CrossFit Athletic Group

It’s 8:33 pm on the last night of Summer 2016. I am sitting alone in the gym, garage door open, lights from Foley shining through the darkness and reflecting the scopes on the walls. The heat has died down; it’s a balmy 70 degrees outside – which means 85 once you cross into our threshold. I can hear the traffic cruise by on Stephenson, a few people yelling from the Bar down the street. And somehow, the most noticeable noise is that FREAKING CRICKET CHIRPING that has been here all Summer. How are you still alive, crickey? Are you feeding off paintchips? Is Mushu watching over you? Of all the buildings on Stephenson Hwy, whyyy do you insist on ours?

But I digress. I got a mass email yesterday morning from a business guy who said a CrossFit gym owner should coach no more than 10-15 sessions per month. I coached 51 sessions in the last week and a half. Actually, 52 if you count the introduction to these two dudes on Saturday morning.

I’m definitely not complaining, but occasionally I just look at this place like, Jesus, whyyyy? Anywhere but here. It sucks, though, because any time I’m not here I feel guilty. And the mindgames ensue; I blame myself, then I blame jobs and homework, then I blame the roof that is taking $100-handshakes from rainwater, then I blame Aly because of course I blame Aly. I assume I’m not the only person in the world like this; everyone goes through some variation of a funk in what they do. This is what mine looks like.

It happens on the outside too with basketball, track or P.E. at a school. I’ll get funk’d up by the kids not caring, or not being able to run things my way, or movement patterns looking horrid, or disagreements with another coach. So I’m in a bad mood when I drive back to the gym, run in real quick to grab my stuff before walking home. And what’s the first thing I hear when I unlock the door? That FREAKING CRICKET CHIRPING. It’s literally the best thing, ever.

I can never stay annoyed with this place. It’s just plain too good.

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We scale most workouts because we do not treat them as final exams. There is a certain affect we want you to feel after a workout and we often need to adjust things in order for this to occur. Sometimes we want you to feel the lungs explode, or your legs beg for mercy, or your brain to connect on a movement pattern; it’s different every time. What we don’t generally want is this. Sometimes we’ll be okay watching an athlete do The Collin, but on the regular this is best avoided; we aren’t meeting the purpose the workout was intended for. So the thing we scale most often is weight. When I see things like 10 reps per round of 185-lb. cleans I usually think Okay, let’s try to make it heavy relative to each person’s strength. Doing this keeps everyone on pretty even ground as far as intensity goes but it also can give us a distorted view of how strong some people are.

If I polled everyone in the gym asking who the strongest girl is, Katie Shakes would be the unanimous answer. But I still think people undershoot how strong she really is. You see her in workouts finishing first in your group, hearing the loud thuds when her bar drops compared to the shallow clanks when yours does, and you think about how heavy that would feel if you had to use that same weight.

Then you realize that if you had to use that weight while going that freaking fast and being that freaking tired, you would injure yourself.

Then you realize that she is defying the laws of physics by getting skinnier while lifting heavier.

Then you realize that since you are a dude and her 225-lb. deadlift is really supposed to be 315-lbs. for you, the weight might not budge.

And when you finally realize that she also beats you on the running/bodyweight workouts, you waive the white flag.

Katie Braschayko as an athlete does not make sense. I’m telling you – with the 10+ years of seeing CrossFit workouts on a decent-sized scale – that this girl is abnormal. You are all watching a rare breed of athlete. Brian Hassler was not even this good, and he was really good.

Katie Braschayko as a character also does not make sense. From Day 1 of Fundamentals I could tell there was something a little different about her.  She was incredibly sweet but every now and then she said something that would make me double-take to make sure it wasn’t Carter talking. She also apologized every time she failed on a push-up, dip, handstand, or pull-up – which I found odd considering she was a coach, herself. And most notably, her anticlimactic storytelling was on par with the Ryan Richards and Elle Laurencelles of the world. To this day, as Athlete of the Summer, she does things that make me cringe, not quite daily, but probably every other day.

Still, I would place a lot of money in saying that Katie Braschayko might be the best thing to happen to this gym since Carl Paoli came through our doors exactly four years ago today. I don’t know how or why yet, but she’s one of those people that is going to do something great extraordinary with her life, make a lot of people better, and we will get to say, “YEAHHH! SHE’S ONE OF US!”

All great things become annoying at some point. I mean, if people can get sick of something as amazing as Pokémon Go, then nothing else really stands a chance. But we have to realize the things that annoy us are often things we care deeply about.

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Sometimes in early-August I’ll be walking up to the 5 pm session wishing for the Summer be over; if I have to watch Aly flat-out refuse to squat more than five inches again I am going to strike an innocent bystander. (With his unfortunate luck, it would probably be Matt Fecht.) But now, as I am watching the clock uncontrollably tick away the remaining hours… minutes… seconds of the Champions Club Summer 2016, I suddenly miss it. Really bad. I miss being annoyed by the Goobers for an hour before their 11 am session starts. I miss being annoyed by improvising the Finding Nemo workout on the spot. I miss being annoyed with Jack Trastevere’s duck feet. Why? Because I realize how many good things were accomplished once I moved past the annoyance.

Summer at the Champions Club is a 3-month long family reunion. If you have fully-functioning eyes and ears, you are going to notice something you don’t particularly like about someone else – especially in a setting like this that exposes both the best and worst of everyone. Katie Shakes has missed a grand total of 5 days out of a possible 147 the past two Summers combined. She’s had over 142 hours of opportunity to annoy me, and other consistent athletes are in a similar boat. If the most annoying thing at my job is the Athlete of the Summer asking a lot of questions, life is good!

If you’re one of those consistent athletes, this rusty warehouse has given you an equal opportunity to hate it as well. When things are going rough in your life, you can always complain about the gym because you know it won’t retaliate. Regardless of what you think or say, you can always come by the Champions Club at 32301 Stephenson Hwy and see the garage doors open, the warmup on the board, and your family sweating, complaining, laughing, yelling, and doing all the other things families do.

And chances are you’ll hear THAT FREAKING CRICKET SOUND among them. That’s when you know you’re home.