Crossfit in the Airport
Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is pretty difficult when you’re traveling. You’re trying to catch flights, so it seems perfectly justifiable to cram whatever’s available in your feed hole and skip your 15-minute power walk.
Just recline your seat after takeoff, enjoy last summer’s blockbuster and some Everybody Loves Raymond, and wait for the hot beef or chicken entree.
Or you could try exercising in the airport.
We enjoy breaking social convention and doing unusual things in general, so it only took a few seconds to go from everyday travelers to the founding members of the Terminal E Fitness Club.
“Check it out, they have showers in this one!”
“Man, perfect! We can do Crossfit while we wait for our next flight!”
“Uh…”
It doesn’t help that burpees could be mistaken for the most extreme way to praise Allah before hijacking an airliner. Which is one of the reasons we were so eager to leave the US. How silly is it that in “the land of the free” we have to worry about perfectly legitimate activities arousing suspicion enough to prevent us from traveling?
We did a workout called a “deck of cards.” The idea is that you assign each suit an exercise and each card corresponds to a number of repetitions of that exercise (so the Ace of Hearts would be 14 burpees).
Usually you draw all 52 cards one by one, doing what each one prescribes, but without a physical deck of cards we just work backwards from 14. Burpees, body weight squats, V-ups or sit-ups, and push-ups. If you think it sounds easy, give it a whirl.
Crossfit is ideal for people who want to be all-around fit and get there as efficiently as possible. The workouts are always different but short, intense, and comprehensive.
It’s totally scalable for anyone from old ladies to Hulk Hogan and it’s designed to target every aspect of fitness (e.g. strength, agility, stamina). They put daily workouts online that take all your muscle groups into account over time.
After four months I’m pretty proud when I catch a glimpse of myself coming out of the shower. I’m definitely in the best shape of my life.
We’ll miss Adam, Katie, and the afternoon class at Crossfit Austin. We’re heading out to do the workout of the day on the Avenida Balboa: three rounds of an 800m run, 50 back extensions, and 50 sit-ups.
If you have 30-45 minutes to spare – and I know you do – you should do the same.