The intimate embrace of failure

There's a commercial for Nike, featuring Michael Jordan, called 'Failure' in which he talks about how many shots he's missed, how many games he lost, how many times he's been trusted to make the game winning shot and missed. It's contradictory and thought provoking. Why would this guy, of all people, be talking about failure? Michael Jordan? Failure? Really?

The point is that he was not afraid to try things that he might fail at. By striving to do things that were hard and often beyond his ability; by trying and failing and trying and failing and trying and failing then maybe, one day, things would change. He embraced failure as a necessary part of the process and as the great man says 'that is why I succeed'.

This expresses the most valuable lesson I've learned so far since starting training at Paradiso Crossfit (PCF) and it's a lesson that translates to every other part of my life. It's simply this: if you can find a way to consistently and safely work at the things that you are bad at, you will inevitably improve. PCF provides an incredibly powerful environment for this simple lesson to thrive in, since the coaches and staff there continuously invite you to participate in the crazy adventure of your own physicality: your strength, speed, stamina, agility, balance, coordination, etc. Every piece of it comes up somewhere in class and each and every point of weakness and failure provides a possibility to grow.

For me, this year, the month of March was a dramatic crazy time. I'm a  biomedical data scientist and my attempts to apply for funding were all being rejected. I genuinely did not know if I was going to have a job in six months time and the consistent failure was eating into my self confidence.

This was also the time of year when the Crossfit community competes in a world-wide fitness tournament: the Crossfit Open. Anyone can enter. The organizers post one workout per week for five weeks. Everyone does the workout and must either film themselves doing it or have an affiliated judge score their effort, submitting their scores to the global website to be tallied up and compared. At PCF, one of the members is a really talented film editor called Charlie Mason who shot and spliced together awesome music videos of our community putting ourselves through this process (available at Vimeo here: 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, 14.4 and 14.5). They're beautiful. Check them out.

Now here's the deal. I'm a beginner at this stuff, but because the coaches suggested that I 'have a go', I signed up and completed each open event. I even appear at various moments in Charlie's videos. I'm the old guy at the back, who looks like he's about to die. I was ranked 68,782 in the worldwide competition and I can't say that I did particularly well in any of the events. The first (14.1) was particularly frustrating since it involved so-called 'double unders' (which is like using a jump rope, but passing the rope twice under your feet for each repetition, see here for a demo video). I couldn't do this at all. It sucked. My score was really, really low and I just hated the experience of trying and missing, trying and missing, trying and missing. Argh.

So, I resolved to fix it. Every time I went to the gym for the next month, I'd have to pay an 'exit toll' of 30 double unders to leave. I told the coaches about my plan and they held me to it, checking in and supporting me, asking me how it was going and providing great advice about technique and form. After about a month, I got the knack for it and managed to string together 30 in a row. This was enough and I decided to try working on other things after class.

Fast forward to the class we just finished tonight: I did seventy four double-unders in sixty seconds. The feeling of doing this now feels natural, comfortable, fun even. There's a sort of swirling comfort when you hit the rhythm of the rope whizzing around you and you dance in its whipping movement. This small success was a product of my earlier failure, of my coaches' request for me to give it a try, of my willingness to do something that was going to be difficult and to see how it went, and of course, the translation of all of this into regular practice to actually address the issue. To some extent, this happens in every class; in every effort expended honestly trying and failing to do something. The openings for success arise only in having an intimate, up-close-and-personal view of our failures. We need to embrace them.

Double-unders and jump ropes aside, the important ramifications of this have echoed within my career. I think that my attitude and approach at work have changed to match a Crossfit-like approach to working on my weaknesses and reassessing how much I permit other people to determine my destiny. In May, we managed to secure some funding for work that I would not have attempted to put forward had I not been afraid to fail. I can't credit PCF for every aspect of this small success, but I would say that there was an underlying moment in its inception when I said to myself 'I got this, I'll take this on' that was pure Crossfit and a direct product of my training, my coaches, my community and my gym.

The Rise

Beginning in ashes,
Amid smoke and flame,
We crouch, weighed down
And pinned to the ground
By our hurt, broken hopes and our shame

It is then, when we find
Amid ashes and dust,
Small good things still smoldering
Deserving of shouldering
By effort and work and our trust.

Let us stand, let us rise
Amid others' contempt.
Grow our wings in the rising
Our brightness now shining
Resurrected just by the attempt.

Note: this poem is dedicated to Derrick Johnson, the specialist Olympic Weightlifting coach at Paradiso Crossfit and who signs his online posts with the hashtag #PhxRises.   

To run in darkness is to touch the night

To run in darkness is to touch the night.

Quiet bodies moving lithely,
Cushioned and smoothed: Reebok on asphalt,
In an unlit LA driveway,
As a down-to-the-street-and-back
Piece of this evening's workout.

And here, in this safe little patch of shadow, 

I think of what it must have been like 

To run in the dark a long time ago. 

With lives, perhaps, dependent on

Your hard, striding effort and breath hammering.

Feet slipping, enemies closing.

To run in darkness is to touch the night.

An Athletic Rebirth

I resigned from my old gym a few weeks ago. They wouldn't let me do it over the phone but made me come in an fill out a form, obviously making the process as cumbersome and irritatingly slow as they could. So, in the part of the form where they asked for 'any other' comments, I wrote the following:

"I started doing Crossfit & realized that the entire business model of traditional gyms is based not on getting me stronger and fitter but on selling me stuff (classes, but more like personal trainer sessions and suchlike). Crossfit trains and treats me like I'm an athlete, not a consumer."- Gully Burns (8/10/13) 

I had started training at Paradiso Crossfit (PCF) about three months earlier. When I started, I was immediately struck by how extraordinarily difficult everything looked. I'd walk in for our orientation classes just as the final normal group workouts were wrapping up and just kept on repeating to myself 'Erm, that looks hard' when I saw the athletes work (especially when they were pulling stuff like this: Paradiso Crossfit 'Fran' January 9, 2012). The trainers literally seemed to have a different relationship to gravity than me. Watching one of the senior coaches (Zeb) demonstrating a move called 'box jumps', I swear he seemed to be floating up on some kind of hidden wire rather than just jumping up and down.

Now, previous to this. I had torn the lateral meniscus in my left knee doing kickboxing in 2006. I was on crutches for a solid six months, all told (now that was interesting), had it repaired surgically (pretty groundbreaking stuff, surgically speaking) and then couldn't bend the knee beyond 90 degrees for a very long time. I worked through rehab and then practiced yoga very carefully and precisely for years. I had qualified as a yoga instructor and was busy practicing one of the more traditional, athletic styles (Ashtanga Vinyasa). My perspective was: "I'm in my forties, I need to be really, really careful. Let's leave the hard stuff to the younger crowd and work out how to stay mobile and healthy". But even in yoga class, I just found that the people teaching had some other set of priorities going on than helping me. I had a particularly horrible experience in a teacher training course that I was taking and was left feeling pretty disgusted with the whole lurid, pseudospiritual, over-sexualized activity of what modern yoga seems to be.

Moreover, I never thought that I'd be able to squat deeply again, let alone do any weightlifting, let alone sprint or run or drive myself athletically. Previously to my injury, I had fenced competitively for just under 20 years, and had thrived in a competitive sporting environment that relied mainly on skill and technique over pure fitness, stamina or strength. I had reconciled myself to thinking that my days of competitive training were done. The lifestyle component of PCF's fitness training is entitled 'Everything is everything' and presents the question: "What is Fitness" to newcomers like me. I was struck by the answer that it could be stated simply as 'the ability to do physical work' and an extension of this is that health can be thought of as the ability to do physical work over the course of your life.

Now that resonated strongly. It's not necessarily about being the strongest, the hottest (yeah, good luck with that, matey), the most flexible or the most agile. Its simply about being able to do physical work and to be able to keep doing that work over all the many years to come. For me also, not getting injured is a crucial part of that too and I think that Crossfit athletes could really learn a thing or two by studying yoga with all of its introspection, its self-study, precision, patience and its focus on compassion for oneself, (but that's a post for another day).

Finally, I was struck by the generosity and consideration that my fellow crossfitters have for each other. I remember that some of the personal trainers in my old gym were pretty rude and standoffish to me, probably because I wasn't paying them at the time. At PCF last week, a couple of the gym's stars were training at the same time as a bunch of us taking a group class. I don't know who they were, but it was pretty clear that they were considered minor celebrities in the gym (or maybe they were just a couple of advanced practitioners doing their normal thing; I don't know). Halfway through the workout when I was waddling around carrying a pair of heavy kettlebells and basically just trying to put one foot in front of the other, I almost ran into one of them. He immediately apologized and stepped aside seeing how I wasn't really in any state to even just walk in a straight line. In my old gym, I expect I'd have gotten a nasty look or a snotty comment at least. Not so at PCF.

So now, beyond all my previous imaginings, I'm in an environment that allows me to train physically beyond anything I'd have previously imagined. I'm able to do so intelligently and almost entirely free of any ego-driven silliness. The people training and teaching there are friendly, supportive, genuine and don't see me as a customer to be sold stuff but an athlete. This is a transformative, elevated and powerful conversation to participate in. Even more so, because my athleticism is really nothing particularly special, at least it isn't yet.