I didn’t know if I’d like it.

Bill was confident I would. He knows that I like good, hard exercise, that when I finish a workout, I like to be gasping, panting, drenched through with sweat, and enjoying that crazy clean feeling in my bronchial tubes–a clean that only comes from breathing extra hard for a long time.

Yes, he knew I’d like it.

But I didn’t know if I could do it. It’s not like I had studied up, or watched YouTube videos, or really knew all that much about it.

But what I did know was enough: CrossFit meant weights. Not the pink ones you held loosely while striding down a walking path in the 90’s. And not the ones you velcroed to your ankles for a workout in the 80’s.

No. Real weights. The kind you lift on barbells. CrossFit had barbells.

I was intimidated by barbells. Very.

But if I’ve learned anything from being married to Bill Stevenson these twenty-five years, it’s that his ideas are sound. And that he likes me. Lots. And that he likes for me to get to do what I enjoy.

So, at his gentle persistence, I tried CrossFit. And I love it.

I won’t say there wasn’t a lot to learn. There was, for starters, those intimidating barbells: how to hold them, how to lift them, which ones (of course) to work with. The placement of knees over toes, the angle of the hips and back, and where to pull from when you are ready to pull them up to and past your face and then (miracle) Over Your Head. All of this is Very Important.

And there are so many ways to maneuver the barbell, each of them working the body and its muscle groups in different ways, each vital to do correctly. The lexicon surrounding these efforts remains a point of practice for me: press, bench press, push press. Clean and jerk, split jerk, thruster. Front squat, back squat, deadlift. Almost every time (still), I need a review: Which one is that again?

Slowly, I am building strength, adding weights to my bars and just seeing if this time I can do the workout at a new (heavier) weight. Success–even small–is always a thrill.

There are other ways to work out at CrossFit, though. Beyond the barbells, I mean. Kettle bells, wall balls and slam balls. A rig to hang from and (try to) do pull-ups. Ropes for the climbing that dangle from the ceiling. And then there’s your own body to work against via push-ups, box jumps, and burpees. Or you can run: 200 meters, 100 meters, distances we’ve memorized in the parking lot.

The workouts are always different, and they always cost me. The music is always loud enough (I hope) to cover the sound of my groaning, but never loud enough to mask the bang and rattle of barbells hitting the floor. And the very best workouts end with a quiet room, the music off, a gym floor covered in prone bodies, the sound of lungs sucking air.

The workout is different every time, and every time I walk out grateful: to be learning; to be (at least somewhat) succeeding; that my body is able to do this.

And I also walk out spent: red-faced, soaking wet, and a little bit stronger than I was yesterday.

Always so worth the effort.

Saturday’s workout was special. Specially designed to celebrate the number 25, soundtracked by the greatest hits of 1990. Bill and I were celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary, and Bull City Crossfit was celebrating with us.

And–another of Bill’s wonderful ideas–the workout was also a fundraiser for the Samaritan Health Center next door, a free clinic providing medical and dental care for those in our community in need. For every team completing the workout at the prescribed weight, we were making a donation to Samaritan.

The gym felt festive that morning. Many of the “regulars” were there: people we usually work out with over the course of days. But some “outside the box” friends joined us, too. And whether the athletes that day were friends or not, they offered us hearty congratulations. We were reminded, again and again, that twenty-five years of marriage is a pretty big deal, a considerable accomplishment.

It was nice.

The workout itself was hard. Very. It turns out that twenty-five is a fairly high number, a fact that became clear to me on Saturday when I was on burpee number nineteen, or had completed only sixteen of the requisite twenty-five box jumps. We had to do twenty-five of everything, you see: burpees, kettlebell swings and wall balls, push-ups, slam balls, and box jumps.

And when we had completed twenty-five of each of these, we started over again.

Why? Another Crossfit term: AMRAP. As Many Repetitions As Possible. And of course, the workout had to last for 25 minutes.

There was some relief built into it, a fact that makes Saturday workouts fun, and that was especially significant for this celebration of our anniversary: everyone works in pairs.

So, while I started with the burpees and then went on to kettlebell swings, I only had to keep going until Bill came back from his 200 meter run around the parking lot.

This is meant to be a relief: just when you are Sick To Death of doing slam balls, your partner comes back and picks up where you left off, so that between the two of you, the trouble of those slam balls gets divided up quite nicely.

The metaphor, I think, is obvious, perfect for a wedding anniversary. We were sharing the load, so to speak. We were pacing each other. We were relieving the other’s burden, and all the while working toward a common goal.

Before the workout, a handful of people asked us how we’d made it. Twenty-five years! What makes your marriage work? In answer, I might have offered them the metaphor: teamwork, plain and simple.

Except.

It wasn’t until I was out the door for my second run that I realized it. We were somewhere in the midst of wall-balls at the time, or maybe it was push-ups, and I headed out to run and hit the wall of heat. The North Caroline June handed us temperatures in the nineties, and running in that thick air felt like a slog through loose sand.

What should have been a break from the intense indoor workout became a costly dalliance with humidity. The sweat that had beaded in and begun to drip through my hair was now in my eyes, and I found myself running with one eye closed. But clear vision seemed less important than getting (somehow?) to the end of the run.

I returned to the gym more exhausted than I left it. Bill gave me the count (seventeen box jumps) and left for his run. I regarded the box through squinted eyes, my body bent, hands on my knees. I couldn’t breathe, let alone jump (or even step) onto a box, and certainly not eight times. After which I would have to commence with burpees. Twenty-five of them.

And we were only (how many?) Not Very Many minutes in.

I jumped onto the box.

I don’t know how many times we made it through the workout, although everyone wrote down their team’s score at the end. I do know that I always ran (albeit slowly) through the parking lot. But in the circuit of work indoors, I will confess to stopping once or twice. To just catching my breath. To (a time or two) spending part of Bill’s run just trying to recover–which mean that our incremental drive toward twenty-five was Decidedly Slowed.

And I decided through vision bleary with sweat, that this was the metaphor. Because if I’ve learned anything in twenty-five years of marriage, it’s that (at times) it’s Incredibly Hard. And that (at times) one of you is going through something that means the other has to pull All the Weight. That (at times) you are really just too exhausted or sad or incapable to continue. And that, if you aren’t both decidedly and definitely All In, well….

At the end of the workout, a coach-friend asked me what makes a marriage work. How is it done? he wanted to know.

How to summarize? How to encapsulate twenty-five years of joy and fulfillment and of believing in that joy and fulfillment when, at the time, it sometimes is Just So Hard?

My answer: You have to decide that This Is What You Are Doing. It may look like raising children. It may look like going on business trips. It may seem like buying a house, or remodeling a bathroom, or saving money to buy a new car.

But when you’re running around the parking lot, doing a workout at Crossfit, that’s the only thing you’re doing. And when you’re doing box jumps, you’ve got to jump onto the box.

And when you’re married to that Someone who has, in turn, given his whole life to you, you’re Being Married (not getting. being) All Of The Time.

By miracle, by grace, Bill and I have celebrated twenty-five years. Some of them, for various reasons, have been Incredibly Difficult. But coming out on the other side of Difficult, we have found we are stronger Every Time.

And Every Time, it’s so very Worth the Effort.