Saturday, June 18, 2011

?You Die Slower If U Work Out?

Peter Jordan examines why kids at Saratoga High are embracing CrossFit. Whatever the reason, fitness is becoming more important for many students.

There are a number of stereotypes associated with Saratoga High School. One is the relative importance placed by the community on academics (very high) as opposed to athletics (not so high). Marching band falls somewhere in the middle, if not in reality, certainly in the mythology.

Our rival school, the other one in a district of just two schools, beat us in the big football game 28 years in a row. But our Academic Performance Index score is 932, and theirs is 873. As a nod to this—or maybe a playful dig—we don’t name our WODs after girls; we name them after institutions of higher learning.

“University of Wisconsin” was a particularly dreadful workout. In retrospect, had we anticipated how tough it would be, we probably would have agreed to scale it back a little to mollify the innocent, trusting, generally willing and agreeable mostly freshman boys and girls that comprise our physical-education classes.

Too late now. The clock had started: 50 wall-ball shots for time, with four burpees every minute on the minute. One of those workouts where there really isn’t a forgiving strategy. You just have to gut it out. Later, when asked to describe their “least favorite WOD,” many would recall this day. Ironically, several would rank this as “most favorite.”

Go figure.

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