[Jeremy:] It's just weird when, I don't know, you've worked your whole life for something and then it's gone.
But it's just stuff, and we'll be all right.
[Jeremy:] We knew this bad storm was coming, but we've been through hurricanes before.
A little wind blows and a little rain falls, and we'll be OK.
They weren't projecting that the storm would be very bad at first, so I wasn't worried
about it at all.
So we didn't think anything of it, really, for our gym, for our house.
So here's our back door.
The water started comin' in through the road out here up into the back of our house, that's
the real low point and it got really close to the house so what we had to do was we had
to walk out into the water out here in a side-by-side ATV.
Picked us up, and they brought us to our friends who had a boat and we were able to get out
of here before it got too bad.
As you can see, the water line got up to about, I guess it's about five-and-a-half feet with
three foot off the ground, so eight feet plus.
We got out of town for a few days and just kinda kept up with the storm online, kept
asking friends in our neighborhood how things were going and everybody had to evacuate.
[Christine:] There actually were deaths in our neighborhood, so it's amazing that we
did leave.
[Jeremy:] This was gonna be the nursery.
This was gonna be our nursery.
You can see the water picked up very heavy furniture and turned it upside down.
Here's our truck.
I hear you can drain all the fluids out and it might run.
I don't know, man.
The interior, they say that stuff's pretty toxic after a little while.
We have a baby on the way.
She's 30 weeks.
I gotta, first and foremost, get her into a house.
[Christine:] Being a mom-to-be, I'm ready to have a place to call our own again, but
I know it will happen in time, when it's supposed to.
[Jeremy:] It can be a little frustrating, but you just gotta be patient.
Our philosophy on it is God knows what He's doing, and it's gonna work out.
Unreal experience.
All these cars are flooded.
Everybody came and parked their cars here.
[Producer:] To try and get them above?
[Jeremy:] Yeah, because this is kinda a high point here.
They were all lined up here, just, I don't know, a few days ago.
But they're finally coming around, picking up a bunch of this stuff.
CrossFit shaped a lot of my life.
I've used CrossFit to reach a lot of our high-school kids in town.
I lead a ministry that mentors high-school students, and I get to go and be one of the,
kinda like a strength and conditioning coach for our high school.
I get to meet a lot of kids because of it, and I love doing that.
Just another way to reach people.
I started CrossFit in 2007.
I was a state-champion, national-champion, world-champion powerlifter, set a bunch of
records.
Right after that, I still wanted to compete, so I started doing mixed martial arts and my MMA
coach, I saw him doing this workout before one of our practices, and he was deadlifting,
and he was doing pull-ups, and he was running, and I just never seen somebody do all that,
and he was doing it all before we trained, did our sparring and our wrestling and our
Brazilian Jiu-jitsu.
And he said, "You gotta join me, it's this thing called CrossFit," and he showed me the
website way back in '07, and after my very first workout, I was hooked.
I had no idea what had just happened to me.
[Christine:] Unfortunately, I'm not the most active person in the world, so hearing about
CrossFit, I'm like, "I'm totally going to die."
You know, I'm strong, but I really don't like to sweat and run and do endurance things,
so finding this, I'm like, OK, a 15-minute workout, 7 minutes, you know, I can do that.
So, ever since we got married, we've kind of just been doing that together.
[Jeremy:] We got our affiliate, when, May?
In May.
All right.
We had about 50 members and we just have morning classes, so it was going really well.
About 50 members and I'm still excited about it.
Just ready to get back to working out, get back to coaching, get back to leading people.
People need to get back to normalcy around here, and a lot of people keep saying that,
so we're excited to start back soon.
[Christine:] You know, we posted class is postponed, you know, for Monday, and so Tuesday
they sent us a snapshot, and I mean, nothing was wrong.
And so they're like, "Hey, we're having class Tuesday, right?"
Then Wednesday hit, and Wednesday it wasn't quite in the gym, Thursday it was three feet,
Friday, you know, it was six feet.
[Jeremy:] Been officially open here for about...
[Christine:] Three weeks.
[Jeremy:] Yeah, up until the flood, it was three weeks old here.
This is it, man.
[Christine:] We used our personal savings, everything that we had saved up until that
point, to open this, to buy the equipment, everything that went along with it.
So, it's totally abnormal that a gym would be even profitable in the first year, let
alone the couple of years, so for us to be able to start debt free is just incredible.
So to lose this, to lose the house, you know, it's so unfortunate.
Every donation that's come in so far is a blessing.
It's literally a penny that's going right back into the gym, to be able to purchase
things.
[Jeremy:] We've lost one month of that income and then it looks like we're gonna lose two.
But more than that, for me, people can't get back to their normal, you know?
People can't get back together and work out.
They can't get that community right now.
We want to have that back as soon as we can.
[Christine:] We've had lots of affiliates contact us through this, just "Hey, how can
we help."
There's a CrossFit gym in England that's doing a fundraiser.
There's a 5k that's happening I think today or tomorrow.
[Jeremy:] Tomorrow in Arizona.
[Christine:] In Wisconsin, they've held multiple days of fundraisers and so they've been able
to be so generous, and bless us with that.
It's just been incredible, the CrossFit community stepping up, not knowing who we are or anything
about us.
[Jeremy:] We see these people comin' into our lives and being a blessing to us, and
we can't wait until we're at the point to where we can just bless the heck out of other
people.
Because we've been blessed, we want to help whoever we can, really.
[Christine:] Losing a house is hard, but with this thing coming, we've got 10 weeks and
we're gonna restart life, you know, we're just pressing reset on the life button.
And I don't know, things will be OK.
[Jeremy:] Yep.
[Christine:] Yeah.
[Jeremy:] This is our house, getting bulldozed.
Sad to see her go.
A lot of hard work.