Last night, I attended the charter meeting of a new group. The Coca CrossFit Book Club is a pet project of Jessica M. Shultzaberger. Jessica says that the focus of our endeavors will be books that provide mind food for our fitness goals. The first book we discussed is Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath. It's a book that translates statistically significant research arrived at by psychologists who study ways that personality traits can be revealed in tests.

I read it, not expecting to learn a whole lot since this is my area of expertise. But I was surprised. I learned a huge lesson from this slim volume, and the lesson didn't have anything to do with my fitness goals. It had everything to do with an issue that has troubled me for a very long time.

I've been a fitness bum for more than twenty years. I hired a personal trainer back in the day, back when moms with toddlers in tow hadn't even heard of such a thing. Though I'm not much of a runner, I enjoy strength training, spinning, yoga, pilates, and hiking. There was even a time when I joined the Swim-cap Set for water aerobics. (Stop laughing. I was healing a torn meniscus.) For a while, I got up at 4:30 in the morning and drove fifteen miles for the sadistic pleasure (don't you just love oxymorons?) of working out with Cleveland's own Boot Camp Babes. Why, I consider my workouts to be such an essential part of health and well being, my two amazing trainers-turned-friends appear in the Acknowledgements of Miracles Every Day.

But it was not until this past spring that I discovered the elite workout system known as CrossFit.

Thanks to my friend, Mary Gigliotti, I was introduced to Kate "Killer" Rawlings, owner of and coach at Coca CrossFit in North Ridgeville, Ohio. Kate has made a name for herself by breaking most, if not all, of the rules in various and sundry areas of life.

To look at her, you'd never guess that Kate is one of the nation's strongest young women. She's petite:  five foot-you've-gotta-be-kidding-me. But a dynamo.

Kate fell head over heels and toes-to-the-bar in love with the sense of community this fitness approach offers. CrossFit is to the world of fitness what Harley Davidson is to the world of motorcycles. It's a community. CrossFit competition brought out the Killer in Kate; she (power-) snatched a spot as the 29th strongest woman in the nation.

She threw the die, eschewed the easy paycheck, and opened her own gym. Her passion is contagious. Her work ethic is impressive. Most days, she coaches nine hours--on her feet teaching, demonstrating, encouraging, inspiring men, women, teens, and kids. Weekends are more of the same, with roving WODs (Workouts of the Day), competitions, and, sometimes, happy hours with the gang. Word of mouth is spreading the news of a compassionate and compelling personal coach who really cares about her flock of peeps. More and more people are finding their way to her Mills Road gym.

As for me, I came to Kate with a rotator cuff that had been torn for three years. I refused to have surgery on it. I can be stubborn that way. I'm glad that I did, because within just a few months of training under Kate's watchful eye, the pain vanished.

Since the sense of community is what drew Kate so completely in to the CrossFit circle, Kate gave her blessing to Jessica's idea and was there to help launch her company's book club. The round-table discussion mirrored the atmosphere at Coca:  warm, convivial, accepting, but challenging. When it came my turn to describe what I learned from Strengths Finder 2.0 I found myself trying to catch a room full of strangers up on decades of my life.

How could I explain the origins of a life-issue? What it is like to crave the time aside that it takes to be a writer?

In a busy house with a large family and an extensive circle of friends, it seems that something having to do with someone else's life is always clamoring for my attention. And so, I've struggled with frustration and anger.

True, I'm ridiculously driven. I have a need to do, do, do more, more, more for many, many, many. At odds with this drive is the need to create.

There you have it:  your strength is your weakness but your weakness is your strength. Yin and yang. Frick and frack.

Magically, this little book showed me that I've been incredibly lucky. My particular constellation of strengths is not just utilized in my life. It is optimized. For example, I would have wasted much of what makes me Me if I had one child instead of six.

I know now that the way I drain every drop out of every day is a natural consequence of my strengths. This book club turned out to be a gift that I gave to myself. Reading the pages of our first book was like unwrapping that gift. What I found inside was serenity.

I'm done with being frustrated. I am finally at peace with someone named Maura who feels most at home when she is engaged in the act of striving.