After an evening team practice at Ocean State CrossFit in Rhode Island, Ray Fleser and Ashleigh Cornell slipped into a booth at their favorite Italian restaurant. It was where they shared their first date two-and-a-half years ago, and they were there to celebrate. Just a few weeks prior, the couple had helped their affiliate’s team qualify for the 2015 East Regional.
He tucked into his steak; she, her salmon. But before they could clean their plates, his phone trilled with the sound of an incoming email.
“Congratulations!” it read. “Based on your performance in the 2015 Reebok CrossFit Games Open, you have earned the right to be called the Fittest in Rhode Island!”
It was surprising news. He had missed the memo that state leaderboards had been created that year.
“It was a really amazing sense of accomplishment,” he said.
He told Cornell to check her email, too. She brushed him off. Honors like that were for elite athletes, not her. He insisted.
“I was like, ‘Oh, what the hell, I’ll check my email,’” Cornell said. “And then I got one too. I was so pumped.”
Proving themselves to be the fittest in their state gave each of them a new perspective on their fitness.
“Not Top-20 Material”
Fleser, 28, always wanted to be the best.
“At least within my surroundings,” he said.
For years, that meant working to be the best on the rugby pitch. After playing rugby for the University of Rhode Island for six semesters, he went on to play for a year as an openside flanker for the USA Division 1 Boston Rugby Football Club.
It was during his rugby career that he was first exposed to CrossFit. His college rugby coach, Nate Godfrey, used CrossFit.com workouts to prepare his athletes for the upcoming matches.
“I didn't know what CrossFit was, it was just a website with kick-ass workouts,” Fleser recalled.
Years later, Fleser would return from active duty with the United States Air Force to find that his rugby coach had opened CrossFit 401 in a storage unit about a mile away from campus. Intrigued by personal training, Fleser shadowed Godfrey to learn the fundamentals of coaching.
In the winter of 2013, Fleser attended a CrossFit Level 1 Seminar where he heard chatter about the upcoming Open.
“I always looked at exercise as a means to get better at a field sport, I never looked at exercise as a sport itself,” he said. “So when I learned about the Open I was like, ‘Yeah, I might as well see how good I am at exercising.’”
He finished 534th in the North East that year.
Though initially rugby came first—in the summer of 2013, he earned a spot on the USA Maccabiah Rugby team at the 2013 Maccabiah World Games in Israel—as time went on, his focus shifted.
He took a job as a trainer at Ocean State CrossFit, and by 2014, “I just kind of decided to hang up the cleats for a little bit and just devote myself to CrossFit,” he said.
He was won over by CrossFit’s comprehensive approach to fitness.
“You see these people that are so strong but then they lack endurance, or you see people that have tremendous endurance but they lack strength, and you see people with maybe a little of both, but can they do gymnastics?” he continued. “As far as the 10 domains that CrossFit gives you, it really leaves no stone unturned, and that's what really intrigued me. That's what I love about it so much.”
That year, he improved his Open rank by 413 places, taking 121st in the North East in the 2014 Open. The progress made Fleser hungrier, and he vowed to finish in the top 48 in 2015 and earn the chance to compete as an Individual at the North East Regional.
“I was like, ‘You’re there, man, your numbers are there, all your lifts are there, you can do this,’” he recounted.
He spent the months leading up to the 2015 season targeting his weaknesses: While he could comfortably clean in the 300-lb. range and back squat in the high 400s, at six feet and 220 lb., his handstand push-ups and muscle-ups were inefficient and he fatigued quickly.
“I had a competition where handstand push-ups in the final cost me the podium, and another where muscle-ups cost me getting into the final,” he said.
To improve, he paired muscle-ups and handstand push-ups with movements like rowing and double-unders. Combining these movement for short every-minute-on-the-minute workouts would “gas my system and toast my grip, to kind of simulate what it feels like when I’m exhausted, my hands don’t work and I need to do muscle-ups,” he said.
Though his effort paid off in Open Workouts 15.3 and 15.4—the triplet of muscle-ups, wall-ball shots and double-unders and the ascending ladder of handstand push-ups and cleans were his best finishes across the five weeks—it wasn’t enough to earn a spot in the Individual Competition at regionals.
Fleser wasn’t surprised. His goals changed the moment he heard Dave Castro, the Director of the Games, announce that only the top-20 athletes from the U.S. regions would advance to the new, combined regionals.
“Not to say I gave up, but like, you know what you can do,” he explained.
He committed himself to helping his team qualify, and succeeded, but when his name settled into the 46th spot on the North East Leaderboard he struggled to shake thoughts of what could have been if the regional model remained unchanged.
“In 2015, I held myself to the level of an elite athlete,” he said. “I was kind of obsessing over making the top 50, and then Castro came out with the (combined regional) and it really took the wind out of my sail. Being realistic, I was like, ‘You know what, I'm not top-20 material.’”
Masked Potential
Like Fleser, Cornell, 31, has always been competitive. Growing up, she played every sport her community offered, including volleyball, track, gymnastics and swimming before becoming a Division-1 softball player and cheerleader at the University of Rhode Island.
“I always tried to beat the boys in gym class,” she said.
In 2012, she ran the Cape Cod Marathon in 3:28. It was her first marathon, and her time was good enough to earn a spot in the 2014 Boston Marathon, which she finished in 3:52.
“People run dozens of marathons for years to get that, and I’m like, ‘Nope, I’m gonna qualify for the Boston Marathon on my first marathon,’ and I did,” she said. “I’ve always had really high standards for myself.”
After college, Cornell waited tables while attending graduate school where she studied history. When she wasn’t working, she trained at a local gym dedicated to functional fitness. Friends suggested she try CrossFit, but it wasn’t until she suffered a rough break-up that she gave it a shot.
“I just needed a change,” she said. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna do this CrossFit thing.’”
She joined Ocean State CrossFit in November of 2013. Within a week, Fleser had invited her to compete in a local throwdown.
“I was like, ‘I don't even know what I'm doing. I just got here,’” Cornell said. “And he was like, ‘No, you're gonna be good, I know it.’”
In her first workout, a triplet of deadlifts, box jumps and pull-ups, she impressed Fleser with her raw strength and natural agility.
“She didn’t know how to kip, she didn’t know what she was doing, but I just watched her move and I watched the way she moved weight, and I just walked over to her and I was like, ‘Have you ever done this before?’” Fleser recalled. She hadn’t.
“He put me on a crash course, so in addition to going to class, he was snatching with me and helping me, going above and beyond because he knew I had potential,” Cornell said. “But also, obviously, he had other interests.”
Three weeks later, they were dating.
When Cornell started CrossFit, she could clean and jerk 165 lb. and back squat 225 lb. She got her first muscle-up just a few weeks into training, and finished her first Open in 2014 in 462nd place in the North East. But she never saw the potential that was so obvious to Fleser.
“It beat me down a lot, seeing other women crushing gymnastics or lifting more than me,” she said. “I would get fixated on what someone was lifting or someone doing 20 unbroken muscle-ups and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t do that.’”
Though she loved to compete in local throwdowns, she always set the bar below the podium, comparing herself to other regional athletes and expecting to fall short before the first rep was even in.
“I’d be like, ‘Whatever, they should beat me; they’re regional athletes,’” she said.
Qualifying for the Individual Competition at regionals was never on her radar.
“I didn’t think it was a possibility; I wasn’t even considering it,” she said.
A Different Perspective
With the individual competition off the table in both Fleser’s and Cornell’s minds, they spent the months leading up to the 2015 season dedicated to team training. Cornell joined the Ocean State CrossFit staff as a coach, and when they weren’t at the gym, the couple spent their time snowboarding or unwinding at the beach.
After the Open ended last year, they looked forward to competing alongside their teammates at the East Regional. But thanks to two short emails and the title “Fittest in Rhode Island,” they arrived at the XL Center in Hartford, Connecticut last May with fresh perspectives.
“In everything I've done I've always tried to be the best; well, you only know that by looking at other people,” Fleser said. “There were people in the state that I was looking up to that I might have seen in competitions that are always gonna give me a run for my money, and when all the dust settled in the Open over five weeks, I set the bar. Everybody was trying to be the best, everybody was giving everything they had for one more rep … and when the dust settled, I was on top.”
As Cornell watched the Individual Women throw down, she no longer saw such a disparity between them and herself.
“Mentally, it was game-changing,” she said. “Being recognized as Fittest in Rhode Island has really helped me to say to myself, ‘These are no longer your idols, these are your peers and your competition. You know their names, it's time they know yours.’”
The boost in confidence helped her to view regionals as a learning experience. Though she struggled with the strict handstand push-ups in Open Workout 15.4 as well as Event 7 at the East Regional, instead of lamenting over what she couldn’t do, she went home and practiced. In a recent re-test of Open Workout 15.4, she added 15 reps to her previous score of 93.
“And it was the last workout of the day after three other workouts, so I think (fresh) I could do even better,” she said.
Better still, she no longer worries about what other athletes were doing.
“There (are) people that are always gonna be stronger than me, but I've proven that whether it’s a matter of fitness or just sheer determination … I can still hang with them,” she said. “I force myself to kind of let go of obsessing over what everyone else has on their bar.”
In just a few weeks, Fleser and Cornell, now engaged, will test their fitness against their peers once more in the 2016 Open. And this year, they’re setting higher goals. They hope to help their affiliate’s team qualify for the Games, and hold onto their titles as the Fittest Couple in Rhode Island.
“If we keep our titles for years to come, that will be amazing,” Fleser added. “And if neither earns it this year or ever again … we will be proud of what we have accomplished, and enjoy our lives together, being able to say, ‘Yeah, we did that!’”
