CrossFit Athletic Group

Best Beast Modes include things that happened in the gym and outside of the gym and aren't limited to posts under the Beast Mode category. There is definitely a chance I missed a few, but I have thought pretty hard on these ones. Please note in the comments if there's any off the top of your list. They are ranked and I biased a little bit on how much the gym's training was involved. For example, Matt Fecht finishing top-50 in the country is better than anything anyone in here has ever done athletically, but he was a legit professional marathon runner before coming in. So I just take that into a little bit of account for each one. Also, #11 is Isiah Thomas's number, so there will be 11 people on the non-session lists.

Enjoy.

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11. Jay's Grand Finale

In Summer 2015 the Kavanaughs got us in their city pool for one of our team workouts. We (or I) planned on doing a workout there but we ended up just doing swimming races and bouncing off the diving boards. Everyone was doing cool until Jay got up there...

It has no significance to the gym whatsoever but it's dope!

10. Shannon's Double Helen

Our gym has always been known for having an unnaturally great community, and that's a great thing to be known for. We also have seen a lot of impressive athletic achievements happen from average people working really hard and exceeding their normal expectations.

Whenever Shannon Marchant comes in the gym we are reminded that sometimes God creates mutants just to show us how good he is at his creation thing.

Personalities are difficult to stand out in here because of all the great people, and somehow Shannon's personality does. I don't know how, but there has just always been some kind of gravity around her since the day she came in. Couple that with her elite athleticism and you have an irreplacable piece the Champions Club has been fortunate to have since 2013. Back then we used to do Advanced Sessions in the Summers and Shannon was invited in 2014. On July 17, 2014 the Workout of the Day was Helen. Murley and Shannon both wanted to break the girls record at the gym, but the question is who would do it? Both did, actually. Murley broke the record once.

Shannon broke the record twice. Once at 10:30 am and once again at 7 pm.

9. Aaron Sexton Introduces Himself

Sometimes kids just stand out in ways that are tough to put into words. I can't tell you why Aaron Sexton is my favorite kid I've ever coached, but we've just meshed well together since he came in as a 7th grader in Summer 2013. Up until last Summer his attendance was up and down but he would have spurts of consistency and he always excelled on the football field as a quarterback, basketball court as a guard, and baseball diamond as a pitcher.

Aaron was brought up to the varsity baseball team at Troy High his sophomore year and was in and out of the lineup as is usual with most underclassmen. Then when playoffs started coach put him in and the kid went bonkers (I embarassingly forgot to type the "k" in the first draft of this post). He hit a walk-off double in extra innings of the semi-final. Then started on the mound in the Championship and pitched a gem as Troy upset their cross-town rival Troy Athens. I was at the Athens game and it was one of the proudest moments of my Champions Club career.

8. When Jesus Called Jack Trastevere

I can definitely use my writing to make things sound cooler or more important that they were. This was a case where I wrote a great post and the real thing was even greater. Here's what I want you to do right now: close your phone/laptop, find the nearest clock, and stare at it for 5 minutes. Watch every second go by, watch the minute hand steadily creep like TLC millimeter by millimeter towards the next big number. It is then you'll realize that, when not distracted, 5 minutes is a long freaking time.

Jack Trastevere did 185-lb. back squats nonstop for 5 minutes. 

5 minutes.

30 reps.

7. Josh Howey Wraastles All-State as a freshman

I had a really good creative writing-style account of Josh's Regionals wraastling meet that either didn't save or got lost somewhere. Of all the high school sports I go to watch, wraastling is easily the second most boring (lacrosse is the worst). But at Regionals last March at Warren Woods Tower I decided I was going to sit on the mat right next to the wraastlers. I figured if anyone could be more concussed and less aware of their surroundings than me, it would be wraastlers. So I sat there about 10 feet away from these two fat hambeasts body slamming each other and it was the absolutely awesome! All the other mats had finished, the entire gym was watching and screaming, and the kids were putting on a show. After they finished Josh and another skinny dude came up and I got to see Josh qualify for States from the best seats in the house.

Fast forward a week and Shakes and I met Mr. Carey at Ford Field in the State Championship. While the wraastlers were still probably unaware of the surroundings, the Ford Field security surely were not, so I kindly took my seat in the stands by Josh's parents (and probably close to the Junkin's season ticket spots). So instead of getting a dope close-up picture of Josh's neck bent in an odd angle, all we got was this grainy one from Shakes's phone that looks like a bigfoot sighting.

We saw Josh win that match, then he lost his next one, and ended up finishing 4th in the state.

6. Jay Makes GVSU Basketball Team

Speaking of unpublished posts, I had one half-finished called the Jay Junkin Effect that I never got around to wrapping up. But the gist of it is having known Jay since I was like 12, I got to see a really cool transformation from really uncoordinated kid to really good athlete. Can you imagine a world where Jesse Junkin is picked before Jay in a game of front-lawn football? Jay never played AAU basketball, never hired a trainer, and never worked out until the Summer going into his senior year in high school. All he did was eat peanut butter and take naps. And Santa rewarded him with a 4-inch growth spurt during Christmas Break his 8th grade year. When I say I'm jealous of Jay Junkin, it's only 30% joking.

After a solid senior year at Lamphere Jay decided to go to Grand Valley with a plan: try out for the basketball team every year until his senior year and see if he would make it. Their coach had never kept a walk-on before and it proved true Jay's first two years: he tried out and got cut. Still, he didn't hire a trainer and didn't do anything drastic. He just did CrossFit and practiced for hours and hours in his driveway. In the midst of a great Summer 2014 at the Champions Club Jay beat me in one on one in his driveway for the first time ever and I chucked the ball down the street to Jared's house. A few months later, Jay became the first walk-on to make the Grand Valley basketball team.

Jay tore his ACL while we were playing one-on-one at Lamphere in June 2015. I won the first game, he won the second game, he was winning the third and I demanded we play to 11 instead of 7. Then... yeah. Probably my worst feeling as a coach.

5. Cecilia becomes a National Champion

As far as I understand, Cecilia Steinwascher was on the verge of quitting soccer when she came to the gym on April 27, 2018. She has lots of aches and pains from her years of soccer, and these shin splints were making running almost impossible. Turns out running on your heels can do that, so she fixed that in about a week and from there on she was in permanent Beast Mode. Over the course of the two Summers Cecilia has been part of the Champions Club, I cannot recall a single workout that she did not bring it. She has been as locked in as any athlete I can recall.

Summer 2019 was AOTS Banner-worthy for Cecilia. She was running was well as ever and lifting as well as ever and was getting pull-ups and handstand push-ups and everything was looking great. In fact, she is probably the most boring athlete I've ever coached. She literally does anything I ask with zero pushback. The main thing she'd have to get over was her rocky relationship with her soccer coach going into the season. Coming from a family of soccer royalty as she did, accepting a 'different" style would never be easy. But Cecilia made it work and got on good terms with him about halfway through the season. She was named 1st Team All-American, but a National Title is the one thing driving her and all of her teammates. GVSU is like Alabama - they haven't won a National Championship in 4 years and everyone loses their mind. Thankfully, we didn't have to see what a 5-year drought would look like. They took home a 1-0 win in double OT. Cecilia sprained a tendon in her foot late in the second half and is recovering as we speak.

4. Matt Fecht finishes top-50 at 2016 US Olympic Trials

In the Summer 2015 Matt Fecht invited me to do a 20-mile run with him on one of the trails by Stoney Creek. I have played on a court with NBA players, seen Denard Robinson play football in person, and got a behind-the-scenes view with the Fittest People On Earth. I have never in my life been more in awe of an athlete than I was with Matt Fecht on that day. He used his feet to cover 20 freaking miles while I sat on a cushioned seat connected to two of modern man's most efficient inventions.

Condors are the most efficient animals on the planet and humans are like in the 30s. But give a human a bicycle and they jump all the way up the the number 1 spot, past the condor. I was given this mechanical gift from the cavemen and was wheezing and cramping and dizzy. And we're not talking about Mr. Carey or Reggie on a bike here, this is me - ripped, fit, eats clean as a racehorse, not-limited-by-my-ankle-because-it's-pedals. I mean, at like 5 miles I was okay. By the time 15 miles hit I was wishing for death while Matt just kept chugging along at his 5-minute mile pace. I hadn't been on a bicycle since the 5th grade and to make matters worse, I was tasked not only with the prospect of being on it for 2 hours, but also handing Matt water bottles mid-run without getting off the bike. Knowing this would require supreme coordination only the top echelon of the Graph would be able to achieve, I asked him for a few practice reps during his warmup 3-mile run (yes, a 3 mile warmup to run 20 miles after).

The handoffs went smoothly until I was faced with a dilemma: late in the workout Matt asked for some water but there were a few runners coming at us in the opposite direction. Matt moved to the right of the path and I slid in behind him. Instead of calmly waiting for the runners to pass, I decided to try and grab the water bottle below my seat. I was going faster than I wanted to and couldn't get a hold of the bottle. Option 1: Keep trying and risk running the bike into Matt's Achilles tendon. Option 2: take one for the team. I chose Option 2. A second later only the bushes below the path stopped me from tumbling all the way down to the river.

Turned out to be a good decision because a few months later Matt Fecht with both Achilles tendons fully-attached finished in 48th place in the country at the US Olympic Trials (post says 50 but official results turned out to be 48).

3. Ryan Richard Owns the Tribe Wars

One day in 2009 Brian and I were working out at Foley and a random kid asked if he could join in. He was a sophomore named Ryan Richard. I had no idea that Ryan would turn out to be one of the most important people to ever join the gym. There will be more about him in upcoming lists I'm sure, but the kid had an insane work capacity. I was in my fitness prime as a college athlete and Ryan - 4 years younger - could match me in about 3/4 of the workouts. Then once the technique came around he was doing things like sub 3 minute Frans and 250-lb. clean and jerks before he graduated high school.

The Champions Club was involved in two CrossFit competitions: Battle of the Boxes in 2010 and Tribe Wars in 2012; the latter was with CrossFit BMW. As a 17-year old high school senior, Ryan Richard was the fittest athlete in that gym full of grown-ass adults. The highlight was a max effort snatch workout where he ignored my coaching and hit 175 lbs.

More on Ryan in the coming months. But I have never seen anyone from the Champions Club have a CrossFit performance like Ryan on that day.

2. Big Kris in Orbit

I sat looking at this section for 3 full minutes typing then backspacing, typing then backspacing, seeing if I could anything that has not been said in the original post. I don't know what else to say. Kris Campbell climbed a freaking rope. If the universe wanted me to be strict about having people sing waivers, this event would have turned out differently. The Champions Club could have had its very own Grand Canyon, but instead we got the single best graduation/accomplishment in our 10-year history.

1. Emma Wonsil's 20 Minutes to Remember

So Emma is one of the people I definitely took for granted when she was part of the gym and we didn't exactly separate on the best terms. But the kid was hugely important in the early Champions Club operations and often times her coaching/community involvement would overshadow her insane work capacity - much like Ryan.

Emma did one-on-one sessions with me in the spring of 2013 while she was a senior running track and playing softball. She was the MVP on each team. I was the track coach (along with Brian) and would often have to fight/bargain with the softball coach in order to get her time with us. In general it was simple: softball games take priority over track practices and track meets take priority over softball practices. The tricky part was when a track meet and softball game landed on the same day.

On May 7, 2013 both softball and track were home at Foley. And what Emma did is something I doubt... I'm debating on typing this without doing a Google search... whatever, it's our website. And what Emma did is something that I doubt has been done by a female in MHSAA history.

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Honorable mention: Jacob's first rope climb w/ Carl Paoli, Pat's Bar Hang Workout, Jennifer Setting Records,Bubs and Bromm 4x4 at Regionals, Murley's Kelly pr, Erika's Murph, Mrs. Pip's Lifts 4 Gifts 2018, Mrs. Bennis loses 80 lbs., Mrs. Carey gets a pull-up, Kristen does 15 straight pull-ups at Battle of the Boxes, Brian rows basically an entire 5k at Battle of the Boxes, Sydni's deadlifts in the Fieldhouse, Murley runs sub-20 5k, Mike Rossman wins State Championship 400m dash*, Renee Shelton wins 4x1 in a cast at Regionals, 10 Champions Club kids go to States in 2012, Morrow's elbow muscle-up, Jacob's first official** Mario Baseball Championship, Elizabeth's 2015 unofficial CF Open, JZ's 2015 unofficial CF Open, Jason does 207.5-lb. overhead squat as HS sophomore, Saporito's Backwards Filthy Fifty, Lauren Higgins Snatch Balance with Bromm eeping in the background, Shakes's deadlift at Lifts 4 Gifts 2018, Fry's Barbara from August, Mel does all the Hero Workouts, Woorden finishes 3rd in Powerlifting States, Josh Bennis does 11 handstand push-ups, Carter is still living 7 years later

*this happened about a week before the Champions Club started, but I still kinda count it because he worked out with the pre-Champions Club sometimes and Brian and I were really involved with his technique/training. If it happened the next year it would've been top of the list.

**his prior Championship in the Mitchell Guist Memorial season was forfeited due to pitching Magikoopa, who was ineligible at the time of participation