In 1990 I was 15, a sophomore in a new high school in California. The new high school was in an affluent part of town, and my family was anything but. I was born military. My father served on submarines for 23 years and retired in 1987. I was well used to starting at new schools--this was my 7th since kindergarten--and resigned to the idea of making new friends again. When a classmate suggested I join her at the gym after school I readily accepted, thinking I could find some way of entertaining myself and she and I could get to be friends through that channel. That afternoon at the local YMCA I familiarized myself with the bikes and treadmills and stair steppers and didn't even glance at the echoing, intimidating room that held the grunting men and the stern iron machines. My companion sweated on a stair stepper and I flailed beside her. We became friends, for as long as a military child ever holds on to friends, meeting up to go to the gym 3 days a week. She and I parted ways at graduation, but her legacy of gyms has stayed with me.

From that gym I belonged to a gym that catered exclusively to women. I went away to college and explored the campus facilities. I came back and went back to my women's gym. I moved away again and ran dizzy circles at another college gym on a track that was 17 laps to a mile, carrying a counter in my hand so I wouldn't have to focus on the tedious laps as they accumulated. I moved to Minnesota and started working at the front desk of a local gym. Test taken and passed, I got my ACE personal trainer certification. I moved to London and eventually found s gym in the basement of a small mall in Bayswater. Hand in hand with my new fiance we came back to California. My old familiar women's gym had closed, but I started work at a new one near my college and began my studies in physical therapy. I made an agreement with my new husband that I must always have room in the budget for a gym membership, and moved from gym to gym as we moved around the city. No matter where I was, I always had a gym.

When I first started at the YMCA all I touched were the cardio machines. Always a sturdy child, tall and muscular and heavy, I was relegated to the end of the line-up-by-height lines so definitively that I went there automatically. That sturdiness wasn't a burden to me until we were stationed in California. Here all the girls were tiny and thin and blonde, their ankles the size of my wrists, the tops of their heads no higher than my enthusiastically developed chest. As a military child you learn to assume the skin of those around you, to blend in as much as possible. I wasn't going to blend in naturally. In the late 80s and early 90s, all the world knew for women was Jane Fonda and Denise Austin. I relentlessly pursued the lanky, lithe California Blonde look, mastering cardio machines and ignoring the iron behemoths in the background. My body, however, did not comply. I was an Amazon in a sea of pixies, and my body refused to change.

Over the years I learned the uses of the machines in the other rooms, the machines that would build muscle. Their use and mastery came easily to me, and my body adapted quickly. I moved from machines to free weights and my body was even more thrilled. Through it all, though, I was surrounded by California pixies. Nowhere was an example of a strong and glorious female form. Instead I was constantly reproached, constantly battered by the accusation that my body wasn't what it was supposed to be, that it did not fit the mold to which it had been designated. I ignored the way my body loved the weights, and pursued that waifish figure on the cardio machines. I moved further and further from both the California pixie and the natural healthy form of my Amazonian body, and struggled to be happy. Something in the back of my heart knew I was on the wrong path, but the pain in the forefront of my brain blocked that message.

And then I heard about Crossfit.

I read the books. In two days I devoured Inside the Box by T.J. Murphy. I went looking for more. I helped myself to First: What It Takes to Win by Rich Froning, now four-time Crossfit games champion. I added Learning to Breathe Fire by J.C. Herz to my reading pile. I plowed my way through pages and pages of the Crossfit website and the associated journal. Something about this was dogging me. I was driven to learn more. Yelp told me where boxes were in my area. The closest box to my home was only 1.5 miles away--score! But it was directed by retired drill instructors. In between a bad car accident that left me permanently disabled (albeit in minor ways, but ways that need to be respected) and a lifetime of a self-effacing personality I knew I couldn't handle an environment in which I was provoked and goaded. Another box in the city was well-known, the box I read about in Murphy's book. I nixed that one, too, again because of my self-effacing tendencies. I knew I'd be intimidated and lost there. Another box was just too far away. Then I found Crossfit Kivnon, or CFK.

The box, founded by a chiropractor, had instructors who themselves had overcome challenges. It was small. It was relatively unknown. It was tucked in an area of the city I knew very well. No answer came to an email I sent to their Contacts page, but I pursued the idea anyway. I drove by several times, parked nearby once.

On the corner at the top of the small hill I stopped to debate my next step. A woman dressed in shocking pink ran out the door and up the hill toward my car. My heart started pounding as she headed toward me. Would she yell at me? Would she ask me what I thought I was doing there? I watched her as she ran by, and breathed a sign of relief. Driving away I made the decision that the next time I would go in. I would be the one initiating contact. I would be the one taking that step. I was terrified.

The next day I got out of work early and impulsively aimed my little car down the freeway toward the box. The box has only three parking spots in front, and when I got there the one by the door was open. Taking it as a sign, I pulled in before I could talk myself out of it. The instructor inside looked at me. I looked at him. I decided I had to go in. The details of that first visit are inconsequential, but the result of it was that I promised to come to the Free/Open class on Saturday. I felt better. I felt welcome. I felt like there was a chance for me, in this box.