Fran.

Fran is the best known CrossFit workout. The way my trainer put it, asking a CrossFitter’s Fran time is like asking how much one benches at a conventional gym.  It’s an ice breaker, a standard, a benchmark. It’s also a sprint. The exercise is:

Reps of 21-15-9
Thrusters (95#/65#)
Pull-ups

That’s it! That’s all you have to do. Pretty easy, right? This guy did it in under 2 minutes.

God. No. It isn’t easy as this guy proves (and doing it under 3:00 is supposed to be godlike). I finished at 6:14 using 35 pound weights and ring ups instead of Rx. Honestly, I feel like my time should have been longer given how others in my class and at the gym finished at 9+. What this suggests to me is that either I need to be going lower on my ring ups (entirely a possibility) or adding weight. When I go to the gym tomorrow, I’ll try and see if I can do an assisted pull-up.

This means that I can use a heavy rubber band to help me up.

Tomorrow, I’m bringing a college friend into the gym to try CrossFit for the first time. When I was hanging out with her earlier today, I tried to explain what CrossFit is and how it works. There was no way to explain it without sounding a little scary (which it is, don’t get me wrong) and undoable. I really feel like anyone can do CrossFit, you just have to be willing to swallow your ego a bit and scale down. Anyway, we’ll see how that goes.