Three and a half years ago in May of 2012 I was severely obese. I weighed over 300 pounds, and was over 45% body fat. I had no vision, no direction, and no purpose. I was a horrible student, and a failure academically so I had no real educational prospects either. I was desperate for inspiration.

June 7th 2012, I was in an English classroom alone because I was the teachers assistant, and the class was in the library. I was watching Olympic Water Polo videos on the computer, and I came across one with Al Pacino’s speech from “Any Given Sunday” voiced into the video. The last 7 words will ring in my ears forever, “Now, what are you going to do?!” (https://youtu.be/rLokxyQwAuw?t=1m5s)

I decided in that moment that I was going to do everything I could to become an Olympic Water Polo player. This was my only hope.

For the next two months, I would bike 15 miles to get to swim practice and back, we would usually run 1–2 miles as a team, and swim for two hours. After biking home I would eat, take a quick nap and then spend another hour doing workouts with rip-60. I lost 15 pounds in that period. It was going really well, but I was really afraid that I was going to lose momentum because I was going to spend a month travelling. Little did I know that this would lead to a massive pivot point in my life.

For the first two weeks of the trip, I would be in Utah living with my Aunt Marianne! I told her in an email that I have to train, and watch what I eat, but I also told her I really don’t care about what kind of exercise I get, because I was at a point where I knew nothing about training. That’s when she told me that there was a program that she was too intimidated to try alone at her local gym, a program called CrossFit, and I said I’d love to do it.

My first workout was a 12 minute Met-Con of 200m Rowing, 10 pushups, 10 wallballs.

I was hooked…

During the weeks I was in Utah I had broken down SO many mental barriers that I had built in my mind about the capabilities of my body. I was doing things I never thought I could do (WITHIN A WEEK!) I was perpetually sore and could barely move, but I wasn’t slowing down. Near the end of the trip I overheard a few people talking about a local competition, CrossFit the Club Games. Naturally the first thing I did when I got home was google it, but what came up was something much different than I was expecting. Nothing about CrossFit the Club Games showed up, but EVERYTHING about The CrossFit Games did. I was ecstatic because it meant there was “probably” a CrossFit gym near me! (At the time I had no idea that there were 5 CrossFit Gyms within 10 minutes of my house, and I had no idea that every day I went to school I actually biked right past the gym that would eventually become my second home.)

I then spent the next two weeks in Michigan for a family reunion. I spent around 3 hours training almost every day that I was there. I would pull different CrossFit workouts from different websites and do them at the local community gym. After all, I was still training to be an Olympic Water Polo player!

I got home in late July. I found the closest gym, CrossFit Counter Culture, and I was ready to go. The difficult part was convincing my mom to pay for membership. But I was going to do anything. I ended up convincing my mom to buy one month of membership for both her and myself as a birthday present for that summer. I wanted her to experience how impactful CrossFit was, and it worked. I had my membership, and I knew that I was going to crush this Water Polo season.

By September I had convinced one of the coach’s to write an extra strength program just for me. (Love you Zia!) I was waking up at 5:45 am to get to the 6:00 am CrossFit class so I could get home and shower to make it to school on time. After school I would go right back to the gym for another 1–2 hours of strength focused training. I would go home, eat as fast as I could, then get in the carpool to Water Polo practice. My life was eat, sleep, train. (School became extra sleep time for me since my grades were so bad anyways I didn’t really care…)

As the season progressed my dreams of becoming an Olympian slowly started pivoting into wanting to train for the CrossFit Games. I played polo for 8 years and I was good, but I wasn’t outstanding, and I definitely wasn’t even close to junior-national level. But more importantly, CrossFit was all I wanted to do. My passion for CrossFit consumed my dream of being an Olympian, and then my passion became 10x more potent.

I didn’t take a single rest day for 3 months. Zip. Zero. None. I still remember the workout of the first day I missed, and I only missed it because the gym was going to be closed that day, but last minute they scheduled a class and I didn’t hear about it. (7 minute AMRAP: 7x 30" burpee-box jumps, 7x pullups, 7x kettlebell swings 24kg. This was that days workout.) I went to every Water Polo practice, every morning to a group class, and never missed my strength sessions. I read every single article, and watched every single video about CrossFit. I absorbed incredible amounts of data about fitness and health. I was eating fully Zone/Paleo within a month of training, I was doing airsquats anywhere to perfect my form. I was even able to get my Level-1 trainers certification on scholarship through CrossFit HQ in March of 2013.