“Hang in there,” the small woman chirped as she ran past me on the home stretch of an 800 meter run that had devolved into a palsied shuffle. I was 20 minutes into my first day back at Indy CrossFit after a five month layoff and my quadriceps were thrashed from the first run, squats and lunges. The problem was that I was only halfway through the workout.

CrossFit, developed by trainer Greg Glassman in the 1990s and refined over two decades, is a high intensity fitness system that blends Olympic weightlifting, gymnastics, and middle-distance cardiovascular training. Excersises like handstand pushups, pull ups and dips, deadlifts, presses, and rows/runs of various distances are jammed up against one another and participants compete to finish in the shortest amount of time possible. CrossFit workouts have a hurrican effect on the body, and the core routines were given women’s names just like the violent tropical storms.

Today’s workout was cooked up by Sarah Smith, who unlike many trainers, suffered along with the rest of us. Her Suffer on Saturday workout consisted of…

800 meter run
50 sumo deadlift high pulls @ 45# (basically picking up a weight from the floor and lifting it to your chin)
40 wall balls (a squat that involves throwing a medicine ball to a spot on the wall four to five feet overhead)
30 lunges
20 ring dips (dips on Olympic rings)
10 knee to elbows (where you fold your body up on itself while hanging from a bar)
800 meter run
10 knee to elbows
20 ring dips
30 lunges
40 wall balls
50 SDLHP
800 meter run

I finished in 47:27 – the fastest male finished in just over 28 minutes, the fastest woman came in under 32. I knew that it was going to be rough but there’s never really a good day to start CrossFit, you just have to jump in the rapids and hang in there.