Athlete of the MonthJanuary

Professionally, I am a buyer for a food service distributor in Rosemont. In my free time I play ice hockey and softball, go to see live music, and read.

I have a lot of friends who do or have previously done CrossFit, and encouraged me to try it out. It took a while for me to actually walk in the door, but once I did I was hooked.

The two things that keep me coming back are the community and the tangibility of progression in CrossFit itself. I think having something that is so easily measurable in so many different ways pushes me to constantly focus on something new to improve upon. Also, it is great to have friends around who constantly push you to do your best and cheer you on. At the start, I found both of these things intimidating–I thought that there was this endless list of skills to learn before I’d become comfortable in classes, and I would get stage fright whenever someone cheered me on in the middle of a workout. Now I see these things both as positives that have motivated me to continue pushing myself harder.

WHAT ARE YOUR CROSSFIT GOALS? HOW CLOSE ARE YOU TO REACHING THEM?

UGH SO MANY! As I said above, the beauty of CrossFit is that you always have something new to work on, but that makes setting and sticking to goals difficult sometimes since I have the attention span of a golden retriever puppy when it comes to athletics. My ultimate goal is to be able to try anything. If I have a friend who invites me to do an activity I’m not familiar with, I want to be able to jump in trusting that I may not have the technical skills necessary to be an expert, but have the basic athleticism to not hurt myself.

On a more short-term scale, I realized this last open that I need to work on my upper body strength and my gymnastics, so I am focusing on working on extended time hanging from the bar, toes to bar, and anything with a dumbbell/barbell that involves upper body, especially overhead. I am hoping by the middle of the year to start Rx’ing some workouts that require overhead squats, thrusters, and the like, and by the end of the year to have comfortable working sets of major gymnastics movements.

I like long chipper WODs, because I like the idea of being finished with a movement and not having to go back.

Wall balls.

When you walk in for the first time, and for each time after that, don’t compare your day one to someone else’s day 600, or even someone else’s day 15. This community has been so helpful for me because it helped me move my focus from all the Instagram/”Health and Wellness Industry” noise and focus on my own goals and my own process. Keep showing up, keep putting in the work, and keep giving high-fives and you’ll surprise yourself this time next year.