CrossFit, the Liberal Arts of Fitness

During my Humane Letters class yesterday, a student piped up with this statement, "Well, we get an education to get a job." The rest of the class audibly gasped and then looked at me for my reaction, while the one poor student realized what they had said.

I did not disappoint! They got a reaction from me. :) I am not in education to create a better work-force for the future. I do not run a trade school. My students know that I do not give them assignments so they can make more money in the future. While jobs, money and trade schools are all important things, as a liberal arts educator, none of those things are the central reason for an education. I believe that well-educated students will be better prepared to specialize and focus their training, but that all comes after a liberal arts foundation.

I teach and study with my students so that we all can be more fully human, more completely the people we are created to be, more wise, more virtuous. Specifically as a grade school teacher, I love education because it is general, it is broad, it is liberal. It is liberal because it is such an integral part of what makes us "free" men, people who have been given all they need to pursue a full and complete life.

And as the dots start connecting in my mind, I realized that this is why CrossFit, and especially CFWSC, is so perfect for me. When I decided that I needed to change my life, there were many factors, but a driving factor and what keeps me going, is the realization that I am not doing all of this to lose weight, to look better, to wear a smaller size...I am eating better and working to build strength and fitness in order to be a more complete person. And that makes the pain from those weighted lunges yesterday worth it.