought about. The simple, glib answer was that I wanted to be mentally tougher and was here to learn the secrets of America’s steely warrior class. But the real answers were far more complex. There were the voices that needed to be quelled. And I wanted to be able to deal with a bunch of bosses—due to the structure of the joint venture I ran, I had four of them—who were, at this particular point in the development of my website, skull-fucking me with random emails, criticisms, complaints, and general expressions of unhappiness with me and my performance. If they were unhappy with me, they might fire me. If they fired me, I wouldn’t be able to provide for my family, for my children. So if I were mentally tougher, I’d be able to get those guys off my back, or at the very least pay less attention to them. I’d keep my job and the Madden kids would be able to eat meat a couple of times a week and go to the college of their choices. At least that’s how me and my squirrel brain saw it.
“I’m here to be a better father,” I said.
It was clear from the look on his face that it was not the answer he was expecting. Nor was it really the answer I was expecting. But all the hours of going to bed before the kids and of being too tired to really and truly engage them the way I had hoped I would as a father, of wanting desperately to not fuck up and be the dad who told them I wasn’t going to drive them to a bike race and what made them think they could even do a bike race anyhow, distilled the complexities of my thoughts to a seven-word answer. He paused, smirked. “Go do the push-ups,” he said.
I passed the push-ups test, pumping out 58, unbroken, in two minutes. Squats? I scoff at squats. I did 75 squats so picture perfect you could have charged people cash money to see them. The sit-ups? A mere 35. But I had a reason. An excuse, really, but the instructors had told us this was an excuse-free zone, excuses being like assholes, blah blah blah: they had us do the type of sit-up in which a partner holds your feet, which you place flat on the ground while your hands go behind your head. I trained for CrossFit sit-ups, in which you place a pad called an AbMat at the small of your back, put the soles of your feet together, and reach your hands way out behind your head when you go back and in front of your feet when you go forward.
The big instructor wrote everyone’s totals on a whiteboard. Some of the guys had crushed the standards, with upwards of two hundred reps. I was DFL: dead fucking last. Even the big mouth had beaten me. “Remember these numbers,” the instructor said. “It’s always really interesting to see who can bring it now, and who can bring it eight hours from now.” I took solace in that thought. I’m a total second-half guy.
Then we ran the mile. I used to love running. I was a decent 400-meter guy in high school. I’ve completed two marathons and countless shorter road races. But I have come to hate running with a passion. Part of it has to do with the fact that every time I run, with every step I remember the feeling of running away from all those kids to score the touchdown that night in Norwood. Now I’m not running away from anybody. I used to like this. And now it sucks. I’m slow, watching those Hatfields again.
It sure sucked at the 20X. As the others roared off, I fought to maintain contact with the back of the group. Then I fought to maintain sight of them. This was bad. By the time I had reached the turnaround at the halfway point, the espresso that I thought would be out of my system by now suddenly seemed very, very present as it bubbled in the back of my throat.
I could hear, barely, the sound of someone running up behind me. “Looking good, Madden.” It was Divine. “Breathe, nice and easy. Lean forward, almost like you’re falling forward. Land on the balls of your feet, not flat-footed. You got this.” It was reassuring to have Divine there, a half step ahead of me, urging me on. It was also embarrassing. Here I was, once again, the fat kid who coul
dn’t keep up, who needed help. I wasn’t sure what had happened between the day I tested myself and this, but I felt the sudden urge to stop. I slowed even more. “Do not stop,” Divine warned. He hadn’t raised his voice one bit, but the emphasis was more than enough to keep me moving, even as bile crept up my throat. “Come on. Just to that post up there.” Then “Just to that driveway. You got this, Madden. You got this.”
“You don’t have this. Just stop,” said one voice in my head.
“Don’t stop,” said a slightly louder one.
Step after agonizing step I listened to the louder one. I didn’t want to embarrass myself further in front of the ultimate Cool Guy. Thoughts of regret for that breakfast filled my brain, then the breakfast itself filled my throat. But I kept running.
Finally, we reached the door of the box. Divine walked silently inside, where I could see the others gathered, already recovered, sipping from water bottles. That’s when I started barfing, and when Rutan asked if I wanted to continue. He was concerned. I wasn’t.
Embrace the Suck Page 10