Sex and sweat

The recent Granite Games competition in St. Cloud, Minn.

Those unfamiliar with basic routines might find themselves pacing around a gym for hours only to have accomplished little more than walking around a gym for hours. It’s time to stop fanaticizing about the day you’ll take better care of your body and turn it into a reality, says CrossFit 8035ers.

This weekend marks the first CrossFit 8035 Ménage A Trios (MAT) Games. MAT Games will bring together individual athletes for an exciting day of “just you, doing two girls and wrapping up with a WOD,” according to its website. Interested?

  “So we named the games the Ménage-A-Trois Games because every athlete works as an individual and does two ‘girls’ and a WOD (workout of the day),” said Abi Reiland, co-owner and trainer at CrossFit 8035 and director of the first CrossFit 8035 MAT Games. “The ‘girls’ in the CrossFit world are benchmark workouts — not actual people — and they’re brutal.”

With that said, CrossFit piggy-backs the workout with the “suggestive” vocabulary, including “the box” (gym), where they don’t use machines but rather are the machines, on which they “snatch” and “jerk” regularly.

We’re talking lifts, people. Stay focused.

“Everybody in the gym comes in to focus on personal betterment and development in a very positive atmosphere, so although an outside perspective might deem certain terminology a little crude, if they spent five minutes in a box they’d understand the nature of our community,” Reiland explained. “You have to be able to laugh at yourself a little in an environment that is sometimes very intense.”

The workouts are very intense. CrossFit brings gyms and athletes from across the Midwest together to compete in three rigorous and difficult workouts throughout the day involving strength, endurance and gymnastics movements. Athletes test their physical and mental boundaries while being side by side with other competitors, adding more motivation to the workouts. Sprints, dead-lifts, kettle bell swings and over-box-burpees are a few of the workouts it involves.

“Regardless of discipline, CrossFit will challenge (athletes) in a way that nothing else ever has. It is the sport of fitness; specializing in not specializing; using every part of your body for every functional movement possible,” Reiland said. “It is being prepared for the unknown. It’s training for life.”

But why all the double entendre? Who’s to thank for blending workouts with innuendos?

According to Reiland, the founder of CrossFit, Dr. Greg Glassman, explained, “Anything that left you flat on your back, looking up at the sky asking, ‘What just happened to me?’ deserved a female’s name.” CV

David Rowley is an Iowa native with a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Iowa and a master’s in film journalism from the University of Glasgow in Scotland.