***Important Announcement***
MPH will be closed from Monday, August 29 through Saturday, September 3, as well as the Labor Day holiday.

• This will be important, prescribed rest for all of us, athletes and coaches, as there is no “off season” in our sport. Rest and recovery is essential to maintaining the mental and physical intensity required for long-term success. There will be no posted workouts during this time, and instead, a programmed break from all CrossFit activities.
• We will resume a normal workout schedule on Tuesday, September 6.

Congratulations Robert W., Brandon W. and Rob M., for completing our Elements Workshop curriculum!

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In January, we asked about your interest in a town hall-style dialogue—any question-and-answer session(s) that would better your experience as an MPH athlete. We received many comments, both on the website and via email. From Ivy F.: how are you? Are you getting enough sleep? Are you having enough fun outside of work? Is this still your dream job over a year in?

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Town Hall
Question Two: Us

This used to be our thing. Sit down with a pen and a notebook, or open a laptop—work it out. Everything is significant, especially our experiences over what is, as of today, the past two plus years. And, codifying these moments in some semi-permanent space was is important.

In December of 2009, we wrote a tiny piece called On Post-Workout Response. We were shocked as it was picked up and passed across the Internet’s exercise nation. People read us? Then, a good friend and someone we respect very much took that opportunity to tell us that we should suppress the urge toward abstract philosophy and emphasize this, more tangible content. At first, we agreed. After all, the body is an operative quantity, certainly more so than the tangled beast that drives it. It seemed that if we wanted to grow our presence and expose outsiders to the expertise of our community, a more direct route was in order. So, in July of 2010, we wrote the final, quasi-reflective piece for the next year.

If you’ve ever written, or attempted to write a technical piece on anything…it’s a silly, wearisome exercise to slash your voice. This is why we have a half-dozen essays on exercise and movement theory waiting in queue to be finished. It’s not that we don’t have much to say in these veins—we do, and we will. We’ll happily expound the leverages involved in pulling a deadlift, the implications of static and dynamic movement assessments in predicting and reducing injury potential, or the mechanism of scapular dyskinesis, to name a few.

For us, however, these teachings are what class time is for. Yes, it’s important to arrange these lessons in some retrievable way, but it’s not what perpetually excites us about the challenges of the everyday—we must find our voice again. And, this, as much as any other awakening during the last year, evokes how we have been, how we are, and how we will be.

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Starting something is easy. The powers of newness and possibility are undeniable, and the potential to achieve that thing set out from a hope or dream is infallible. A little more than two years ago, that was us—easy—as we opened our doors for the first time on a warm Monday morning at 5a. We’ll never forget passing our window that morning and reading the “CrossFit MPH” sticker-sign glued to it, the whole block bathed in streetlights; or jiggling the stuck locks open; or being smacked in the face by the noxious smell of new rubber mats and bumpers; or not having working air conditioning and minimal cross-ventilation. It was ours—the nauseous excitement of the early days.

Shaping that same thing into something consistent, appreciable and good is far more difficult. Imagination is a poor substitute for experience, and until it happens to you, like many other life-altering occasions of creation and destruction, you can never know what it really feels like. We never knew that opening this business and realizing our dream would be at once the most gratifying, and also the most trying time, and that good would never be good enough again.

We have not always known how we are. Some days we’ve felt great, other days we’ve barely recognized ourselves. It’s been hard to predict which days will be which. This has been especially true, we’ve learned, because when you devote your life, your entire self to something, its few failings can easily outweigh its many successes. Sometimes every inaccuracy and omission, no matter how trivial, is unbearable. While we’ve always savored the potential of today, we’ve never believed in tomorrow so much. Some nights, we don’t sleep because we’re so taken with the prospect of what comes next.

We do, however, know who we are. In a short time, we’ve created the greatest athletic training facility in Washington, DC. We built a place where every day, we all can connect with ourselves and with each other; where we learn from every adventure and mistake. There is no system as thorough, no coaches as informed and prepared, and no instruction as fluent as ours. People, experience and information are meaningful here, because they close the space between what we think is possible, and our real potential. There is nothing we cannot do.

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We’ve been missing something recently, though—each other. And, there are no greater friends than us, three people who know each other better and take care of each other more completely; or who have been almost dangerously loyal at every turn, against every opposition. Two years in, this is what we’ve only recently reconciled. Now we might have peace again, knowing that each other is what makes us whole. One voice.

Thank you for asking, Ivy.

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This week, play a sport, hike, ride your bike and walk to work—nothing that resembles a workout. Turn off your watch, metronome and anything that counts or beeps—nothing that reminds you of the clock. Keep your hands clean of chalk and tears, and treat them repeatedly. Stretch, massage and roll. Sleep in. Leave work early. Eat well. Really well.

We are away these next few days, resting, reflecting and appreciating the future of MPH. When we return, a busy turn into the fall season begins with charity events, races and competitions, and clinics. The fun and good, hard work begins soon.

For now, rest…

–Melody, Rebekka and John