This past weekend in San Francisco saw both the Folsom Street Fair and a Fight Gone Bad fundraiser at our Crossfit gym. The similarities between the two events took us by surprise.
Folsom Street Fair is the world’s largest celebration of “Leather Pride,” including fetish fashion, bondage and sadomasochism. Folsom Street is closed to traffic and multiple stages are erected on which kinky, typically backroom activities are brought into the full light of day. While there are also artists and vendors, the main attraction is the opportunity to be strapped to any number of medieval contraptions and spanked into submission while strangers cheer you on.
By the standards of Folsom Street, our lives are admittedly vanilla. When we want to experience pain and humiliation in public, we simply go to the gym.
Folsom Street Fair is the world’s largest celebration of “Leather Pride,” including fetish fashion, bondage and sadomasochism. Folsom Street is closed to traffic and multiple stages are erected on which kinky, typically backroom activities are brought into the full light of day. While there are also artists and vendors, the main attraction is the opportunity to be strapped to any number of medieval contraptions and spanked into submission while strangers cheer you on.
By the standards of Folsom Street, our lives are admittedly vanilla. When we want to experience pain and humiliation in public, we simply go to the gym.
Three blocks from Folsom Street sits United Barbell Crossfit Soma. For anyone unfamiliar with Crossfit, it’s a fitness program designed around short, very intense and constantly varied workouts. Every day is different. One day might include 400-meter sprints. The next might require heavy Olympic lifts alternating with handstand pushups. The beauty of Crossfit is that you have no idea what your next physical challenge will be. These constantly changing workouts play perfectly to our short attention spans.
The one consistent element running through all Crossfit workouts is that they hurt. Although the workouts tend to be short, they usually require an all out effort. The Fight Gone Bad workout is a perfect example.
The one consistent element running through all Crossfit workouts is that they hurt. Although the workouts tend to be short, they usually require an all out effort. The Fight Gone Bad workout is a perfect example.
Know Your Lingo: Instead of “Dungeon Master” or “Mistress,” Crossfit uses the term “Coach.”
We will not describe all of the individual exercises that make up Fight Gone Bad. Listening to a Crossfitter describe his or her workout is a like listening to a child explain the plot of a movie. It’s interesting to other kids, but no one else should be forced to sit through it.
Fact: Both Crossfit and the Folsom Street Fair can involve “talking dirty” although, in the case of Crossfit, we like to call it “exercise induced Tourette’s.”
The exact details of Fight Gone Bad can be found on the United Barbell Website. What matters is that it’s 17 minutes of anaerobic hell. It doesn’t seem like 17 minutes is long enough to get a full workout, but in this case it was more than enough time to completely destroy us. 17 minutes of Fight Gone Bad reduced us to lying on the living room floor for the rest of the day. We were physically and emotionally spent.
Fact: The main difference between Crossfit and Folsom Street Fair is that Crossfit lacks the concept of a “safe word.”
Of all of the things these two events had in common, the most important, was their shared support for local charities. The United Barbell Fight Gone Bad Fundraiser raised over $3700 for Rubicon Programs, a local organization focusing of homeless advocacy and support. The Folsom Street Fair raised over $300,000 for local and national charities including the AIDS Housing Alliance, the Mission Neighborhood Health Center, the Queer Cultural Center and Westside Community Services. In the end, both events could claim the slogan: A little pleasure, a little pain and a lot of good for the community.
Side Note To The Crossfit Faithful: We managed to write about FGB without too many boring details. But it would be sick and wrong not to at least share our scores. Taking into account that we are old and that Steven is asthmatic, we think we crushed it. Steven scored 249. Andrea scored 278. Both of us got a PR.
