Wee Beasty Progress

The pullup station has become the center piece of the CrossFit Gym.  The original CrossFit HQ (at least the original when CrossFit.com went live) had pullup bars modestly placed in the frame of the overhead garage door.  Nothing fancy, just a horizontal bar with a center support.  An additional indoor set was hung off the interior balcony.  Still the apparatus was modest and forgotten if you didn’t look for it.  However, in many affiliates, by necessity, the pullup station is a construct with it’s own gravity field.  It is it’s own building.  The pullup bars at Ground Zero are somewhere in between.  The Wee Beasty is a beast.  It has been a pesky beast to construct creating a total of 3 schematic changes and dozens of trips to Lowes as carnage.  This past weekend, the Wee Beasty was finaly raised and tied together.  She will be fully operational as a pull-up station by the end of the week.  The plan is for her to grow organically with the gym.  Eventually, we will add bar dip stations and crown her with even higher bars to hang Olympic rings and ropes from.

Stay tuned.

By far the biggest challenge has been the set up of the pull-up station. The first weekend consisted of cleaning the space. The next weekend was supposed to be the weekend we set up the pull-up station.

I was determined to knock it out in one day. I put in my order for steel pipe and all the connection and screws on Wednesday at Lowe’s to be picked up on Saturday. Well, Lowe’s decided it wasn’t too big a deal to leave out an elbow connection or two. They politely marked the number they were able to set aside on the list I gave them… but decided it was too much trouble to get the missing pieces from a nearby store. They left that up to me. Bah! I’ll get the rest later! Anyway, I charge off with my shorted loot, still convinced and determined to hang the pull-up station TODAY dang-it!

Well long story short: it didn’t happen. Not close. My plan to have a pull-up system hung off the wall was great, except the wall is completely inadequate to support a pull-up system of steel, let alone a bunch of people kipping for time.

So I spent the rest of the week making plans to beef up the wall that I wanted to hang the station from. That plan didn’t work either.   So I sat down, with pen and paper, and devised a set up that will anchor to the floor and spent the remainder of Saturday morning running around returning material and purchasing new material.  And so it is that I have come up with a contraption I will call “The Wee Beasty”. I think it will serve Ground Zero better than the idea of suspending the station from the wall.  Here is a pick of the progress we made last Saturday.