Crossfit bible stories?

You don’t have to believe in anything other than the value of exercise to work up a good sweat, but lots of us observe the season of Lent this time of year, and my ongoing attempt to live a life whose parts are more connected to each other got me thinking that looking for Crossfit stories in the bible is either a fools’ errand or a fun exercise for Christians with chalk dust and callouses on their hands.

I can be counted among both groups. On the one hand, I realize that Crossfit is a core strength and conditioning program pieced together in the late 1980s by a former gymnast. In what I take to be evidence for God's sense of humor, Crossfit was introduced to the world after gaining popularity in Santa Cruz, a city whose Spanish-to -English translation means "Holy Cross." Given the timeline involved, it's easy to assume that there are no Crossfit stories in the bible.

On the other hand, I also know that from a certain point of view, if you think in terms of definitions that are older than Coach Glassman, the whole bible is a “Crossfit” story. That point is easier to explain when you set aside ten physical skills to think in terms of the “training” that God gave twelve Jewish tribes and then twelve apostles before franchising his message out to other people.

Crazy stuff? Maybe. But exercise, at least, is in the bible like a song that you only hear part of when you’re close to your maximum number of sets and feel like you’re going to fall over. I like to think of biblical exercise as a kind of Crossfit prototype, even if my reasons seem ridiculous. After all, Jesus said that anyone who follows him must be ready to “take up his cross.” Then he showed us how to do what we cannot do without him. Let’s call that “coaching.”

By now you’re probably thinking either “okaaaay” or “Dude, Are you sure you didn’t inhale too much incense the last time they burned that in church?” Let me come back down out of the clouds with a few examples taken mostly from two people, Arthur Blessit and “Prodigal Jon.”

Blessit has been carrying a cross on hikes around the world for years. By his calculations, Jesus did more walking than most of us realize. Blessit’s “conservative estimate” is that Jesus walked south to north (Egypt to Lebanon) about 436 miles, and from the Mediterranean Sea inland “at least as far as 100 miles (160 km).” A web page explains how Blessit figured this out. His numbers are probably too exact, but they are plausible, and that’s a lot of exercise, not counting the carpentry without power tools that Jesus learned from Joseph.

“Prodigal Jon” is a blogger who looked through the bible in search of “the greatest exercise-focused bible verse ever.” Jon says that verse is Isaiah 40:31, because it includes the first reference to “God’s triathlon” of “walking,” “running,” and (I kid you not) “hang gliding.”

Other people proposed favorite verses of their own, like 2 Samuel 22:33-37 (“It’s got weight lifting, extreme hiking, street fighting, world’s-strongest-man-style bar or bow bending, and running.”). One person nominated the hard-working woman in Proverbs 31 with the comment that “sista’s calves must have been rockin’!”

I also like some of the New Testament verses, such as 2 Timothy 2:5, which puts an emphasis on good form (in the NIV translation, “Similarly, if anyone competes as an athlete, he does not receive the victor's crown unless he competes according to the rules.”).

Sometimes the usefulness of exercise is implied, because it isn’t the point of a story but leaves traces there anyway. Think of John 21, when a mixed group of apostles and disciples catches so many fish that they cannot haul their nets into shore or their boats without help.

How about this one: in first-century Jewish culture, adults did not climb trees, so when a tax collector named Zaccheus climbed a tree to see Jesus, he was humbled at least as much as some of us are at the end of a “Waiter’s Walk” with a 35# barbell. But he climbed the tree anyway.

The story of Easter Sunday morning, when “the other disciple outran Peter” while both were hurrying toward the (empty) tomb of Jesus, is another favorite.

How about a hand for the people who carried the paralyzed man in Mark 2:1-12? There were four of them and only one of him, so this was not a case of unusual strength, but it certainly counts as “functional fitness.” The best part is that when they couldn’t get their friend through the door of the house where Jesus was preaching, they lowered him through the roof. Talk about "improvise, adapt, and overcome."

It’s great stuff. And maybe – just maybe – Crossfit stuff.