My buddy Russell is down in the Bay Area this week. (check it out, Russ, another mention). As always, good to see him. It sucks when your friends move away and great when you get a chance to see them.

When I met Russell back in January of last year he was a rather stout 5'9", 280 (or so). When he moved up to Seattle at beginning of this year, he started taking fitness seriously. I'm not joking here. Russell is still 5'9", but now he weighs less than me -- I'm still around 185. It you don't think that's remarkable, you're smoking crack. He's lost a hundred pounds in less than a year and didn't mainline heroin once (allegedly).

I used to drag Russell around the slopes. That'll never happen again. I can't keep up with him. This morning we went to the gym and Russ introduced me to his workout style called Cross Fit, the goal of which is to achieve elite fitness. It is the realm of Delta Force and Navy SEALs, not lazy jews, but I went along because I wanted to see this miracle of fitness, my old rolly-polly friend who used to down IPAs by the fistful and was a master of the barbeque who now counts calories, eats no bread or really nothing refined and is just in sick shape.

The basic idea of Cross Fit is that you do excises that you work muscles you'd use in the real world. The goal is not to build massive muscles, rather it is build all your functional muscles. And they do this by coming multiple movements in an interval, with little or no breaks and timed. Always timed so you can track your progress and compete.

With that in mind, we hit my gym this morning. We did some warm ups basic stuff, pull ups, push lups and some work with the medicine ball. Then came the real action. Russell set up a simple program. Rowing for 25 calories (the machines measure), 10 squat thrusters (like Olympic-style weight lifting) and 25 sit-ups. No stopping. No whinning. No barfing. Sounded easy enough. Boy, was I mistaken.

It took about 2 rounds for Russell to lap me. He finished in 13 minutes and change, even pushing up more weight on the thrusters and didn't seem to be breathing hard. I was dying after 3 intervals. I felt light-headed, dizzy, nauseous. Russell was pushing me and pushing me hard. He was freaking the people out on the elipticals next to us in my normally low key gym. I pressed on, fighting it every bit of the way, wanting to quit, wanting Russell to fucking shut up and go away, but he wouldn't. Some friend.

I finally finished the 5th round, pushing meekly through the final rowing, thrusters and sit ups. I was spent like I haven't been in years: sucking air, oozing sweat while I stared up at the ceiling and tried to recover. It took me more than 26 minutes.

I spent most of the rest of the day on the couch watching football and I don't feel bad about it for a second.

Rusell, you are a freak of nature. Way to go, amigo.