It didn't hurt, I'll tell you that much.
Because I didn't do it right.
My first CrossFit workout--my first exposure to CrossFit...
My Brother was going to school in Hawaii at the time. Hawaii Pacific University.
I went down to help him find a place in Honolulu.
The first experience I had with CrossFit was my MMA coach. He'd been looking at CrossFit.com for a while.
He came to me and he said, "I think you should try this workout."
He introduced me to "Helen".
First workout I did was 50-40-30-20-10 kettlebell swings—really light—I think it was like 8 kilos,
Box steps to a twelve inch box.
And push-ups.
I remember doing it and feeling like I was actually going to die.
So my first CrossFit experience was looking at the CrossFit.com website
and seeing the "Nasty Girls" video. I thought, "This is crazy what these girls are doing."
But I saw that they were doing squats, and at the time I was living in Paris. I was doing martial arts.
I was squatting a hundred times every day for a warmup before my session.
So I thought, "Ahh. It's going to be okay."
My first workout was the workout "Helen". I used to run the 400m. Thought I'd be pretty good at it.
Midway through, I think I probably hadn't even cleared the first round, I was in a world of hurt.
I didn't really know what was going on.
There was a lot of weird things going on.
Conflicting emotions. "Why does this hurt so much?"
How could that ever be a problem? We got through the first round and there were a bunch of people
standing around watching us doing this weird, new thing called CrossFit.
I watched the site for a couple more days and a workout pops up, which was 4 rounds for time
400m run and 50 squats
I'm like, "I can run and I can squat. This is going to be a good day.
"This is going to be my entry point. I'm going to see if this program is any good."
What happened is that I go to this beautiful woods next to Paris and start my workout. I track my 400 meters.
I mean the swings were with some bad dumbbell. And if I look back on it, I cringe now.
But it was, um, I got the swings done. It was definitely swinging.
I was bodybuilding. I was doing the whole back and [biceps]
structured programming. And he showed me this workout, and it was "Angie".
So 100 push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and squats.
And I said, "OK. Looks a little bit beefy, but I don't get it."
And I'm probably about two hours into it, let's say, and we threw in the towel.
We were like, "This is fucking stupid."
Got through the first round and I thought it was all right.
Got through the second round and thought I was going to die.
On the third round I was down to doing single pull-ups.
My kettlebell swings were nowhere near good reps. I'd be no-repped by any judge with half a brain.
First 400. Great. I get to the squats and I'm like, "Huh, feeling a little out of breath."
Second 400. Start to slow down. 50 squats. I'm starting to take breaks.
I'm like, "What's happening to me? I normally do a hundred!"
Afterwards I was in so much pain. At this point I'm doing MMA and I thought I was doing pretty good
but I just got torn to shreds by this workout. The humiliation of finding myself on the floor
with 30 people standing around looking at me and all I want to do is just leave my body.
That was that. I'm hooked. [laughs]
And then the third [400]. There's this lady who walks past me with her dog.
And I'm like, "Wow."
It's like the dream where you try running away from something and you can't move.
Because we were doing sets of ten and resting for three minutes.
We were just sitting there. There's zero intensity.
We didn't know how to kip so we're just running out of juice on the pull-ups.
Grunting and groaning. I'm just like, "This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen."
And I come to find out that I was doing it incorrectly. He brought it back after he actually --
he introduced me to CrossFit, obviously initially, but then he stuck with it
and brought it back to the table.
I can't remember what my first workout was that I actually let loose and felt the, uh...
Felt that hit.
Being able to find something that made me feel like that in a relatively short space of time
whereas I'd been used to doing 60-minute runs, half marathons...
And then to come to doing a twelve-minute workout and feeling worse.
I just thought, "I've got to do this."
Sometimes CrossFit is hard, and getting to the next level is hard.
You know, we can spit platitudes at it. We can say things like I've said.
We can say, "One step at a time. One rep at a time."
But there's going to come a day where you're going to hit a wall. Hard.
You're going to hit that wall and you're going to make a choice and that choice is:
Am I going to go deeper into this place? Into myself where I don't want to go.
Where every fiber of my being, every nerve ending I've got it saying, "Stop! Slow down!
"My god, put your hands on your knees and just stop."
Jeez, there has to be something to this. I finished a workout with an absolutely terrible time
both physically and on the clock.
And I was floored by that. There has to be something to this. I'm training ten hours a week.
I thought I'm fit, but turns out that fitness did not translate to real life.
That was my first experience and it really got me hooked. Ever since it's been CrossFit, CrossFit, CrossFit.
I did that in about seventeen minutes.
With a ten-kilo dumbbell, running on a treadmill, and literally I think I was clear
for a week solid. I'd not be able to train again.
It was amazing.
I even thought, at that time, if I can do this and do this fast
I can do this so it never affects me, then I'm going to be fit.
Never gets easier. You just get faster.
What separates the people on the floor, here at Regionals, from people on the floor at the Games
from people like me, maybe people like you, is that when that pain comes and it's time to stop
they've trained that very specifically to move past it.
And there have been days when they quit. I guarantee it. They put down that bar one day
and pushed it away and said, "That's enough of that."
But they came back the next day, took that same challenge, and pushed through it.
When I eventually picked it up and started following the website, I was living in Alaska as a fishing guide.
So I had one shitty barbell, with the metal plates. I have a 45s, 35s, and maybe 25s.
And a rope that was strung up to a tree, and I just started drinking the Kool-Aid.
We say, "One rep at a time. One day at a time." But they're not all up, nothing is.
You're going to take a step forward and you're going to take ten steps back.
You're going to have an injury. You're going to have a mental breakdown at some point.
I'm seven and a half years into this. That happens!
You stand up and you dust off and you say, "There is no way that that's going to be the thing that beats me."
"There's no way that that's the thing that stops me from getting to that next level."
The people out there—the people with those competitors numbers on—those are the people
who believe that ethos and live it. Every day.