CrossFit the Danish Way
When I received the e-mail that I was invited to join the CrossFit gym in a nearby neighborhood, I took it to be spam. In the year since I sent my application, I had forgotten I signed up for the waiting list1. This was the beginning of my very Danish CrossFit journey.
The gym2 was housed in the local municipality’s sports facilities and has been running for over a decade in a quiet neighborhood in the outer rim of the greater Copenhagen area. The people operating the gym are people who live in the area. They volunteer their time to make it happen, and come together in assemblies to vote on the direction of the gym. Even the trainers reflect this: some are professional personal trainers with CrossFit certifications, others are people with day jobs who want to work out at an inconvenient hour. The gym is really a community of the people in it, much more than a commercial gym would be. This is very typical in Denmark. Danes build clubs and associations for any purpose, from affordable housing to aquarium maintenance… Government is very supportive of this and enables these efforts by providing location, some seed funding etc.
This being Denmark, all communication takes place on Facebook. The gym is why I have a Facebook account again after going without one for the past 15 years. The privacy nightmare that it is doesn’t seem to bother my fellow gym goers. The result of all this community effort is that I pay about a third of what the private gyms in the city center charge, and I keep up with the community through the same site propaganda is spewed.
When I showed up for the first class, people made a point of welcoming me. I understand some of this is CrossFit ethos, but this was one of the few places I felt welcomed in Denmark. Not just allowed in, but made to feel like I belonged. Danes are usually a live-and-let-live kind of people. They are very private, and do not go out of their way to interact. Some of this is due to their respect for your privacy, and some of it is that they have full schedules. By meeting them in a club, I was able to finally be an insider.
The people attending are quite mixed. There are a few internationals like myself, but most are Danes from all walks of life. The gym being community run, it reflects the range of people in the neighborhood. People bring their kids to Saturday family sessions. When you show up for a 16:00 class, it is very common to see a few kids on their iPads waiting for their parents to be done. There are people that grew up in the gym, started out waiting for their parents, and graduated first to the teenage team, then to regular sessions. There are old ladies with shoulders like boulders, and competitive CrossFit athletes that take part in competitions…
The sense of belonging, and the endorphins I get from working out got me addicted to working out way more than I ever did before. The intensity of the workouts is also higher than anything I would put myself through. A friend of mine who works out in one of the commercial gyms finds our workouts to be insane, and I agree. The reps are just impossible with good form. I guess that is why everyone is kipping in pull-ups. After years of focusing on good calisthenics form I still can’t bring myself to kip.
That said, this year I did my first Murph. Here we are in Denmark, celebrating an American soldier by doing insane numbers of calisthenics exercises. A very CrossFit kind of absurdity. Not having done any olympic lifting in my life, I find that part of CrossFit to be the most intimidating. We do lots of lifts, with questionable form… The trainers try to correct the posture, and movements, but the goals set at such high reps often lead to failure. I keep the weight low on bars, and give myself permission to grow in time.
So yes, that is my very Danish CrossFit experience. The gym has brought me a sense of belonging, and a group of friends I look forward to seeing at the end of the day. I am happy to have cracked this part of the Danish code.
