The road less traveled

We’ve all been there. We’re in a rut, or at a stand still. We want something different, or we need something different. But change is scary. And most of us are reluctant to head in a new direction, especially if it’s far different from where we are at.

We can reach these “forks in the road” several times in our lives. There is a moment when you need to take that leap of faith and go in the direction that is maybe not the easiest of the paths. Or you decide to stay where you’re at – dissatisfied and bored, wanting more – but at least you know what to expect. Right? Or is it right?

It’s been my experience, taking the hard road, although filled with uncertainty, may get you to exactly where you need to be. I can apply this to several decisions I’ve made in my life, but the one I will share with you is how I found CrossFit.

My workout partner, Cari and I had been training together for over a year. I don’t know how many of you have done classic weight training, but I tell you that after a while, you’ve experimented with every rep scheme and split known to man, and will find yourselves very bored. We used to pour over Muscle and Fitness Hers and Oxygen just looking for something we hadn’t tried or seen.

It was around that time that a young man in our gym told us about CrossFit and Brady Hubler. He told us that we would “love it!” He also described a few wods. . . yikes. We checked out the CrossFit main site and were skeptical. It looked rather intimidating, but our interest was sparked. We had to do something different.

We came across Brady one day passing in the hall at the gym and I decided to tell him that we wanted to try a few sessions with him. The rest is really history. It’s wasn’t easy in the beginning. Not hardly. We thought we were in good shape when we met him. We weren’t. We thought we were pretty tough. We weren’t. We felt like we’d “done it all.” Not even close. I will say that we had never really trained until we met Brady.

It was the best decision we’ve ever made. We quit our fancy gym to workout in a garage. We left all that was familiar to learn entirely new movements. We suffered through nausea, muscle soreness we’d never felt, exhaustion and fatigue we never knew existed. We had the experience of being coached for the first time – which is a relationship that is far different than the one you share with your “globo gym” trainer carrying a clipboard. We were pushed, encouraged, yelled at, cheered on. In almost two years with Brady, I can say that we’ve been through quite a lot. We’ve transformed ourselves physically, found a renewed competitive nature that drives us, and mental strength we didn’t think we had in us. But there is one thing we’ve never experienced – boredom.

We took the road less traveled. We’ve never looked back.