October marked my one year of attending 7pm, Tuesday-Thursday CrossFit classes. I started due to encouragement from my younger sister (she is a CrossFit coach in Colorado) and wanting to have something in the evening that required me to leave the lab. Plus, I was looking for a community outside of graduate school. I have now started the fifth year of my PhD program in Earth System Science at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability, and I am an agricultural soil scientist. My research focuses on ‘circular’ nutrient practices for growing vegetable crops in California’s Salinas Valley (about 1.5 hours south of our gym). Did you know that the Salinas Valley of California grows over half of the nation’s vegetables? I am looking at crop fertilizers that can be made from waste (wastewater, household food scraps, yard clippings, etc.) or by ‘recycling’ on-farm nutrients.

Long story short, my work requires digging many, many, many holes and taking lots of soil samples, along with walking through a huge field of super sandy soil for up to 8 hours a day. Last week I found myself in the field needing to take 0-30cm soil cores since we are trying to quantify the carbon content in the cover crop roots. The tool of choice for this task is a slidehammer with a 30cm metal corer attached. Once I picked up the slidehammer plus core (see photo), it felt too familiar. I felt myself transported back to our gym and to carrying a barbell from the wall rack into the rig.

Although my sister used to tell me about the benefits of CrossFit for functional fitness and strength training as being very important, I didn’t believe her until I saw it for myself. I can now work long days out in the field, carry buckets of soil and lift heavy containers of supplies. For two days of root core sampling, I lifted our ‘barbell’ back and forth across the field to our sampling area for three hours straight- only to do it again the next morning another two hours. So even when I have to miss class for fieldwork, I am doing CrossFit out in the field. If it’s a tough workout at CFPA, I tell myself that I can do anything since I am doing my PhD. Likewise, during a hard day in the field or lab, I remind myself that if I can do CrossFit, I can do this.

Thanks to my wonderful coaches Ali and Andrew for all of your support and encouragement, I never regret the bike ride to class!