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Anna Fobbe: Finding Friends for a Lifetime

When Anna Fobbe left college, she felt a little lost.

“I would say I was having one of those phases of I don’t know what my next life chapter was gonna be,” she said. “I didn’t know my new calling.”

She was also missing her team. A lifelong athlete, Anna had spent the past four years playing soccer at Bemidji State University. Her team was like family, and though she was a goalkeeper, she loved to train hard.

“Even when coaches were like, ‘Hey, goalkeepers have different expectations, you don’t have to do the same fitness test,’ I was like, ‘No. I’m going to be the fit one on this team,’” she said. “I’ve always had the mindset to excel.”

So when she found herself miles away from her team for an internship with Twin Cities Orthopedics, she knew she needed to find a new outlet for her athletic ambition.

“I was like, ‘Well, what am I gonna do now?’” she said.

Then she remembered: Back in Bemidji, she’d tried a week of CrossFit upon the insistence of her friends.

“My friends always mentioned, ‘You’re psycho; you should just try CrossFit for fun; see if you like it.’”

Anna went in to a local gym for a free trial week. Her first workout was a rowing version of Kelly: 5 rounds for time of a 400-m row, 30 box jumps and 30 wall-ball shots.

“And it absolutely sucked, but I kept going,” she remembered. “I’m like, ‘Holy cow, I love this.’”

Not only did she love the training style, but she also loved the feeling of competition and camaraderie. So she joined CrossFit Minneapolis/St.Paul, where she often trains in the 11-a.m. class.

“I’m pretty intrinsically motivated, but when it came to someone next to you pushing you, it brought a whole different realm and element to it,” she said. “I’m up against Deb and Tara and they freaking kick my butt every day.”

Anna was already pretty fit when she started CrossFit; she was a collegiate athlete, after all. But CrossFit, she said, challenged her in completely new ways. Olympic weightlifting, for example, was new territory.

“It was a little frustrating,” she admitted. “I was like, ‘I feel like I’m athletic, but I can’t do any of these movements!’”

But she learned quickly.

When Anna joined CrossFit St. Paul just over a year and a half ago, her clean tapped out at around 120 lb. and she could do just one strict handstand push-up. Today, she can power-clean 163 lb. and knock out sets of unbroken strict handstand push-ups and strict muscle-ups. Plus, she can back-squat 235 lb. to full depth – five pounds more than what she could only squat to parallel in college.

“I’m still improving,” she said. “Every day is a new day to get a little better.”

But the benefits have been more than just physical.

Anna, a former exercise science and pre-physical therapy major, is training for a career helping people move. CrossFit, she says, will have a big influence on how she practices.

“It keeps you moving the rest of your life,” she said. “For someone that wants to go into PT, I think it’s wonderful, because all we’re doing, too, is looking at how people move and trying to fix their wrong movement patterns … and make them better so as they get older, they’re able to correct that and functionally just keep on living.”

The relationships she’s built at the gym—with people from all ages and different walks of life—have also prepared her to be a good therapist.

“It helps me connect, because you have to be a good people person when it comes to anything with coaching or PT,” she said. “(In CrossFit), you meet all these people and some people are moms, some people are my age, some people are 40 or 50. … Everybody’s at a different range, and everybody gets through it together, everybody cheers each other on. It doesn’t matter your level; it doesn’t matter if you’re doing it prescribed or scaled or whatever, you’re just trying to individually make yourself better, through other people.”

“The people I’ve met have shaped me to understand where I am in life is awesome and there’s only more to come,” she said. “It was tough not seeing my friends and being on a team anymore, and to have this community that you get to go to everyday … is addicting. These are friends that you make for a lifetime.”

Testing the Human Spirit: Chad Hancock

In one of his first CrossFit workouts, Chad Hancock tried to best Rich Froning.

He’d seen a video of the legendary CrossFit Games champion do heavy Fran—(15-12-9 reps of 135-lb. thrusters and 45-lb. weighted pull-ups)—in just over 5 minutes and thought, “I could do that.”

Chad went out to his garage gym to give it a shot.

“It probably took me 35 minutes to get through; I thought I was gonna die,” he said. “I just loved the challenge.”

At the time, Chad was an endurance athlete—and a damn good one, too. He’d spent more than 10 years traveling the country to do triathlons and long-distance mountain biking, competing in the elite waves and finishing on the podium more than once.

He loved it, but when he started building a family—today, Chad and his wife have four kids aged 5 months to 9 years—he just didn’t have the 15 hours per week endurance training required.

So he started CrossFit.

What began as a fun way to get in a good workout in a short period of time quickly became Chad’s next competitive passion.

“It’s a super humbling sport as far as how many great people there are, so no matter how good you are at something, there’s always people that are better—way better—that you can learn from,” he said.

CrossFit also afforded so many new skills to learn and opportunities to improve, whereas in endurance sports, progress appeared in the form of mere seconds from race to race.

“I knew the group I was racing with, I knew who would beat me and I knew who I would beat, and when you do that 30 times a year, it’s boring,” he said. “Versus the workouts that we do at the gym, I don’t know (what’s going to happen). I’m not gonna beat everybody!”

Chad loves competition, but not just for bragging rights. For him, training and competing in the gym is preparation for excelling in every area of life.

He begins every day with a personal mantra: “Test the human spirit.”

“It kind of drives me always to understand that there’s a point of measure and there’s something that I am capable of beyond what I’ve experienced,” he explained. “There’s a huge rush when you realize that you really kind of pushed beyond what you thought you were capable of. It’s an organic, personal payoff, and the feeling kind of really uplifts the entire day.”

It’s an attitude that permeates every aspect of his life—his career in the competitive world of venture capitalism as well as being a husband and father of four. Where others with similarly demanding lives and careers might make excuses, Chad prioritizes his health above all.

“I honestly think it’s all related,” he said. “If you work really hard in fitness, it spills over.”

Facing a challenging project at work is not so different from taking on a tough workout, he said. And the same goes for raising a family.

“Because family’s really hard sometimes. Sometimes you have to grit your teeth and go through the 2.5 mins of Fran with four kids.”

He described driving his youngest around the neighborhood in a snowstorm at 1 a.m., trying to get him to fall asleep.

“And there’s these really hard moments, but I also experienced really hard moments at work that day and got through those, or really hard team training and got through (that). So when you hit that hard moment with the family or hard moment with a relationship, (CrossFit) makes you better prepared for all of that stuff so nothing is necessarily a give-up moment.”

Plus, he’s seen firsthand the consequences of neglecting health.

“My dad, for example,” Chad began. “He’s 68, but you would think he was in his 80s as far as how you hear him breathing. I work out with other people his age, and it’s a completely different tone that they set. There’s way more energy in them, they don’t get tired at the top of stairs, and they’re doing the workouts that we’re all doing.”

For that reason, Chad and his wife have made fitness a huge part of their children’s lives, converting their basement into a hybrid gymnastics and CrossFit gym, complete with a rig, boxes, rower, tumbling mats, balance beams, mini trampoline and parallel bars.

“After the fourth time that somebody jumped off the couch and hit the coffee table, we just started selling that furniture that I had before all the children,” he said, laughing.

After Chad finishes a workout in his half of the basement gym, he might help his daughter with her balance-beam routine or coach his son through a series of obstacles.

The key is teaching his children that fitness is about fun, not suffering. Whereas in traditional sports there’s always a clear winner and loser, “in this environment, as long as you are personally improving, it feels like a huge victory,” Chad said.

Come mealtime, the lessons turn to health.

He described a conversation with his 9-year-old son about the merits of eating an extra-large bag of Skittles—a prize earned for good deeds done at school—after dinner.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, you can have it, but how much do you want to have? How do you want to feel after?’” Chad said. “He’s like, ‘I want to feel good after.’ He took the bag and took a third of it and didn’t even look at the rest of the bag. So it’s cool seeing him make those decisions.”

With a full-time job and four little ones in tow, Chad doesn’t have much time left over for racing. But his performance in the races he has done since starting CrossFit have improved, despite a lack of endurance-specific training.

“I think just because I could hit those higher percentages of output during a race and feel OK,” he said, comparing the approximate 85 percent output of most endurance training to the 95-100 percent output of a CrossFit workout.

His deadlift has also increased from an iffy 315 lb.—“it would look like my spine was gonna shoot out my back”—to a pristinely lifted 500 lb. He can also touch his toes now, something that he never thought would be possible in his endurance days.

But the best part, Chad said, is that he’s nowhere near the top of his game yet—and that means there’s plenty left to accomplish, in and outside the gym.

“Test the human spirit,” he said. “Because it’s there and it wants to be tested.”

Burpees for Life: Brad Gordon

It was the early aughts, and Bradley Gordon was on the last 2,000 feet of a 15-mile “slog” through Glacier National Park. The rugged trail had Brad and his friends winding through the Rocky Mountains, down here and up there for a total of 3,000 feet of descent and 6,000 feet of vertical climb.

Brad had never been an athlete in the conventional sense of the word, but he was an outdoorsman. He loved to hike and climb. But on this journey—in his early 30s at the time—he felt the least capable of the pack.

“I distinctly remember just trying to put one foot in front of another for the last mile and a half,” he said. “I just didn’t have it and the others did—and that didn’t feel great.”

Two of the hiking party went on ahead to camp—mid bear country, there could be no stopping—while one stayed behind with Brad.

“I remember him waltzing around, looking at flowers, basically, while I was trying to get myself up the hill,” he recalled.

Brad survived that hike, but it wasn’t until 2008 that he had his real wake-up call. Following another hike, this time in the Tetons, he went to the doctor after suffering some gastroenterological distress.

At 35, he was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer.

Brad tried to improve his health and fitness before treatment, going to the YMCA in the weeks before.

“That was … a total joke,” he said. “Because basically my fitness routine would be go to the Y, but nothing would really push me and it was easy to get bored with it. It just didn’t go anywhere.”

For the next year, he endured chemotherapy, radiation and multiple surgeries, one of which has left him without a left ab. Though treatment was successful, the experience left him with a sobering call to action.

“You only have this one life to live,” he said. “It still drives me today: People who get an abrupt diagnosis of something like that—and it might be an injury or cancer or an infection—if you’re in better shape going into that … you’re gonna do a lot better statistically and emotionally and physically than somebody who isn’t. And so I think I came out of that going, ‘Man, I need better reserves for any future illness.’”

So Brad joined CrossFit St. Paul.

He’d never lifted weights or done any sort of gymnastics before. He barely knew what CrossFit was; only that it was some gym up the road from his home.

But the measurable, repeatable aspect of performance-based training immediately appealed to Brad’s scientific brain (he works as an ER physician and administrator at Regions Hospital in St. Paul), and he was hooked.

He also appreciated the community.

“The other thing was just the people,” he said. “You’d expect to show up and you’d get a friendly ‘hello’ from somebody, and you wouldn’t know them for any other reason and you might not even know their last name, but it’s a bit of a shared struggle kind of thing.”

When Brad first walked through the doors of CrossFit St. Paul in fall, 2012, he’d never heard of a burpee. He had a 15- to 18-minute mile and could barely hang from a pull-up bar, let alone do a pull-up.

But progress came quickly.

He was soon surprised to learn he could achieve a full-depth squat. And after about six months, friends began commenting on his new physique.

Consistently he showed up to the 5:30-a.m. class, and by 2016, he’d lost about 35 lb. after participating in a gym nutrition challenge.

Today, Brad can do unassisted strict and kipping pull-ups, and his PR mile time is in the 8-minute range. And he’s definitely familiar with burpees.

But even after seven years of CrossFit, he’ll be the first to tell you it was never about the gym—it’s about being fit enough for life outside of it.

“Number one, parenting is a hell of a lot easier if you’re physically fit,” said the father of a 3-year-old son.

He described a recent plane trip in which he was able to squat down to retrieve a dropped toy while holding his 40-lb. son and wearing a full backpack.

“It’s something I could have never done (before),” he said.

And though as a busy working parent he doesn’t have much time for long adventures, Brad said it’s easier to put a little more “warrior into (his) weekend.” He can take a quick six-mile hike during a North Shore vacation, or climb to the top of a cliff while ported on an Alaskan cruise.

“Everybody stayed on the boat …  and I could go do a pretty intense hike and come back 3 hours later and have seen the views from 1,000 feet above the boat,” he recalled.

More importantly, Brad knows that every workout is a dollar in the bank of longevity.

“You don’t quite know what’s around the corner,” he said. “We’re pretty fragile when it comes down to it, and so building yourself up to be pretty strong—even if it’s just relatively strong—it’s not like you’re the fittest on the earth; if you’re just more fit than you were before, you’re gonna bounce back faster.”

Brad described watching his 70-something father slowly withdraw from activities of daily life.

“He decided he didn’t want to go to the movie theater with us because he was worried he couldn’t manage the stairs,” he said. “If you can’t get up or if you’re worried about falling because you know you won’t be able to get up, you start modifying all the things you do and saying no to activities.”

And so that’s why after colon cancer, multiple surgeries and seven years of training, you’ll still find Bradley Gordon warming up at the break of dawn for the 5:30-a.m. class.

“My main goal is to just be able to get up off the floor independently for as many years of life as possible,” he said. “The longer you can get up off the floor, the longer you’re independent. So I might as well just practice that with as many burpees as possible.”

A New Face Here to Stay: Lauren Beltz

You walk into the gym and set down your bag.

As you lace up your shoes, you notice a new group of recruits in the back—the Level One class doing their very first air squats.

“Adorable,” you think.

Some, you’ll never see again. But hopefully, you’ll be squatting right alongside them in class in just a few weeks.

In July, Lauren Beltz was one of those new recruits. Today, less than six months later, she’s a faithful member of the 6-a.m. crew at CrossFit Minneapolis.

“It’s a great way to start your day,” she said.

Lauren works for Proctor & Gamble, loves running and rowing and is a recent transplant to the Twin Cities. She moved here in April, making Minnesota the sixth state she’s lived in over the past nine years.

“Lucky me, this is my first winter,” she joked.

Lauren has been active for most of her life.

She played sports in high school and college, and afterward, was an avid runner. With a career that has her on the go every couple years, she made a rule for herself: After every move, she’d try a different fitness regime, usually a new running club or a different kind of race to train for. Most recently, it was Orangetheory in Cincinnati.

“I did that for a couple years and I kind of got bored of it,” she said.

She’d heard of CrossFit before but was intimidated by the weightlifting and gymnastics elements of the program. But after hearing friends rave about it—including a few who’d attended CrossFit Minneapolis years ago—she decided to give it a shot.

“I was like, ‘Well, it’s a new challenge,’’ she said. “I like a good challenge; I like to be active. So that’s why I decided to show up.”

And when she walked into the gym for her first Level One class, the experience was anything but scary. She appreciated the small class size—in this instance, just two athletes—and the patience and encouragement of the coach.

“Jordan was primarily my Level One coach and she’s fantastic,” Lauren said.

By the end of the month, she was hooked.

For starters, she loved the program itself. In race running, you have to wait months or years between races to measure progress.

“Where the cool thing about CrossFit, especially when you’re new, is seeing all the improvements you make on a daily or weekly basis,” she said. “And so that’s really fun, just to see all the progress that you’re able to make in such a short amount of time.”

She was also amazed at the efficacy and efficiency. Whereas before she’d have to run for more than two hours to feel like she got even a slight workout in, with CrossFit, “I can do a workout for 15 minutes and feel like that was such a hard workout,” she said. “I don’t need to dedicate hours of my day; I can dedicate an hour and get a really good workout in.”

Plus, CrossFit came with a built-in community, something that can be hard to achieve when you have to pick up and relocate so frequently.

“It is nice to have people to hang out with at the gym and after,” she said, adding that she loved going out to dinner with gym buddies after Friday Night Lights during the Open. “The whole community is so supportive and always encouraging you to make sure you’re doing your best.”

In fact, Lauren liked CrossFit so much she even convinced her co-worker, Anthony Bowman, to join. They even do hotel WODs together when they have to travel for work.

When Lauren first walked into CrossFit Minneapolis, she took one look at people doing gymnastics movements and thought she’d never be able to do that. Today—after diligently attending the gymnastics class at CrossFit Minneapolis—she can do pistols and toes-to-bars.

“I’m still not perfect at it but much better than where I was from day one,” she said.

She also recently PR’d her deadlift at 200 lb.

“I feel like (CrossFit) does give me confidence because if I can wake up and go to the gym and do something that I wouldn’t have otherwise done and push myself, then it makes the day that much easier,” she said. “If you can tackle something in the gym, then you can definitely tackle something outside of the gym, whether that’s in work or your personal life.”

Today, Lauren’s got her sights set on handstands—and CrossFit is one challenge she plans on sticking with for the long haul.

“My only regret would be that I didn’t start it sooner,” she said.

Proud of What She Can Do: “Bus Lady” Penny Norquist

You might know her as the woman who waits for the bus every day after the workout.

The people on the bus know her as the woman who works out at that CrossFit place with the big green circle on the side.

“‘I see you get off at that CrossFit and it’s really inspiring; I need to go do that,’” Penny Norquist quoted one of her fellow riders.

Penny, a mother of two, cycling aficionado and loyal member of the afternoon and evening classes at CrossFit St. Paul, joined the gym about five years ago. She was over the elliptical at the globo gym, and even though she loved cycling, a proper training ride took too long to do every day—about two hours when all was said and done. So she decided to try CrossFit.

Photo Credit: Wendy Nielsen

The first gym she tried felt decidedly bro-ish, but when she walked into CrossFit St. Paul, she knew she’d found her crew.

“I just loved the atmosphere of the gym,” she said. “It seemed pretty family-friendly and female-friendly.”

Still, she was intimidated. “Terrified,” to be precise. Though she’d been an endurance athlete all her life, running track in high school before finding a love for cycling in adulthood, she’d never held a barbell in her life.

“I remember Chris Powers in my on-ramp classes, and I think if it wasn’t for Chris, I would have left,” she said, laughing. “He was so chill.”

Despite her initial trepidation, Penny quickly fell in love with the program. The variety of movements and workouts meant she never got bored. But it wasn’t just about the workouts themselves.

Around the same time she joined the gym, Penny went through a divorce. Add work and parenting two young kids—and eventually going back to school for a master’s degree—and you’ve got a killer recipe for stress. The gym became a respite from the stress; a place to take a mental break and focus on herself.

“I do think a lot of it is mental peace of mind; that’s part of what I get out of it more than just the physical piece,” she said. “Keeping myself from going crazy.”

CrossFit also helped her build confidence and transform her self-image, Penny said. Though she had a set of lungs, she’d never been strong—before CrossFit, she could manage only one or two push-ups. And though she’d always been thin, she still wasn’t happy in her own skin.

“I think I also just wasn’t feeling great about myself,” she said. “You can be thin but not necessarily feel confident about how you look.”

Five-plus years of lifting weights, setting PRs and learning new skills have definitely changed that.

“I think I’m much more forgiving of myself than I used to be,” she said. “We all have days where we don’t feel good about what we ate the day before or you put something on and you don’t like the way it looks, but I don’t think about it as much. I’m much more focused on here’s the things I can do. …  I’m heavier now than I was back then, but I’m more proud of what I can do and feel better overall.”

One of the things Penny can do now is smash a Tough Mudder—a 10-mile obstacle-course race subjecting athletes to heights, fire, water and even electric shocks.

“Part of what they say is something along the way is gonna frighten you,” she said.

She recalled an obstacle in which a rope ladder was suspended over a pool of water. Athletes had to broad-jump several feet from land to the ladder before climbing to the top of the obstacle.

It reminded her of box jumps, a movement she had scaled to step-ups for quite some time.

“I stood there for like 10 minutes looking at that rope,” she recalled.

Spoiler alert: She made it. (She can also rep out box jumps with ease now.)

But even more important than conquering obstacles or setting box-jump PRs is health and longevity.

“I grew up in a family that’s not active,” Penny said.

Her father battles several health problems including diabetes and Alzheimer’s, and her mother struggles with knee and back pain.

“I’ve watched my mom become so much less mobile; I’m like, I cannot be that,” Penny said. “I gotta do what I can to have that not happen. You kind of start when you’re younger wanting to look a certain way …  and now, my friends and I joke, I’m like I just want to not be broken. I just want to stay able to do the things that I want to do.”

With a 118-lb. clean, a 113-lb. overhead squat, kipping pull-ups and not just one but several push-ups, Penny’s certainly far from broken. And if you check out a 4:30 p.m. class some day, you’ll probably catch her working on her next goals: toes-to-bars and 14-lb. wall-ball shots—no matter how heavy they may feel.

“I can’t think of any workouts that at the end I was like, ‘Oh, that was a terrible idea,’” she said. “I always feel better when I’m done.”

Does Your Band Teacher Even Lift?

It was elementary school P.E. class, and a cluster of kids sat in a circle on the floor. 

In the middle hung a rope, stretching high above their heads to the gym ceiling above. One by one, the students scaled the rope in front of the entire class, their dignity hanging in the balance.

“And most of my classmates could screw right up that damn rope,” said Corey Desens, now 50. “Oh my God, I was lucky enough to get like a quarter of the way up. I was always the chunky, fat kid who could never really do it.”

Decades later, a year after starting CrossFit, Corey decided to try to climb the rope during a workout at CrossFit Minneapolis, forgoing his usual modification.

He was soon startled to find himself at the top.

“I climbed that freaking rope like 20 times that day, and it was nothing,” he recalled.

Corey started CrossFit in the summer of 2017. He usually trains in the afternoon classes among athletes decades his junior, and has happily accepted the title of “Grandpa of CrossFit Minneapolis.”

“Sometimes when we’re just like chatting, I feel like I’m a father figure, almost, because (I) have a lot of life experience,” he said. “But when class starts it’s like I am the child because everybody is so good at everything and I’m like, ‘What? How do we do that?’”

He wasn’t new to exercise—for the past 20 years he’d trained at a typical globo gym, splitting his time between cardio and resistance machines. He even gave yoga a shot—once.

“That was not a really good fit for me because I kept laughing the whole time because I’m not flexible at all,” he said, laughing. “They hardly appreciated my giggling during class.”

Despite his commitment to training, he never saw significant results—and he was bored. He wanted an exercise program that would keep him intellectually engaged and constantly challenged. 

CrossFit certainly fit the bill.

“I knew nothing,” he said of his first day of CrossFit. “I didn’t know how to hang on to the bar. I didn’t know what any of the terminology meant; I mean, I knew nothing.”

But that didn’t discourage him from coming back. An educator by profession—Corey is a high-school band director—he doesn’t shy away from taking on new challenges. 

“Corey is continually seeking to improve—in every way possible,” said CrossFit Minneapolis coach Adri Haider. “He works hard to increase mobility, technique and always pushes to add a little more weight to his squat.”

Plus, even after just a few weeks, he’d already begun to see results.

“I liked the fact that it was super challenging for me, and I liked the fact that once I kept going I started noticing changes in my body and the shape of my body,” he said. “So that’s what made me keep it going; the fact that I was seeing results.”

As time went on and Corey got fitter, he began to notice results outside of the gym, too. At school, lifting a tuba case over his head and into a tall cabinet is “nothing now,” he said. He’s even noticed an improvement in grip strength, noting that sometimes students have trouble loosening the drum stands after he’s adjusted them.

“I’m like, ‘Oh, sorry, I must have made it too tight for you,’” he said, laughing. 

His improved cardiovascular health has also helped him combat narcolepsy, a sleep disorder that causes overwhelming daytime drowsiness and sudden sleep attacks.

At the time of Corey’s diagnosis, he was sleeping up to 14 hours a day and even had trouble staying awake while driving. Though he still takes medication for the condition, he said that CrossFit “gives me more energy, where I feel like now I’m not so dependent on those meds anymore to stay awake.”

Everyone knows that the first rule of CrossFit is always talk about CrossFit, and Corey is no exception. He loves to share stories of his fitness adventures with his students—even the ones where he biffs a box jump or fails a lift.

Stories like that are opportunities to teach some valuable life lessons, he said. 

“And I tell those stories mainly because when you’re playing an instrument and you’re in a group of people, you’re going to have to step outside your comfort zone and try stuff,” Corey said. “It’s like, people are going to make mistakes in here and you just gotta learn how to accept the fact that nobody’s going to be perfect, and you can’t be hard on other people when they’re not perfect.”

In about a month, Corey will celebrate his 51^st birthday in the best shape of his life. Not only can he scramble up the rope with the best of them, he can front squat 215 lb., back squat 235 lb. and do double-unders.

“The physical shape of my body has changed drastically,” he said. “Weight-wise, I’m maybe like only 10 pounds less than what I was before, when I was going to the regular gym, but it’s now muscle as opposed to fat. … And I’ve never seen my legs so strong in my life. Like, I’m impressed with my legs.”

“And kind of have guns now,” he added. “I’ve never had guns in my life.”

And he only plans on continuing to keep learning, work hard and keep getting better.

“I’m still learning, picking up these little tips. It hasn’t gotten old for me after two years,” he said. “I just want to make sure that the coaches really understand how life-changing they were for me. Especially Chadwick (and) Adrian just have like opened a whole new world for me. … All of the coaches, they are just so awesome about understanding where people are coming from in their ability levels and knowing not everybody is going to be a super-human athlete and then meeting us wherever we are in our journey for fitness.

“I’m just so appreciative to the coaches for not giving up on people who really don’t fit the mold of a top-performing athlete.”