#1. You don’t try hard enough.  No, that is definitely not the case for those of you reading this!  As a CrossFit community, if there is anything that we do really well, it is try REALLY hard in the gym to get the results we are looking for.  It’s the whole competition thing, working out with a team or a buddy who is doing the same workout, and not letting up on the gas until they do, leaving us all in a sweaty pile on the ground after the final round. So, if we have a goal in mind, and we keep on seeing it just out of our grasp, what is torpedoing our efforts? Here’s the real ..read more

We currently have 23 CFKI members signed up for the CrossFit Open.  This is the actual online competition run by CrossFit each year, rather than our Intramural Open.  I love that we have 23 athletes stepping up to take the challenge!  But I think we should have more.  My goal with this blog post is to convince one more person to sign up today. I get emails from people or comments at the gym of, “I feel like you were writing that blog directly to me.”  In general, that is not the case.  But if you are signed up for the Intramural Open and planning to do the three w ..read more

In my travels around the gym this week getting people signed up for the Intramural Open, I have come across some pretty good reasons people have offered for not joining in this year.  But one of my first jobs when I was in high school was as a telemarketer, selling magazine subscriptions to people over the phone that they did not want or need.  Don’t do that job, by the way, it’s horrible!!  But I learned how to not take “no” for an answer, and that persistence paid off in my new role as Alicia’s Assistant-to-the-Regional-Manager of the CFKI Intramural Open.  I wanted to ec ..read more

The CrossFit Open is near. According to the CrossFit Games website: Anyone, regardless of fitness level, is invited to join the largest participatory sporting event on Earth, where all members of the CrossFit community will have an opportunity to participate in the competition season. Participants will complete three workouts across three weeks at their affiliates or home gyms. The workouts are released on the CrossFit Games website on Thursdays at 12 p.m. (noon) Pacific Time, and you have until Monday at 5 p.m. PT to do the workout and submit your score online. At the end of each week, you ca ..read more

Oh you don’t?  OK… I thought you were going to say yes.  Well, I was in your same non-running shoes about 4 months ago, recovering from COVID when my high school buddy Joe texted me to ask if I wanted to run a 50K race with him near his home in North Carolina.  I knew he was a runner, and had run a couple of marathons recently.  But there was definitely some anticipation in how he asked me, as if he was nervous and didn’t want to do this by himself.  And he had every right to be nervous!  He told me later that of all the people in the world that “run” – people tha ..read more

We’ve talked a lot recently about finding your Purpose, and I’ve had some great conversations with some of you about it – I’m so glad you guys are putting in the work!  But where do we go from there?  Once we know what our true life’s Purpose is, we can start to distill that into a long-term Mission that we want to accomplish, and some short-term Goals aligned with that Mission.  There is a lot out there on the interwebs about goal setting, and you can also check out our blog post about identifying your best goals here with the highest chance of success. What I wanted to dig int ..read more

New Year’s Resolutions are funny.  I think most of us take on some sort of lifestyle change that we want to make, because the New Year seems like a new beginning.  So it’s a good time to reset and refocus on establishing good habits and kicking out the bad.  But they generally fail within two weeks of the start point, or quicker!  So then you have a lot of self-help influencers telling you that New Year’s Resolutions are garbage, don’t do them because they’re going to fail.  But what do they offer as a way to improve ourselves?  A product that they are selling, or ..read more

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.” — Buddha Negative self talk can be an absolute performance destroyer, and as a CrossFitter you probably have some experience with it.  Reinforcing to yourself that this workout is going to be really hard, or that your goal is out of reach, can actually make that a reality.  On the other hand, establishing a positive self image and internal dialogue can push you to achieving greater things – especially if you really believe it!  In this blog I’ll cover how you can eradi ..read more

In my last blog post I started with a relatively bold statement, that I was going to introduce some concepts and practices that will help gain clarity on your Purpose – what you are meant to do with your life.  Whoa!!  Writing that again feels almost like an overstep, but over the past few years I have personally gained more clarity, using the tools that I am unpacking for you now.  Last time I started by saying the first key is to gain control of your mind, and we started by Focusing on One Thing – specifically the breath.  If you missed that one, give it a read first and ..read more

I’d like to start a series of blogs focused on gaining clarity on who you are, and what your direction or purpose in life is.  If you know the answer to these questions, then your day-to-day life can be focused on achieving your personal mission, your true “One Thing.”  These are big questions, but the first piece of good news here is that they can be answered, and it is as simple as asking the questions… and then listening. The person that we’re asking is ourselves, and then we need to be open to listening to ourselves, which for most of us will require a little bit of prep work.&nb ..read more