What you discover when you can't fake it anymore

Today, no systems, no patterns from other contexts. Just something I discovered about myself through sport.

In CrossFit, when I was starting out, I did something: I assembled dream teams for competitions. I'd pick the strongest, put them together, thinking that winning was about adding up the best forces. Different times, 16 years ago the level was much lower than today.

It doesn't work like that. When you're weak, it's not other people's strength that makes you stronger. Physically, I mean. Your body is your body. End of.

Then I moved to rowing. And there I saw a bloke doing exactly that thing. Systematically. He'd pick the strongest, put them together, assemble super-teams to increase the chance of winning. They called him "the selector". What a vulgar, arrogant term. And the irony is that he was neither physically nor technically gifted, nor did he have the competence to actually make a proper selection. But someone had put him in that role and he, abusing his power, didn't look anyone in the face, trampling over anyone who wasn't "strong". Though strong... whatever.

And I wanted to insult him. And hate him fiercely, viciously.

Not because he was technically wrong. But because I saw myself. What I was before I understood it wasn't the right way to win. That pathetic thing of wanting to win so badly you don't realise you're not building a team. You're just using other people's strength to make up for your shortcomings.

It's not a bit like cheating. It's proper cheating.

The difference between sport and non-sport

CrossFit isn't even a sport. It's training. Sharing. Community. There the mask falls on day one. The more you act like an athlete, the harder you get battered. Your body tells the truth: this is how much you can handle, this is where you end up, this is your structural limit.

At first you try, try again, don't give up. You think it's about training, determination, willpower. Then you realise no. It's structural. Your body gets to there. It's not a defeat, it's a fact.

And at that point you slow down. You prioritise the quality of what you can do, rather than the quantity of things you could do badly.

Rowing, on the other hand, is sport. Proper competition. Races. Medals. Rankings. And I arrived there thinking it worked like CrossFit. Community, shared suffering, growing together.

I even changed house. Changed life. I left a rowing club in Switzerland where everyone was more genuine, for another where I could learn to row better. I believed in it. And in the meantime I got trapped in the pandemic madness. Alone, literally, in Italy where coming back was quite difficult after being used to Switzerland.

The temple of rowing

I'd chosen what I thought was the right place. The temple of rowing. Where technique is perfect, where you work properly, where you build something real.

What I discovered is that textbook technique is useless if that sense of team doesn't exist. And in that place the sense of team simply wasn't there. There was constant showing off about who's got the biggest between clubs. What for many was a sort of lighthouse in the night was actually run by a board that was collusive and mafioso in its ways.

Appearance versus substance.

Exactly the opposite of what I do for work, where I spend my life looking for real mechanisms beneath facades, taking apart what seems to be to find what is. And I found myself in a place where the facade was everything. Where you functioned like an engine: a piston breaks? You change it. One piece is worth another, as long as it runs well. You're a piston. If you don't run as required, they change you.

There's no intimacy in suffering. There's selection. The best win, the others watch. No one holds your head whilst you vomit and then laughs with you afterwards. No one respects your limits if your limits are lower than those needed to win.

In CrossFit, if I've held your head whilst you were vomiting during a WOD, you can't really act too cool with me afterwards. There's an embarrassing intimacy. Everyone sees everyone. Everyone falls. Everyone discovers their own limits in front of others.

And when the mask falls for everyone, not just for you but also for others, genuine relationships form. Solid ones. Intimate in a way that's difficult to explain.

In competitive rowing that community doesn't exist. There's victory. There's the greed to excel even when objectively it's not the case. There's that bloke who assembled super-teams systematically, compulsively, until it became pathetic because at a certain point you have to surrender.

Which was me, before I understood.

What remains

That you can win without building anything. You can pick the best, assemble them, and bring home medals. But you're not creating a team. You're just using spare parts.

That structural limits exist. And that accepting them is stronger than denying them.

That real intimacy comes from shared vulnerability, not from victories.

That you can change house and life to chase something real, and find yourself in a theatre of appearances where all that matters is the facade.

And that seeing yourself in someone else doing the same shit thing you used to do is a brutal mirror.

Sport doesn't always give you something. Sometimes it takes away. It takes away the possibility of faking. It takes away the mask. It takes away the illusion of being better than you are.

And perhaps that's exactly what's needed.