Built of thick concrete walls, topped with razor wire and laced with electric fencing, it's tough to get out of prison. But CrossFit penetrates ...
Eight-hundred men, and they're all innocent. Just ask them.
Built of thick concrete walls, topped with razor wire and laced with electric fencing, it's tough to get out of prison. But CrossFit penetrates, even into a maximum-security facility in the forest of northern Michigan. When we visited for a powerlifting meet, we found CrossFit.
2012 will be our tenth year competing “inside.” Though it seems foreboding, the prison complex is the nearest opportunity for local powerlifters to compete. Most meets are eight hours away — this is 30 minutes across an international border. I found CrossFit as a competitive powerlifter in 2008, and have never gone back. I still do some powerlifting and Strongman meets for fun, without changing my CrossFit programming. This meet would be my first as a ‘raw’ lifter – no wraps, no squat suits, and no bench shirts.
On our first visit here a decade ago, we found the prisoners to be intense, but uneducated. They'd never heard of Westside (Barbell), though Dave Tate was writing regularly online and showing up at powerlifting meets all over the country. Inmates simply didn't have access to new information.
In 2010, we made our annual powerlifting pilgrimage at Christmas. Tex, a lifer, asked about my training.
“I’ve been doing CrossFit,” I said.
“What the hell is that?” he replied, squinting at me through eyes surrounded by scar tissue.
I told him.
“How many reps do you do?” he asked.
I described the philosophy of novelty. He disengaged, but promised to look it up. I had my doubts.
Back to 2012: We went through pat down, the search, and the rummage through our bags; checks under our feet, the roofs of our mouths. Then, a march through the cold, wide-open ‘yard,’ to the gym building, shivering in hoodies and warm-up pants. We found the inmates waiting outside, many shirtless, relying on blue tattoos to block the cold. One immediately spotted the CrossFit logo on my sweatshirt.
"I did Fight Gone Bad yesterday," he said, "so I'm a little tired."
His name was Wayne.
I notice, among the stacks of plates, new plyo boxes.
“Yeah, them box jumps make your squats go up,” a very thick-chested inmate says.
The CrossFit lexicon rolls from tongues the way barbell talk did a decade ago, and I'm excited to find that the usual system of "mentoring" — far more complex in prison than on the outside — has extended to CrossFit. Those unfamiliar with CrossFit a year ago are now the 'old hands,' training the younger guys.
"I made up this crazy CrossFit workout," Wayne says. "I'll write it down for you. Take you about an hour. You'll hate me. Next time you see me, you'll tell me I'm crazy."
The meet progresses with fewer lifters than usual. As overcrowding and smaller budgets take their toll, lifers who have spent years exhibiting good behavior are released far before their planned parole date. Newer inmates fill their spots.
"This used to be almost like an honor joint," Wayne says. "Now you get all these idiots."
Among the idiots are fewer lifters, more violence and more escape attempts.
With only 25 lifters in the meet, I'm placed in the first flight with the lighter lifters. The lifting order is switched around by an incomprehensible formula; I wait over 20 minutes between my first and second squat, and less than five minutes between my second and third. Later, as I begin warming up for the bench press event, my name is called and I have to run to the platform and press 225, cold.
I find myself thankful for CrossFit: I'm always recovered, ready to lift. The prisoners delight in my rush as the emcee yells, “Chris 'The Phenom' Cooper! Outside lifter, here to get his monnnnnnaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyy!”
Since beginning CrossFit in 2008, and switching full time in 2010, my numbers have changed. I'm 20 pounds lighter; my overhead lifts are much higher. My specialty lifts — the bench press, back squat and deadlift — are lower, but it's impossible to compare a lift done raw, in competition, with one done in supportive gear.
For example, a 265 raw bench press, done in competition with a delayed “Press!” command, was harder than a 285 touch-and-go a week earlier. Wearing a single-ply denim bench-press shirt, I needed 320 on the bar just to make it touch my chest. However, my unbelted deadlift — currently 475 — is a weight I couldn't have managed when my belted max was 520. In the log press, I can now get 13 reps at my previous max.
At lunch, the inmates return to their cells to be counted, and we troop back through the drifting snow to the guardroom for lunch. A prison guard pulls me into conversation.
"CrossFit, huh? I hear a lot of people get hurt doing that," he says.
He's overweight, drinking Coke with his lunch of a burger and fries. His attitude is the same jaded sarcasm as the lifer on the other side of the bars — a prison guard's career lasts 25 years, the same as a murder sentence.
I think about the huge, toned inmates that I'll rejoin an hour later. They're on a plain diet of three square meals per day, get about 14 hours of sleep every night and lift for 90 minutes daily. Many are huge and most are lean. Squats in the morning session topped 600 lb., in just a singlet, cheap shoes and a belt. Bench presses have nudged 500, but haven't quite gone over. We're sure to see deadlifts approach 700 after lunch. I make a joke about Coke hurting more bones than deadlifting ever did, and he lets me off with a warning not to get hurt.
Guards' attitude toward the inmates is complete passivity. Jack, a veteran guard, shares his insight into the ‘type of people we have in here.’
"They're unkillable," he says. "If there were any justice in this world, we'd get a bout of typhoid through here and it would kill two thirds of them. It never happens. Anything that would kill you or I, they're too stupid to catch."
Earlier, when an inmate had trouble recovering from a heavy squat attempt, the rec director asked Jack if he brought his mask for performing CPR.
“I don't need it,” Jack said, “’Cause I ain't doing mouth-to-mouth.”
Then he demonstrated what he called “correctional resuscitation,” slamming his boot repeatedly against an imaginary inmate's chest and yelling, “Get up, motherfucker, get up!” The message was clear: if an inmate is injured in the weight pit, there is no rescue.
After lunch, we put on knee socks.
“Like a condom for your shins,” my powerlifting buddy tells me. “You don't want to mix blood in here.”
Other things you won't want to do: give personal information; hold eye contact for too long ... or too short; hold a handshake too long. One more thing: don't ask what an inmate has done. You don't want to know.
Wayne returns from lunch with a handwritten note. ‘Wayne’ is written above a ridiculous-looking montage of burpees, kettlebell swings, running and more. I thank him and promise to try it myself.
“You'll think I'm crazy,” he promises again.
Then his ‘boy’ does a 625 deadlift. He's in my weight class — the 198s — and wears New Balance shoes and an odd mouth-guard that he swears improves his strength.
When David Stern, former commissioner of the NBA, visited sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s, he found kids in remote villages wearing Michael Jordan hats. They were familiar with the number 23; they knew his name. They did not know about basketball. Jordan's fame had outshone his sport.
Hearing “Rich Froning” inside a max-security correctional facility is less a shock, but inmates who live in these concrete walls are a village unto themselves, with their own politics and religion. Hearing inmates talk about Froning was like finding a Michael Jordan hat in the jungle.
The cliché is of the massively chested prisoner, bench-pressing in an outdoor weight pit, iron clanging as he reps 400 lb. But the real magic always comes at deadlift time. Today is not a disappointment. Wilson-El, who has found religion, while incarcerated, pulls a smooth 655. This is nearly a religious experience for the crowd, but he shrugs it off. First attempts at each lift are chosen not to be sure of success, but to avoid social risk. It's more acceptable to select 315 on the bench and fail than it is to succeed at 225.
This is where some inmates struggle with CrossFit workouts.
“They do a lot of different exercises,” Wayne says. “So you get a lot of the guys, they don't want to do them in front of people. They don't want to lose, ever. They might do Fran when there are a couple of guys around, but they're not going to do it in front of a full gym, no way.”
Some do it anyway. These are the most likely to succeed, the rec director explains, because they're not afraid to be different from their crew.
"This is probably the best they'll ever be — they’re clean, they're sleeping at night, they're eating. They're working out — whether CrossFit or powerlifting. They're achieving stuff and sticking with it,” he says.
