“Being injured is like having a PR every day, because every day you get to do something new. It’s changed my priorities ... I’ve now come back to the reason why I fell in love with CrossFit in the first place: the health, the wellness and the community.”
Above photos by Cheryl Boatman
A former competitive Ultimate Frisbee player, Jennifer Wills, discovered CrossFit in 2009 when trying to get back in shape after ACL surgery. Little did she know that in 2012, she would injure the same knee at the CrossFit Games while competing with the team from CrossFit Fort Vancouver.
Following her injury, Wills underwent surgery, which included a cadaver graft and repair work to her meniscus. She was on crutches and ordered to avoid weight-bearing exercises for seven weeks. CrossFit helped her through recovery.
Wills says CrossFit gave her a mental toughness she didn’t have before. She was committed to her schedule, so she joined a local bodybuilding gym for a few weeks, hopping around on crutches doing timed sets of dips and pull-ups. Once she was off the crutches she returned to training, this time at a box closer to home, F.O.E. CrossFit.
The addition of scaled CrossFit workouts into her training sped up her recovery. Wills saw the difference between her and the other patients at the physical therapist’s clinic each week.
“You would see people … all they did was go to their physical therapy once a week,” Wills says. “I was going to the gym four days and physical therapy one day, so each week I would jump into the stuff I would do and was far ahead of even the high school kids recovering from ACL surgery.”
More importantly, she felt she was able to stay connected to the activity and people she loved.
“The first time, I didn’t do frisbee for six months. I couldn’t run around, so I just didn’t do what I loved,” she says. “With CrossFit being so scalable, I was back in seven weeks so I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything. I was still part of the community. I was still there.”
Just six months post-surgery, Wills did a 120-lb. squat snatch. She feels her strength hasn’t waned much during recovery and she credits this to how strong she was prior to the accident.
“I hardly had any muscle atrophy and I was already set up for getting back to walking. It was way easier than it had been my previous time. I didn’t lose much in seven weeks because I had a lot to start with.”
Wills still can’t run comfortably and she has another couple weeks until she’s allowed to jump, but she is aiming to do the Open workouts as prescribed. Physical recovery aside, she feels the injury brought back her original love for CrossFit.
“Being injured is like having a PR every day, because every day you get to do something new,” she says. “It’s changed my priorities. I considered competition a priority, and I’ve now come back to the reason why I fell in love with CrossFit in the first place: the health, the wellness and the community.”
Wills earned her Level 1 Certificate last December, and she is now sharing her knowledge with students at her gym. When they complain about injury or limitations, she brings her new perspective to them.
“I injured myself doing something that I loved, and there are military personnel out there doing something for work, and they got injured and they are still doing CrossFit … If I put it in perspective, I had it pretty good.”
