First Pullups and Sit Up-induced Road Rash with Heather

Hey, hey.  Heather got her first kipping pull up the other day.  That certainly is a huge milestone for a CrossFitter.  Congratulations on that sister!  Heather is going to be one of these quiet, unobtrusive, suddenly top finishing people in your workouts.  Watch and wait.  The other thing that Heather got recently, and perhaps no less of a milestone, is a patch of road rash near the tailbone, courtesy of doing lots of situps on a very firm black rubber floor.  My first sit up road rash was last summer when I went to visit my folks in Maine.  No CrossFit Affiliate anywhere in sight, not even any mainstream kind of gym option.  I was actually feeling pretty impressed with myself when the family packed up and went to the ocean for the day and I did not skip my workout, but did some kind of thing involving squats, sprinting, pushups and situps on the beach. Since I was in northern Maine, not southern California, I was a complete freak and everyone else on the beach looked like they had just peeled off the flannel and long johns for the day.  Anyway, my tailbone area felt a little tender after the workout, but no more tender than many parts of me have felt after a CrossFit workout.  Hahaha though.  The next morning when I dragged myself out to the outhouse (yes, I said outhouse), did my usual scan-for-giant-spiders-under-the-toilet-seat and went to pull down my undies, they were stuck, painfully, to my tailbone area where a scab had formed overnight from my situps in the sand.  Not pretty.

This brings me to a larger point about CrossFitting.  Sometimes, it hurts.  Tailbone roadrash, deadlift shin scrapes, push press collar bone bruises, rough, ripped, bleeding calluses from pullups…you get the idea.  These aren’t dangerous hurts.  These don’t involve your joints or your muscles or your tendons.  They are brief things that heal up on their own.  However, I notice that for many people who are accustomed to the desk life, the city life, the clean and tidy life, things like barbell scrapes, blisters and bruises are disturbing.  Many of you ask me about these things with worry.  I think you might be worried it isn’t ok, or means you are doing something wrong, or maybe we are doing something wrong asking you to do something that results in blisters.  Have you ever worked as a laborer? a farmer? a field scientist?  gone on a long paddling or backpacking trip?  This sort of stuff is what happens when you do physical work with your body.  It is all OK.  But, CrossFitters seem pretty smart and if you are Heather you drag over a piece of thicker mat for the situps.  I like to wear pants for deadlifting.  Experiment with different grip or pumice stones for the calluses.  Wear your calluses like badges of honor (unless you are Nikki and Elizabeth who are massage therapists-then you might need gloves to save your clients from a massage experience they aren’t eager to repeat!).  The take home message here is-when you give yourself sit-up-road-rash, sleep naked so your undies don’t stick to the scab overnight!  Awesome work on the pull up Heather!!