Kids, don’t try this at home.
Our build-out process went very smoothly. We did everything perfectly on the first try and didn’t make any mistakes. Operating out of a garage space is a piece of cake and it’s easy to accommodate everyone that shows up for a WOD because we have all the equipment we could ever want.
HA! Yea right.
Here are some highlights and tips for starting a garage facility:
Put metal cages around any exposed light bulbs – The ceiling of our garage is high enough to jump rope inside (sweet!) but apparently not underneath the light bulb. Smashing the bulb into a million slivery pieces onto a floor where people place their hands and lay down is a tedious exercise in thorough clean-up.
Weather – have a back up plan. 16″ of snow, no problem. Get creative. Shovel for warm-up. Snow angel burpees. Practice POSE running technique on the sheets of ice covering the road!
Temperature inside the garage - Our garage is nothing more than a one-car framed wood box with a cement floor. If it’s 32 degrees outside, it’s probably 34 degrees inside. Tell me this, are you inspired to do a WOD while glancing up at a frost covered pull-up bar?? Seriously, frost and ice particles! Ever seen A Christmas Story?
Sure, ok, I understand that Flick sticks his tongue to the frozen flag pole and not his sweat covered hands; HOWEVER, I had visions of my sweat covered hands freezing to the pull-up bar, then me being stuck in a never ending lat stretch, and having no way down but for Eric to rip me and my hands from the bar while my hard earned and well-kept calluses remained frozen in place.
So, Eric got out the blowtorch. Yup, we blowtorched our pull-up bar. It worked quite well and the warm bar actually helped to prevent my hands from going numb while doing the other exercises.
Stall mats are heavy – The rear suspension of Eric’s 4Runner may never be the same. Apparently the (very old) truck was not designed to transport 800 pounds of rubber. Sadly, the 4Runner still looks like it’s carrying 8 mats that are weighting down the back end even though we removed them over two weeks ago.
Stall mats do not provide enough cushion for sit-ups.
After completing somewhere around 150 sit-ups while lying on our stall mat floor I felt a painful throbbing on my tailbone. Reaching down the back of my pants to feel what was going on I found a tender to the touch area. I basically gave myself a tailbone rug burn. Awesome. The scab is healing nicely although I have carefully chosen my underwear the past few days. Buy some yoga mats or foam squares for sit-ups or else you’ll end up like this…
Ok a little graphic but hopefully this will deter EVERYONE from attempting to do large quantities of sit-ups on stall mats. OUCH!
We utilized the CrossFit Journal and the message board to piece together our facility. Those two resources provide all the information we needed to build-out a fantastic garage facility. I’ll track down and post the specific articles and posts if people are interested.
We’re almost done, pictures soon, need to paint.
A blowtorch will quickly melt any frost or ice on a galvanized pipe.
