“Finding out that we managed to pull off the first-place win and were going to the Games was a pretty awesome feeling.”
The CrossFit Fraser Valley Centaurs are headed back to Carson, California, for its third consecutive year.
This year, the journey was derailed.
“Two weeks before regionals, we thought that our season was done and we had no chance in hell of making it,” said team member Nate Beveridge, who co-coaches the team and owns CrossFit Fraser Valley in Langley, Canada.
After a year of hard training, the team, comprised of Beveridge, Robbie Perovich, Kurt Baker, Karolina Pawlak, Delaina Snider, and Leah Goddard, suffered two major blows in one week.
First, Perovich’s father, Bob, was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given a month to live.
“He was placed in hospice and I was sleeping with him every night to help him sleep and to have company,” Perovich said. “It was just more time I got to spend with him.”
Next, Pawlak suffered an ankle injury in training. While descending a rope, her foot got caught and she fell to the ground in agony.
“My foot looked like it had two baseballs on each side (of my ankle),” she said.
Too swollen to tell if there was a break, doctors put her in an air cast. With no replacement, as CrossFit Fraser Valley qualified a second team for regionals, the Centaurs’ future remained uncertain.
“They hadn’t put the workouts out yet, and we kinda thought it was over,” Beveridge said, “that we had no chance of making the Games this year. I kept a positive mentality and just said, ‘You know what guys, it’s gonna be a great story.’”
Overcoming Adversity
A few days before the Canada West Regional, Perovich and Beveridge accompanied Pawlak to a doctor’s appointment, where her cast was removed.
“They were like, these 6’2” guys and the doctor was like 5’2”,” Pawlak said with a laugh. “(He) said that the X-ray looked good and that there weren’t any bone structures causing a problem.”
Though her ankle still wasn’t 100 percent healed, she felt able to complete the minimum work requirements without sacrificing her safety. But that meant the other women on the team—Snider and Goddard—were going to have to do “a hell of a lot more work,” according to Pawlak.
While the team tried to work around her injury, Perovich was dealing with the psychological weight of his ailing father.
“He told me that he would give me his strength to help me compete at regionals,” Perovich recounted. “It was very mentally tough, but I had him in my mind, giving me strength.”
When they walked onto the competition floor at regionals, both the Centaurs and Hybrid team members wore stickers signed by Bob on their shirts.
The team overcame several other concerns over the weekend, including Baker’s inability do one strict handstand push-up a month before, and Pawlak’s inability to wrap the rope around her ankle for climbing.
The team finished in the top two in every event, finishing first overall by 1 point.
Against the odds, they were heading back to Carson.
“We were so nervous going into it with the injuries and everything,” Goddard said.
“Finding out that we managed to pull off the first-place win and were going to the Games was a pretty awesome feeling,” Snider added.
For Perovich, the end of the competition felt like relief.
“After we won, I went to see my father and gave him my medal and the ‘Proven’ hat,” he said. “His words were, ‘We did it!’ and I just said, ‘We did,’ and thanked him. The next day he could hardly speak. He passed away five days later.”
The Team
The Centaurs’ physical strength is obvious, but its mental strength has risen to the occasion in 2014.
“Our strength is our strength,” Beveridge said. “(Our) ability to work with a barbell and cycle as a team of two, or three or six, to rotate through barbell movements and max loads, and all that kind of stuff, we’re a very strong team.”
They also have depth. This year, four of the team’s six athletes finished the Open among the top 10 athletes in Canada West: Snider finished first; Perovich, fourth; Baker fifth; and Beveridge, seventh.
“We always place higher in the workouts where we all work together,” Pawlak said.
“We know how to read that person’s face—if they need a little bit more rest, or we need to figure out a way to carry their load a little bit better,” Goddard added.
Most team members live close to the gym, and in total they have nine children among them—Snider has two, Pawlak has one; Perovich, two; and Beveridge, four.
The Centaur family began when Beveridge met Perovich. Beveridge, a former football player, was working as a personal trainer and Perovich was in the middle of his modeling career.
“When I first started training him, he was a model and he was doing a shoot for Jean Paul Gaultier,” Beveridge said. “We found CrossFit and fell in love with it.”
The two opened CrossFit Fraser Valley in 2011.
Goddard, who has a competitive soccer background and works as an administrative assistant in accounting, started CrossFit in 2008 and became a member of CrossFit Fraser Valley the day it opened.
In the affiliate’s second month, Pawlak, a paralegal and a former national figure competitor, joined. She had been competing in CrossFit since 2009.
Snider became committed to CrossFit in 2012 after training with Beveridge to improve her half-marathon time. The full-time mom started to build more CrossFit into her training and never looked back.
Baker, a former football player and all-around athlete, soon joined the coaching staff.
Combined, the team has seven years of Games experience among them. For Beveridge, Perovich and Pawlak, this will be their third consecutive trip to the Games. Goddard was an alternate in 2012 and competed in 2013.
Snider, who opted to stick with her team despite finishing first in Canada West in the Open this year, will be making her first appearance. Baker, who placed 14th at the Canada West Regional in 2013, will also be making his first trip.
Preparing for Battle
The Centaurs members said they have been preparing for the Games from the moment they opened the doors to their gym three years ago. While doing construction, they watched the Games and ordered the various pieces of equipment they saw on screen.
“When the jerry cans came, they still had sand in them from the Games, so we were like, ‘Whoa! We got sand from the CrossFit Games here!’” Beveridge recalled. “We wanted to train for them, and we wanted to be able to do whatever (they were).”
With Beveridge and Perovich writing the team’s programming in alternating two-week blocks, they have been focusing on high-skill movements and heavy loads. The team has been adding every type of exercise they can dream up: logs, SkiErgs and Airdynes, Atlas stones and a wall to climb over.
“Year round, we’re pretty much trying to train for the CrossFit Games,” Beveridge said. “We’ve tried to expose ourselves to anything that we possibly could see.”
The team came together to train one to two times a week to prepare for the Games.
“It’s a pretty incredible feeling, being part of a group of people that all work so hard and work together with one goal in mind,” Snider said.
That goal is three-tiered. Finishing 26th at the Games in 2013 and 29th in 2012, they’d like to keep moving upward.
“Our secondary goal would be that we’re the top Canadian affiliate,” Beveridge said. “Our pie-in-the-sky goal would be a chance to make that final workout. If you’re there, you’re dancin’ with the big dogs.”
As the Centaurs start packing their bags for California in just a few days, Perovich will be preparing to compete with his father close to heart.
“You will be seeing (us) with that same sticker at the Games, and know he’s in my thoughts,” he said.
The tight-knit team is looking forward to sharing the experience with its two newest members.
“I’m excited to drink it all in,” Baker said. “I hope there are some really cool workouts, and maybe some stuff that’s never been done before.”
“I’m just super excited to be going and putting all our effort and hard work to use,” Snider added. “I just can’t wait!”
