Monday, November 28th through Sunday, December 4th we will be offering a Bring A Friend to CrossFit Week!

Join us any day that week… or ALL week for any CrossFit class – including Cynergy Teens and CrossFit m!

This is a great opportunity to share what you do with your friends, family and co-workers.

Check out our schedule.

You’ve got nothing to lose, give it a try!

Click here to register!

Save the Date for the 2011 Cynergy CrossFit Holiday Party!

DATE CHANGE:  from December 3rd back to December 10th – re-mark your calendars!

We will be dressing up the Box for the special occasion!
(It’s amazing how nice it can look with a few lights on the pull-up bars and table cloths on the boxes!)

Please bring your favorite dish and beverage{s) for what has historically been a very entertaining evening!

Write it in your calendars now, because December it is right around the corner!

We are very excited to introduce a WOD4Community: “Mix It Up” event being held on Saturday, October 29th at 9:30AM at Cynergy CrossFit.

This event represents all that we love about the CCF community….

1. Getting to know each other.

With so many new CrossFitters and so many classes, we want to “Mix It Up” by having those that sign up be paired up with someone they have not met or do not know very well!  All the WODs will be about supporting each other through teamwork… and, as always, will be scalable and appropriate for all of our athletes, from our teens to our m class!

2. Competition.

There is something about a friendly competition that brings out the best in our community. From putting your training to the test, supporting and encouraging your team members and being encouraged and supported by your team!

3. Supporting our own.

We would also like to show community support to one of our new Cynergy members, who recently experienced a home robbery in Hanson.  Therefore, we are suggesting a $10-$20 donation, or whatever you can give, for this event.  It is not a requirement to participate.  Although we won’t be able to help with the loss of any sentimental items, we hope we can contribute to helping her get back on her feet and show her the care and support that she can expect from our amazing community!

I will be posting the WODs next week and really encourage EVERYONE to sign up for this event…

Please indicate if you will be joining us!

1. You can respond in the Comments section here
2. Write your name on the White Board at the Box or
3. RSVP to the event on Facebook

(click image to watch video)

How does it feel? I’ve had someone’s life end in the middle of CPR with my lips on theirs. I know how that feels. I’ve put down two of my best friends in the world. I know how that feels. I’ve buried my father. I know how that feels. Then there are feelings I can’t imagine and don’t want to think about.

I’ve tried to watch the complete “Sterling’s Story” video on the CrossFit Journal and until I decided to edit it and re-post it here I couldn’t get through it. I didn’t want to “feel” that kind of pain, so I shut it off, changed the mental channel. I felt enough to want to use what we’ve built in Fight Gone Bad to support the CrossFit Kids/ Infant Swim Rescue and Coach Glassman’s promise that no more infants would drown, but still I didn’t want to feel it.

I sat down to edit the videos and I felt it. I’m not claiming to feel that crushing loss the way thousands of mothers and father have, but I felt enough to make myself sit down and try to make you feel it too.

There are three ways you find out your child is dead. You see it happen, you hear it on the phone, or someone looks you in the eye and tells you. I have two daughters and this morning I sat down, closed my eyes and imagined for a moment how that would feel. I imagined the phone call, I imagined the doctor telling me, I imagined waking up the next morning and having the reality slowly blossom in my brain like the breaking of day that they were gone. I felt my heart break into a million pieces and I couldn’t even come close to the reality of it, and still tears rolled down my cheeks until I was sobbing. I’m not proud of this, but all I wanted to do was get away from that feeling. I wanted to call my daughters and tell them how much I loved them, but I didn’t want to think about what it would’ve felt like to know they had drowned, that they were dead….forever. The only kind of dead there is.

With just a few days left before Fight Gone Bad 6, and more than a $1 million more that we have enough people out there to raise this year, I’m asking you to do the same thing I did. Stop for a minute, sit quietly and feel it. Feel what Marla felt when she saw Sterling laying there not breathing. Feel what she felt when she had to tell her husband that she didn’t know if it was ever going to be OK again. Feel what she felt when she had to disconnect her son from the last breath he would ever take. For one minute, FEEL IT.

Joan Holmes, founder of the Hunger Project explained why people go hungry in a world where there is enough food. She said it’s because we believe they should. What she meant was that we’d long ago given up hope and given into people starving to death as a reality, so we accept that reality.

After 25 years at this, I don’t have a lot of faith left in the average person’s ability to look squarely at a problem and feel it, rather than reach for the remote, but I do have hope in CrossFitters. I believe we can still feel, and if we feel, we’ll do something about it, and Fight Gone Bad provides you with the same confrontation as “can you feel it.” Fight Gone Bad confronts us with “Will you do something about it?”

Fight Gone Bad is going to provide CrossFit Kids/ISR with as much as we can from what we raise to train ISR instructors until (in the words of Coach Classman) not one more infant drowns. If you can make yourself “feel it,” you’ll go to your computer and ask people to support that idea with your donations.

If you can’t “feel it,” I understand, believe me, I understand.

Click on the Big 6 on the upper right hand side of this blog and register for the FGB6  fundraiser.  ANY donation is appreciated!  Thank you!

www.fgb6.org

You sign up. You make it into Special Operations training. There are a million moments you think will destroy you. They don’t. You finish. Not destroyed.

You take your seat on a plane to Afghanistan. Headed for the fight. You leave the base in a Humvee with your buddies. Just driving down a dusty road. Another day. A distant sound that reminds you of something you heard on a warm 4th of July years ago. Suddenly the whole world explodes. Slowly your brain begins to absorb the burned and twisted remains that used to be a Humvee, the bodies of your friends no longer what or who they were. You breathe, know you’re still alive and they aren’t. Your leg doesn’t look like a leg anymore. Not destroyed.

A face leans over your bed and a disembodied voice tells you the leg has to come off. You refuse. There’s something that needs to be done for the other guys and that leg is necessary for a little while longer. Not destroyed.

You limp to the starting line on a hot, humid morning in Miami, Florida months later, looking 100 miles down the road to Key West and you look down and tell the scarred, twisted leg, this is what I kept you for, now do your damn job.

60 miles and the leg says no. A doctor leans in and tells you he can’t let you go on. You look at the leg, you sign the papers that say you understand and accept the risk, and you get up on the leg that shouldn’t still be there and you run 40 more miles. You finish. Not destroyed.

They ask you to count backwards from 100 and when you wake up your leg is gone, wrapped in plastic and thrown into a trash bin somewhere. Not destroyed.

You walk into a CrossFit box for the first time and look at a whiteboard that tells you all of the things you can’t do with only one leg. You suited up, you showed up, and you finish up. Your first WOD. Not destroyed.

On September 17th, Keith Zeier will stand next to brothers and sisters at Alamo CrossFit in San Antonio, Texas who also refused to be destroyed. This first group has missing parts too, but they all know that on this day, if you want that t-shirt, you finish what you started, and Rick Martinez gave them a chance to prove it. You’re all waiting for the call. 3-2-1 Go. 17 minutes later Fight Gone Bad 6 is done. You, your brothers and sisters have done the work, raised the money, and stand together with chests heaving, sweat pouring through t-shirts. Not destroyed.

A woman standing off to the side, nervously bouncing from one foot to the other, catches Keith’s eye and without a word spoken between them, he tells her that you can only be destroyed if you give in, if you let yourself be destroyed. His prosthetic leg is the authority that makes what he’s telling her true. Only you decide when and if you’ll be destroyed.

3-2-1 Go. Not destroyed.

Keith decided not to be destroyed because he had a responsibility to those brothers of his that had given their lives, not their legs, to see to it that their children got to college, so he raised the money because that’s what you do.

Got 17 minutes now?

www.fgb6.org

Please watch.  We Won’t Let You Down.  And give what you can.  Thank you.

Marble starts out as a chunk of stone rooted in the ground that resists removal from its station mightily. It takes brute force to uproot it from its place. Then as an ugly, stubborn chunk it has to be moved by heavy equipment to a place to be cut, shaped and polished until what was once an ugly piece of the earth becomes a beautiful, hard surface brought into service as a floor or a kitchen counter.

There is one more purpose it serves that rises far above the mundane household uses. What was once of the earth becomes of the spirit when it marks a life no longer lived. Most times it marks the cradle to grave passing of a person of the everyday accomplishment of a father, son, brother, sister or friend.

But occasionally there is a rock dug from the earth meant to mark an extraordinary and heroic life. Not long ago I stood before just that special piece of marble on a small piece of ground off the beaten path at the Special Operations Warrior memorial wall in Florida. As I walked from the parking lot and caught my first glance of the yards of cool black marble inscribed to honor and memorialize men and women who had given the most precious thing given to all of us, their lives, I began to feel. It was a feeling of appreciation that any words I write here could not begin to describe.

The black, veined rock had come to a confluence of rest with the souls of people who walk among us but not with us. There was one name I searched for because I knew at least a part of the story that caused the marble slab to bear his name. After walking around the memorial feeling more and more a mixture of sadness, appreciation and a kind of awe took over that I may have felt sometime before, but couldn’t remember when.

Then as if I had always been meant to stand in that place, I found myself standing in front of a small, square piece of black marble with the carefully carved inscription, “Lt Michael P Murphy.” I disappeared into a sobbing, shattered shadow of the person I had been when I’d woken in my hotel that morning. What was left of Lt Murphy was not a piece of rock, it was a reminder of the heights each of us are capable of rising to from one singular motivation. A motivation I, and most of us, rarely recognize, acknowledge or ever have the chance to act on. A motivation that is the very quality we each squander daily as we race through our lives of never enough. A motivation that makes everything else in the world pale and disappear into the background. The motivation wrought by our total and complete love for our brothers and sisters.

For Michael Murphy, that meant making the choice to stand up, as bullets flew through and by him, pick up a satellite phone and make a phone call that I am sure he knew would be the last act of this life. That phone call was a plea for anyone on the other end to please come to the rescue of his brothers who were being torn apart by enemy fire that there was no escape from. And then Lt Michael Murphy was gone.

But I met Michael Murphy. I met him on a wall sitting in a patch of grass in a small field in Florida. I met him, because that piece of marble that had been so stubborn and rugged would forever stand in that place to remind me, and anyone who stands before it, we all have a chance to rise. We all have a chance to give and serve something precious to us to someone and something bigger than ourselves.

Before I left that place, I rubbed my hand across that cold, dark slab and made a vow to Lt Murphy. Writing this now it may sound insignificant given what he’d given me, but I promised him that as long as there was a Fight Gone Bad I would do everything I could to make sure he was not forgotten, and that as many people as I could reach would not forget him either. At least for seventeen minutes once a year.

On September 17th, every one of us has a chance to rise above ourselves, throw some money in the hat for the people we can help, and say thank you to Lt. Michael Murphy for reminding us who we can be. He gave us the chance to be heroic in our own way.

Let us not, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, “….be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

Lt. Murphy will never stand or lie in that place.

I hope you’ll join us this year on September 17th.

View video.

www.fgb6.org

Click on the Big 6 on the upper right hand side of this blog and register for the FGB6  fundraiser.

ANY donation is appreciated!  Thank you!

This Tuesday, August 9th, Colleen and Steve will be hosting a farewell party for our own Holly Cruise. Please stop by, hang out, and say goodbye to one of the most integral parts of the Cynergy Family.
The address is 6 Pasture Lane, Whitman, and the party starts at 5pm… The event is BYOB, and please consider bringing a dish or something to throw on the grill.
All are welcome to attend.

This Thursday, August 11th, at 6:30pm, there will be a track workout at Weymouth High School in conjunction with lululemon athletica Derby Street. This event is open to all levels of runners and is a great way to supplement your CrossFit training. Bring water and a timer (watch) if you have one!

On Saturday, August 13th, our own Di Shannahan will be hosting our annual Beach WOD. The event will be held at Rexhame Beach (2 Newport Street, Marshfield, MA ) starting at 2pm, with a cookout to follow. Please sign up on the whiteboard at the gym…. Any questions, see Di or Cindy.

On Sunday, September 11th, we will be hosting our annual 9/11 Memorial WOD. This year, a new version of the famous “343″ WOD will be introduced. Please put this on your calendar. More details will follow.

On the weekend of September 24-25, the first installment of the Northeast Garage Games will be held at CrossFit New England. The event will feature both RX and scaled heats, so all are encouraged to participate. Please see the link on the Garage Games website to register, and make sure you let your coaches know if you do sign up!

And finally, on Sunday, October 2, there will be no Sunday Morning Service. Instead, Cynergy members are encouraged to run the Harwich Cranberry Festival Race. Choose between two distances: 7.2 miles or a 13.1 mile half-marathon. The course is entirely flat except for one hill around the 12-mile mark and is a pretty good time. Colleen Egan and I ran it last year (with several Cynergy cheerleaders) and had a blast! You have plenty of time to train for this, so let’s get a good group down there and represent Cynergy. Click below for more information and to register!

Harwich Cranberry Harvest Half-Marathon and 7.2 Miler

That’s all for now…. Hope to see all of you at our events this week!

I spoke to Lonnie earlier, and he expressed a lot a gratitude for the support he has gotten from the entire community. Every one of you who worked out with him, cheered him on, came to the fundraiser auction, etc all had a small part in his success!

Congratulations again, Lonnie… We are all so proud of you!