Athlete Story - Anne Thalheimer
“Holy crap, you do CrossFit? Isn’t that, like, suuuuper hard?”
I get this a lot.
Everyone has a different reason for coming through the doors at Nasty Habit CrossFit. Some people want to get faster, or stronger, or smaller. Mine’s a little different: I won a gift certificate at my tattoo shop’s annual holiday party. Everyone at the table winced, and someone said, “That’s a thing you give to someone else!” and I thought, “Well, maybe I’ll try it. Maybe this came into my life for a reason.”
I didn’t know anything about CrossFit, other than that a lot of roller derby people I knew were really into it for cross training. I don’t come from a sports background, other than some on-wheels endurance (distance biking and roller derby), and I loathe running. I showed up for my on-ramp woefully unprepared, ended up crawling up the stairs to my apartment after, and soon learned that it isn’t the first class that’s the hardest: it’s coming back sore to do the second one.
That was about five years ago.
And then I found deadlifts. I found one thing at which I felt like I was pretty good, and got excited about it, and then got better at it. When I started moving heavy weight, it was a game changer. When I started setting goals and training to meet those goals, my whole thinking changed. The more time I spent in the gym, the more I felt like I was learning important things about myself -- not only how to lift, but how to challenge myself, how to embrace the suck in the middle of a long workout, and the satisfaction of gutting through and not giving up.
What I like the most about Nasty Habit is that I feel like I’ve been emphatically supported to develop at my own pace as an athlete. Initially that was a lot of questions about pretty much everything basically all the time. I couldn’t remember what the movements were (wait, what’s a burpee again?), the abbreviations -- EMOM? AMRAP? -- were baffling, and I had to scale everything. But everyone was kind and patient, even as I showed up in my ratty old Chucks and basketball shorts and basically looked nothing like a CrossFit athlete -- tripping over my own feet, catching wallballs with my face, and unable to jump rope or break parallel on my squats.
I found a community that cheers me on; I signed up for my first competition, participated in a mock powerlifting meet, and completed the Open last year. I finally pulled a 303 pound deadlift. I’m doing online training with one of my favorite CrossFit athletes. I’m learning so much and I’m stoked to be here.
...still kinda loathe running though.
-Anne Thalheimer
