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As I explained to the customs officer at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport last month, I’m a regular contributor to The New York Times who was flown from my home in Berlin to write about a new event called Xenom.
The event is a two-day fitness competition that was taking place that weekend at Ford Center at the Star stadium in Frisco. Still, the officer seemed skeptical. “It’s related to CrossFit,” I hastily clarified.
“Oh,” he said. “So it’s like a cult thing.”
I am something of an expert in the “cult thing” of CrossFit. I have written extensively about the company and its exercise methodology for The Times, and my book about its rise and fall comes out in October.
I’ve also covered many fitness fads and exercise competitions that share CrossFit’s DNA, including Hyrox, the German race that has exploded in popularity; the Tactical Games, a “fitness fad with guns”; and MetFix, the health-focused regime created by CrossFit’s founder, Greg Glassman. So covering Xenom, which aims to turn CrossFit into a mass participation event like an Ironman race, was par for the course.
As usual, I set out to learn how the event came together, how it worked and what kinds of people were participating. But this time I wouldn’t just be reporting on the competition. I would be a competitor.
Xenom consists of 10 tests held over 48 hours. It’s a long, physically demanding challenge that includes weight lifting, gymnastics and high-skill movements like handstand push-ups and muscle-ups. I have been doing CrossFit training more or less daily for the past eight years, so it’s not like I was going into this weekend-long fitness extravaganza unprepared.
But as a reporter, keeping my eyes open, my ears to the ground and my mind attentive was a full-time job. It proved a lot harder to be keenly observant while also warming up, sweating profusely and throwing barbells around. I had to force myself off the floor after a particularly grueling event involving a stationary bike to do some interviews and take notes.
On a Sunday morning, I nervously prepared to take on an event I had been dreading: the clean ladder. A clean is a kind of Olympic lift in which you heave a barbell up from the ground onto your shoulders. When done well, it looks easy, but it’s an extremely technical movement that requires precise timing and control.
Five minutes before the event, I rushed over to Josh Godinez, a coach with HWPO, a CrossFit training program I’ve subscribed to for many years. Mr. Godinez was on hand to give pointers to athletes — and I badly needed some. “Can you give me some tips on my clean?” I asked. I showed him what my clean looked like, and he took it in silently.
He offered some pointers. “I’ve taught a lot of people to clean,” Mr. Godinez said. “But never this quickly.”
On the competition floor, and with his advice in mind, I made it to the 198-pound bar, concentrating on what he had told me: Engage my lats, shrug hard. The barbell came up — and I caught it. People around me were lifting far heavier. But under the bright stadium lighting, in that moment, I felt like a superhero.
My last event wrapped on early Sunday afternoon. I spent the rest of the day wandering the arena, chatting with other competitors and asking people what they thought of the weekend — the usual shoe-leather reporting I do while on assignment, though in this case much more exhausted.
One unexpected advantage was that the people I was reporting on saw me not as a nosy outsider but as a peer. I talked to one of the men in my group about his experience. “I saw you run past me on the running event,” he said. “Great job!”
Drafting the story that Monday morning was a little more difficult than usual, if only because my body was so banged up. Working as a reporter doesn’t usually involve being so sore. But I believed that I understood something about Xenom only through doing it myself. It would have been difficult to know just how well Xenom conveys the feeling of being a professional athlete without experiencing it myself, in every lift, every burpee and every ounce of sweat.
Now I am on the lookout for the next assignment in the fitness realm. An Ironman race or an ultramarathon might be interesting.
I suppose it’s time to start training.
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