Going gets tough when the tough get rowing

The subject of this week’s column – the “sport of fitness” known as CrossFit – is so young that many people have yet to truly understand how it works and some haven’t even heard of it. Established in the United States by former gymnast Greg Glassman, CrossFit has become one of the world’s fastest-growing training trends, to the extent that it is often accused of being cultish. Launched in 2000, there are now 10,194 CrossFit-affiliated training facilities worldwide, including 305 in England and 42 in Scotland. The official definition is “constantly varied, functional movements performed at high intensity and scalable to all levels”. That means you’ll be training to move and perform better in general. It also means such training can be suited to your ability; that it can and will become competitive, either against yourself or others; and that you’ll never, ever get bored. In terms of its content, CrossFit is a complex beast, but at its most basic it combines Olympic lifting with gymnastic skills and hard-core cardiovascular fitness. But having done CrossFit regularly for 10 months last year, I can tell you with confidence that there are other, perhaps more authentic, ways of describing it. Sometimes I think it’s the closest to hell exercise can get, other times, the nearest to heaven. I used to be intoxicated by the mixture of disciplines and the endorphin high that followed. I loved the phenomenal group energy engendered by sweat, grit, falling weights and loud rock music, not to mention my new muscles. But then the love affair began to sully as I started an ongoing battle against injury: pre-existing biomechanics issues that were illuminated, and exacerbated, by the intensity and repetition of CrossFit-style training. I also discovered the most crucial side of the CrossFit coin: that if you’re not coached by the best, your experience can be all the worse. And while the coaches at my CrossFit “box” (the name given to the warehouse-style training facilities where the sport is taught) certainly knew their stuff, the numbers in the class were too many; it became impossible to receive the kind of care and attention required to emerge from regular CrossFit training uninjured. More importantly, I didn’t feel I was getting my money’s worth: £175-£225 per month to attend oversubscribed classes where I wasn’t making serious progress. In fact, I was going backwards. Yet nine months later, I’m back in a CrossFit box performing a high-intensity