Touch the Treadmill

#262

I get bored easily. Always have. The same route, the same routine, the same anything for too long and my brain starts looking for an exit. So the fact that I've shown up to the same gym, three times a week, for over tenth months running — that's not discipline. That's a good match.

CrossFit, for the uninitiated, is deliberately, structurally different every single day. The WOD — Workout of the Day — is programmed fresh each session: a different combination of movements, time structures, and intensity levels. One day you're racing to finish a set of rowing and kettlebell swings in under seven minutes. The next, you have twenty minutes to complete as many rounds as possible of pull-ups and box jumps — pacing yourself, managing your effort, finding a rhythm. The day after, you're learning the footwork of a power clean or grinding through wall walks. The programming is intentional — coaches cycle through strength, conditioning, gymnastics, and Olympic lifting across the week so your body never fully adapts and your brain never fully checks out. For someone who finds sameness suffocating, this is basically a cheat code.

And then there's the scaling. Every movement has modifications — lighter weights, resistance bands, shorter distances, scaled progressions. A beginner and a seasoned athlete can do the exact same workout side by side, each working at their own edge. Instead of a full pull-up, you start with a thick resistance band looped under your feet, then graduate to a thinner one, then thinner still, until one day — unassisted. Instead of a barbell, you learn the movement pattern first with a PVC pipe that weighs nothing. You meet the skill where you are, and work your way up. Being called an athlete throughout all of this — by coaches who use the word without irony, for everyone, from day one — it makes you feel like you've always been part of the roster.

My current obsession is pull-ups. I've been working my way toward a strict unassisted pull-up by the end of the year — recently graduated from a horizontal resistance band to a vertical one, and that single progression unlocked enthusiasm and excitement to keep trying harder, to keep moving toward lower and lower resistance bands. Oh, the joy of measurable, visible progress! Gymnastics movements are my happy place in general: wall walks (still mastering moving more than a couple of steps toward the wall), and headstands, where I've only just built enough shoulder stability to balance my knees over my elbows for about a minute. The next milestone? Getting both legs to lift off and balance in the air. I think about it approximately every other day.

Olympic lifting is a whole other universe — complex, dynamic, deeply technical, involving a series of compound movements that have to happen in the right sequence or the whole thing falls apart. It's genuinely hard. Which is exactly the point. My motto this year is to do hard things — and CrossFit delivers on that promise constantly. There's a question I keep coming back to: When's the last time you did something for the first time? Every week at CrossFit, I have a fresh answer.

I've written before about how the community and the people are what first pulled me in and kept me coming back — in Finding Your People (#257). The short version: I go there for the humans. The working out happens in between. I've since found myself a lovely little ladies' group — we grab coffee or catch up outside the gym every now and then, and that warm, easy companionship has quietly become one of my favorite parts of the whole thing.

What I want to talk about here is the starting. Because that's where most good habits go to die. Twyla Tharp, the legendary choreographer, wrote in The Creative Habit about her non-negotiable morning ritual — it wasn't the hours of dancing or rehearsal. It was simply getting into the cab to the studio. Once she was in the cab, the rest took care of itself. James Clear calls a version of this "touching the treadmill" — on the days motivation is nowhere to be found, your only job is to show up and make contact. That's it. Often, you end up staying anyway. My version is pulling out of my garage at 6:15 AM for a ten-minute drive.

And showing up, it turns out, is the most underrated form of self-care there is. Not the most glamorous. Not the most Instagrammable. But the one that quietly compounds — into better sleep, better eating, better energy, better days. The one that makes everything else a little easier to do, and a little harder to quit. Epictetus said it best: "First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do." The 6:15 AM drive is where I do what I have to do. Everything after is just the good part.