I’m going to the CrossFit Games.
Since qualifying for the Games, I have been in a state of denial. I’ve told multiple people that I’m just waiting for someone to take it away. But here we are, a week out from the day I hit the competition floor, and we are leaving Saturday. Nothing is changing that now. I'm going to the CrossFit Games.
I’m not really sure where the denial stems from. Maybe it comes with the territory, when the rest of life still goes on. I’m coaching a full schedule, running a business, being a dog mom to two 85lb greyhounds, and just generally being an adult. In addition to that, the year on a whole has been a rough one. It started when we lost our 3 year old retired greyhound Chacha to lymphoma the first week in January. Losing her rocked our world, and suddenly CrossFit took a back seat in my life. That was just the beginning. It seemed like we couldn’t catch a break in 2021, and suddenly it was the Open, and I had to decide to compartmentalize my life in order to survive a brutal qualifier season.
It’s also possible to blame my denial on the past. This is something that I’ve worked toward for the last 10 seasons. But it's something that dates back even before that. I started doing CrossFit in 2008, fresh out of swimming in college, looking for something to keep me occupied. Not necessarily competitively, but I spent 16 years of my life working out hard, for hours a day, and I found myself bored. Enter CrossFit. In 2012, I said, "I want to go to Regionals."
We had no idea what we were doing.
When I qualified for my first regional in 2012, my Coach Lance and I had NO IDEA what we were doing. I weighed 120lbs soaking wet, had a max clean of 115lbs, but I could do muscle ups and had lungs for days. I was cut after the second workout when I couldn’t meet the minimum work requirement of 10 hang cleans at 135lbs. I was devastated. But that was the turning point in my career. Then and there I decided that I would do whatever it takes to become bigger, stronger, and faster. And at that moment, Lance knew we had a LONG road ahead of us.
The sport was different then, and we had the privilege of growing with the sport. We signed up for EVERY competition we could, especially ones that had events where I couldn’t do a movement, and then spent weeks learning the movements.
2012 wasn’t the last time I failed. In fact, I was still failing things competing at the Rogue Invitational in 2019. The evolution of the sport makes it so you can almost never keep up. And it makes you decide, then and there, are you going to evolve with the sport, or are you going to give up? 10 years in, I’m still fighting for a spot out there.