This week found me in downtown Minneapolis for client work. I typically enjoy the change of office scenery, but missing WODs? Not cool. I knew it was going to bug me, and there was only one fix. A quick internet search led me to a box that — jackpot! — was only a mile(ish) from my hotel.

CrossFit Minneapolis is located in a little pocket of warehouses, in typical box fashion. Walking in this morning, I'm nervous. What if everyone is super intense? Will their equipment be familiar? What if their WOD is greek to me? This isn't my box!

I'm realizing how much RowFit feels like home. And here I am, walking into someone else's house.

The nerves all fade away as I'm immediately greeted by the coach and I realize a box is a box. Like eating dinner at your friend's house and their mom uses Prego sauce instead of Ragu, everything was familiar, just a little... different.

Everyone had little notebooks that they referred to and scribbled in throughout the WOD. The warmup consisted of Freeze Tag with burpees as the method for unfreezing your fellow athletes. And the WOD itself was something I hadn't experienced before, either:

CrossFit Total

Establish 1RM of the following:

Back Squat Press Deadlift

Add maximum lifts together for your CrossFit total. Athletes have three opportunities to establish max loads.

My partner was nice and a former Chicagoan herself. And she was good at the math. The bars were 33lbs instead of the 35lbs I'm used to, and apparently it was a critical difference in terms of me being able to add.

The back squats...ugh. Let's forget about how my knees consistently caved and move on to the Press. As I watched the dudes in the room attempting their maxes, I realized I hadn't even tried a strict press before. Not even a little push? Eek.

I worked my way up to 48lbs and failed my first attempt. It's just all muscling that bar, if it won't go, it won't go. After the squat fail I could tell I was psyching myself out. So for my third and final attempt, I decided to be as quick as possible, in the hopes that my muscles would outgun my brain. Who knows if it'll work again, but it did today. Arms locked!

Onto the deadlift, where I had a concrete goal in mind. My last max was 115 over 3 months ago. Enough time and WODs have passed for me to make a solid PR attempt. I was able to beat that by 10lbs today (if I'd had a chance at a fourth attempt I think I could've tacked a few more pounds onto that).

Some setbacks, and some signs of real progress. Plus finding a really cool box I'd recommend to my fellow travelers. Cool WOD, cool people. Thanks, CrossFit Minneapolis!

My CrossFit total for 09/05/13 was 256:

Back Squat: 83 Press: 48 Deadlift: 125 (PR)