Kelly Starrett once said that "we fail at the margins of our experience." Unfamiliar stimuli tend to highlight weaknesses. Those same stimuli also incur the greatest amounts of growth and adaption. This is underpinning principle of CrossFit's (Greg Glassman's) hopper model of fitness and programming.
The model works like this: imagine you have a large hopper full of different movements, time domains, weights, and rep schemes. Now, standing in a line of competitors who will all do whatever the hopper spits out, ask yourself which movements, weights, rep schemes, and the various combinations thereof you most DON'T want to see come out, i.e. those forms of work for which you have the least capacity. The fittest person in the room, then, is he or she who consistently performs well, say above 75% or so of the group, across all the different and random weights, rep schemes, movements, and time domains. Such a person is not necessarily the best or worst at anything but good at everything. As I've heard tossed around in CrossFit videos before: "our specialty is not specializing," and the hopper model is a very effective model for keeping oneself firmly planted in the realm of generalist.
"Fringe" or "specialty" athletes like powerlifters or marathon runners have glaring deficits of physical capacity that a hopper-model style of programming would eliminate, should the athletes ever decide that their narrow fitness ambitions no longer satisfy them. Sure, I'd love to have an eight hundred pound back squat and a four minute mile, but the physiological adaptions required to achieve those feats simply can't exist simultaneously in a single organism. Single human organism anyway. This is not to say that one is better than the other, but it is to say that true fitness is that which engages the largest breadth of stimuli, bringing us back to Mr. Starrett's observation that "we fail at the margins of our experience."
CrossFit is ultimately about remaining at those margins, which of course are not stagnant; they move with each repeated exposure to whatever it is we suck at. This is often an unpleasant and ego-bashing way to approach bettering your fitness, but it's also one of the most potent. Since my own initial, ego-shattering introduction to CrossFit, I've gotten better at lots of things, and there are some things (like muscle ups or handstand push ups) in which I've developed capacity where none first existed at all. But, the most important thing I've gotten better at is not a movement or rep scheme or time domain at all. The most salient adaption CrossFit has bestowed on me is a greater willingness to methodically confront my own weaknesses.
I'm sure it's some combination of nature and nurture, but the need for external forces to drag us kicking and screaming to "the margins of our experience" in order that we might grow seems to afflict a significant portion of us, myself included. Obviously. Well, if 2012 is to be a year of more robust self-reliance for me, which is my hope, then I know I have to get serious about nurturing that inner child whose curious and pioneering disposition can only be sated by novelty and growth. Self-doubt, complacency, and most "rationally" devised perspectives represent some of my more formidable enemies. CrossFit represents one of my greatest allies.
Coming down with something viral on Wednesday of this past week, it's been humbling to watch how quickly those "margins of experience" can shrink. Suddenly, I find myself incapable where I was yesterday exceedingly capable. I can't remember the last time I was sick, and I'm trying not to let this illness derail my emotions; but as with my first attempt at barbell Turkish get ups (a humiliating and infuriating experience), being made a witness to your own inadequacy is never an easy thing to do. Herman Melville's Queequeg comes to mind at times like this. Can you turn an obstacle into a stepping stone? Can you use illness as a springboard for more robust living?
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