When did you forget how to play?
We played as kids. We dreamt up worlds beyond measure, ran wild and aimless, hurtling along for the sake of the feeling of the wind. We hung from tree limbs, built secret lairs, and created games with rules that were loose and pliable, shifting and bending, always angling towards the Platonic ideal of capital F Fun.
And we grew up. And sometimes we lost the script. And sometimes we found it again, or reclaimed it in different ways, or accessed it through our children. We need to play, to experiment, to move for the sake of it, for the thrill of gravity and precision and challenge.
When I first started CrossFit, nobody really knew what they were doing, and it was great. There were core movements and philosophies, but nothing had really coalesced around a unifying concept. Movements and techniques were suggested, attempted, refined, discarded. There was once a workout that involved “virtual shoveling”- loading one end of a barbell with a plate, holding the far end, and moving it back and forth over something as one would shovel snow. Quickly, we remembered that shoveling snow sucks, and that was the end of that.
At my old gym, CrossFit South Brooklyn, we often played. Classes might start with a dodgeball game, some sort of balancing work, or maybe…The Wall- when we stacked all of the gymnastics mats in the gym up and tried to get over it, however we deemed prudent. The Wall was fun, different, used a lot of the strength and skill we’d built but in a loose, undefined, instinctive way. Finally, one member took a bad step coming off the wall and tore their ACL, and the wall was discontinued- sometimes there’s something to be said for the safer confines of more conventional strength and conditioning training.
My favorite S&C author, Dan John talks about this concept, and I’ve written about it before- he calls them “Bus Bench” and “Park Bench” workouts, named after your mindset when you are waiting on those respective benches. Bus Benchers are outcome driven, they need to get somewhere, they are on a schedule. Park Benchers enjoy the breeze, the sun, the butterfly as it flits by. John says that most of us mostly live in a Bus Bench mentality, only occasionally and briefly sitting on the Park Bench and enjoying the scenery. He argues that our ratio should probably be flipped- that the majority of our gym time should be experiential, experimental, and exploratory.
These days we suffer under the yoke of knowing too much. All of the techniques, efficiencies, and pitfalls have been defined, the frontier has been settled. Butterfly pullups, which were one guy’s somewhat gonzo, novel tweak to make his pullups faster, are now de rigeur, an expected learning achievement from any would-be competitor and for many regular gym goers. We know the “right” way to do things, we train in periodized, repeatable, progressive fashion, and while that’s undoubtedly scientifically sound, it lacks much of the fun, the soul, and the growth of the earlier times. The CrossFit games further ritualized and narrowed our view of movement, until “constantly varied” began to mean “about 20 or 30 different things.” Movements that were challenging to judge, that had tough to define start and end points, that had qualitative rather than quantitative aspects- they disappeared.
I’ve talked to a lot of members recently who are improving, getting fitter, and feeling worse about themselves. Often it is true that “comparison is the thief of joy” but it is not a subtle thief- it needs its marks distracted- their eyes fixed so hard on goals and outcomes that they stop looking at what they are doing right now.
We have forgotten how to love movement, how to love exercise. We cannot love something for what it gets us, for the end it promises, we must love it for what it is, and how it makes us feel. We must love unconditionally, without a promise of return, and with some measure of mania. Love doesn’t grow by five pounds every week, it grows in fits and starts, implodes into itself, begins again. We must relearn how to love the gym.
I’ve been thinking about starting a new “class” at the gym. I’d call it Recess. It would usually, for now, be on Fridays at 6PM, unless I’m out of town, or if I don’t feel like it that week. In Recess we would play. We would try to jump on things and balance them (or on them.) We would move in novel ways and play games. We would stretch and hold poses, if they feel good or interesting. It won’t be progressive, or programmed, and we will leave time each week to just mess around with stuff. It won’t cost any money, but in the spirit of The Barkley Marathons, I may make people pay in other ways.
Let’s play together. I’ll see you at Recess.
