How Five Minutes of CrossFit made me a Better Mom
How five minutes of crossfit made me a better mom
Who knew a sweaty storage unit - sorry, box- would hold a nugget of parenting wisdom.
No, the nugget wasn’t found at the bottom of a puke bucket, but before the warm up was over, I had a new perspective on parenting and my childhood.
Let’s rewind the tape…
Parenting Philosophies
My darling hubby and I want our daughters to participate in one physical activity each season. Not because we want them to be an all-star athlete or master thespian, but we want them to move and get out of the house.
Our oldest started middle school, and now these activities provide an additional lesson in time management. She did theater in the fall, basketball in the winter, and next is the spring sport.
As with most kiddos, she poo-pooed our suggestions. Tennis, track, and softball were met with stubborn no’s. She briefly said yes to lacrosse, but changed her mind after a discussion about trying to catch tiny high-speed projectiles as they whiz by your face (or maybe I am bitter after growing up in Maryland and being a lacrosse failure).
Well pnut butt, if those are all lame, we need to look at outside activities.
Enter CrossFit. They had a kids program, I had done CF in the past and “enjoyed it,” and my daughter loved the idea of strength training.
Plus, let’s be honest, I need to get into shape, why not suffer together?
We decided to try a class before we committed. I warned her it would be hard work, that chances are she would beg to do ANYTHING other than Crossfit, and that grown men bawl like babies after their first workout.
She didn’t care… until she did care.
Enter CrossFit
My first mistake was going on a Saturday, which was a team workout.
I don’t do teams.
I would like to say it’s because I am better than everyone, or that it’s only child syndrome — but the truth is nothing terrifies me more than other people realizing I’m not good at something. Don’t get it twisted, I can admit to myself all day I’m not awesome — but having other people’s success depend on my abilities???
Seeing the team workout sent me into panic mode. I started to worry that I wouldn’t be good enough, that people would laugh at my penguin running skills, that I couldn’t do it.
I looked for an exit but then I felt the tug on my arm, “Mom, I don’t want to do this.”
I tried to appear as if this wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear. Woo hoo! I can use my daughter as an excuse to escape!
I went to the instructor and said, “My daughter is anxious about this class; I don’t think she can do it.”
I thought that the coach would smile sweetly and let us slip out the back door.
“She’ll be OK; I will make sure of it.”
Great. Now we were stuck in this horrible place.
Want to listen to my podcast School Counselor Gone Rogue? Click play below!
If you have never done CrossFit, the coaches like to surprise you with the workout until the start of class. There is an innocent-looking whiteboard on the wall that will eventually make you cringe more than getting an email from your child’s teacher during progress report time.
The Whiteboard of Doom
The coach took out her marker of death and started to write on the whiteboard:
AMRAMP
RUN 200 M
BURPEES
KETTLEBELL
My face and brain drained of life as my feeble math skills tried to calculate what 200 M equaled. Dear LORD! She was going to make us run 3 miles (note to reader — I am aware this is not a correct calculation. If you are good at math or love to run you have no clue the terror this caused)
Then she wrote next to it in bold letters:
WARM-UP
Run 500 M
SPIDERMAN
PULLUPS
Wait, I have to run before the workout?! I was pretty sure in my previous lists of ways I would not enjoy dying, the word spider-man was not involved.
My daughter whispered to me in a panic, “I don’t know what this is, I can’t do this. I want to leave.”
This was when I earned my Oscar. I turned to her with a smile and said, “We’ll be OK.”
Yea right.
My daughter made it through the first part of the “warm-up” run (FYI everything involving CrossFit should be in quotation marks for example, “fun”), and then broke down in tears. “I can’t do this.”
I quickly brought her away from the group to see if she was OK. Yet, even as I tried to switch to mom mode, all I could see when looking at her, was myself as a child.
I had been in her place so many times. Scared. Paralyzing perfectionism. Embarrassment. Every time, I had been allowed to give up. I wanted to give up right now. But I realized I couldn’t quit. I could not let my daughter see me give into my fear.
Once she calmed down, I said, “Sweetie, you don’t have to do this ever again, and you don’t have to do the workout today. But you do have to come in and watch me do it.”
There was no logic having her watch me complete this exercise in humiliation — but I knew she needed to re-enter the gym.
She was scared. People had seen her cry. Even worse, there were teenage boys in the class! But I knew the hardest part would be stepping back into that gym. If she didn’t, she would spend the rest of her life making excuses to back out.
I should know.
She stood on the sideline as the coach reviewed the workout. I looked at my parked car more than once, debating what would happen if I sprinted to it and fled. I had just run 500 m, I could make it to my car in less time!
Then, right before I made a dash for it, my daughter walked up and said, “I’m going to do the workout.”
The Moment you Realize your Children will be Better than You
Well, knock me down with a feather. Here I was, plotting my escape, and she wanted to complete the workout.
I told her it was fine to skip it, that she did the hard thing by walking back into the gym, but then she said,
“I know any sport I try is going to be hard at first. I’m going to have to deal with this weakness, anywhere — but I will get better if I stick with it- and this looks fun.”
That’s when I got teary-eyed.
There is nothing to describe the feeling when you see your kiddo act in a manner that says, “I’m going to tackle life better than you did.”
Alright, let’s not give TOO much credit — our kids won’t know everything, but I breathed easier knowing my daughter might not throw in the towel of surrender when life gets scary.
And because of her, I finished my workout. I can’t walk today…but I had fun.
We decided our spring sport will be CrossFit, and our only goal will be completing each workout.
I share this story with you because as an academic coach, I have seen students have these same fears about school. That it’s hard, it’s not comfortable, and there are funny words on the board that look scary. But just like my daughter, they figure out a way to beat those fears. And that is a pretty darn awesome thing to see.
There is nothing comfortable about being uncomfortable, but if you don’t try you fail. Carrying those failures is a lot heavier than any clean and jerk I might perform in the future.
You might not see me at any CrossFit Games in the future, but this kiddo might help me get through the next month.
Marni Pasch | Academic Coach | Host of the Podcast School Counselor Gone Rogue | Team Pasch Academic Coaching
As a trained school counselor turned academic coach, I work with students in grades 6th and higher, who struggle with academic confidence and motivation. Together we create concrete goals, tackle procrastination and learn creative study techniques. My mission is to empower teenagers to thrive in school on their terms. Want to work together? Contact me for individual or group coaching so teens can achieve success in life, school, career, and their social endeavors. I provided in person academic coaching in Orlando, FL, but work with students across the country through Zoom!