Location
Easy to find, good space for size of club it is. They even recently installed a shower.
Equipment
More than enough for the size club and membership they have – very good array
Instruction
Ashley was professional and knowledgeable and gave me great tips on butterfly pull-ups
Vibe
Hard to gauge during my visit because attendance was light, but the people that were there were extremely friendly and positive
I was a bit nervous visiting another box for the first time. You get kind of use to your coach, the other athletes you work out with regularly – after you get used to working out at that intensity in the first place, your own box feel like home. It’s safe.
So this commitment I made to myself to visit other boxes every month or so – for as long as I can keep that up given how many of them there are in our area of the country and how spread out they are – seemed like a great idea, even if a little intimidating. But if there’s one thing I hoped I could count on is the sense of community in Crossfit.
Most boxes have a drop-in policy. Sign a waiver, pay a small one-time visit fee and you join into the class. But this being my first visit, I still wasn’t sure what I would encounter. Would the members be cool with a visitor? How would the coach be? What would the class feel like? Was I prepared for whatever WOD got thrown up on the board?
I actually scoped out Apple Valley Crossfit a few days earlier, when I went down to the valley to visit a friend that lives near there. As I was about to head home, I checked the box hours and saw that they were still open. So I dropped in to ask in person about the drop-in process. I met the coach running the class that night – not the same one that would be there on the Saturday I’d be working out – and he said there was no problem with me dropping by. I just had to come in a little early to sign the waiver and pay a fee.
On the morning of, I arrived about 15 minutes early and met Ashley, the coach for the Saturday morning class, and three other athletes there for the class. I was told Saturdays were often a light day for attendance during the summer.
I high fived the other athletes and we went straight into a warmup and then the WOD, starting with squat snatches every minute on the minute, building to heavy. My patellar tendonitis was in full gear at that point, so I avoided the squat and did power snatch instead, hitting a PR while I was at it of 155lbs – mainly because I don’t think I had ever actually tested or recorded that particular movement. But it felt pretty good in spite of my knee. I can’t recall exactly how many rounds we did. Something like 8, with a slight increase in the reps as we went up, then a slight decrease as we got to the last couple of rounds while the weight increased.
The second WOD was a metabolic WOD, with wall walks that included 5 knee-ups within the vertical position, then burpees followed by walking lunges. Five rounds of that, as I recall.
All in all, everything felt pretty familiar, and that felt pretty good – like a validation of my fitness level as well as the community spirit crossfit engenders.
Apple Valley’s location was easy to find, just inside of Coldbrook, and they had a nice open space with plenty of room for 10-12 athletes to work out at once. More might fit with the right planning, but then you might run low on bars, plates, etc. not unlike what we have at Rocky Lake. They had similar square footage, but it was spread out a little differently – more of a square than a rectangle, with a large 9 block grid rig in the centre. It seemed like they had largely the same set of equipment we have at Rocky Lake.
