“I said, ‘I want to make the CrossFit Games. That’s my dream. How am I going to get there?’”
In June of 2013, Emily Abbott emailed Justin Thacker, a coach at The Lab Gym in St. Louis, Missouri.
“I said, ‘I want to make the CrossFit Games. That’s my dream. How am I going to get there?’” Abbott said.
A year later, her dream has become a reality.
The 25-year-old Calgary, Canada, native, who first tried CrossFit in 2012, finished first at the Canada West Regional and earned a ticket to the 2014 Reebok CrossFit Games.
While her CrossFit career is short compared to many others who will be competing in Carson, California, it has spanned the world and is the pinnacle of a long journey as an athlete. The journey started on her family’s ranch, where mental toughness and an unwavering work ethic were ingrained.
Growing Up in Calgary
One of four kids, Abbott spent her childhood in Calgary. Her family moved out of the city to a ranch in the foothills when she was 12.
“We started doing all this farm work every weekend, and basically every day after school,” she said.
She spent summers fixing barbed wire fences, moving rocks and driving tractors. Though she didn’t necessarily enjoy doing all of the work, Abbott said it taught her a lot about being tough.
“I remember one summer, working with my dad and my sister on barbed wire fencing,” she remembered. “I was getting cut up by the barbed wire and so were they. It started raining, and my dad was like, ‘We’re not going inside, we’re going to continue to work!’ I can just remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is insane.’ But I kinda liked it—I liked that it was extreme and insane.”
While working on the ranch, Abbott played volleyball, track, soccer and basketball. Her father, Marty, a pilot in the Canadian Air Force, enrolled her in an after-school sports program run by John Csikos, who is the coach of the national water polo team.
“That’s where my sports fanaticism started, because all I would do after school everyday was two hours of different sports,” she said. “Csikos was great—he just built up your self-esteem. He was a national-level coach so he really knew what he was doing.”
Breeding Ground for Success
In 2007, Abbott was recruited to play basketball at the University of Windsor by renowned coach Chantal Vallée, who had taken over the last-place team in the country in 2005. She promised to win a national championship within five years.
“When I recruited Emily, our team was not good and we hadn’t even made playoffs—that’s how bad we were,” Vallée said. “I was a new coach, and I told Emily, ‘We’re going to build this team into national champions, and you’re going to be part of that vision.’”
Abbott went all in.
“She was this really passionate French woman, and she just sold me on her dream,” Abbott said of Vallée. “She had a mission. To me, that was so much more important—to have a goal, to have an end game. She wanted not just to win a basketball championship. She wanted something bigger than that.”
After captaining the team to two national championships as a player, Abbott stayed on as the team’s strength and conditioning coach. The team is now considered a dynasty, with four consecutive national titles under its belt.
“(Vallée) totally kicked my ass, and made me accountable for who I was or anything that I did,” Abbott said. “I became so much more mentally tough, and way stronger of a person. At any point (in workouts) where I feel like, ‘Oh my God, this is so hard,’ I think about everything I went through with Chantal Vallée. Nothing will ever be as hard as playing for her. That keeps me mentally fortified.”
Vallée added: “Emily is a person that really gets it. She understands hard work, and she understands that hard work pays off. She just became an incredible, strong woman, and an incredible, strong leader.”
The Travel Bug
After graduating from Windsor with a degree in English, Abbott “did the whole Europe thing,” and toured the continent for a few months. From there, she moved to St. Louis where her boyfriend, Tom Craig, lived. Abbott and Craig met while Craig was playing hockey at Windsor.
It was Craig who introduced Abbott to CrossFit. Abbott told Craig she was frustrated by her weight gain during her travels and he suggested she try it.
After a couple of classes at CrossFit Central West End, Abbott was hooked. When she resumed her travels, she visited CrossFit gyms along the west coast in North America before heading overseas to Indonesia and New Zealand.
Between surfing reef breaks, swimming in the Dead Sea, and traveling around in a camper van, Abbott gained a new perspective on the role fitness played in her life.
“I think all athletes can relate … when you finish playing a high-level sport, you kinda need something to hold on and to train for,” she said. “I thought traveling would totally fill that void because that’s what I always wanted to do, to travel when I finished this ‘sport business,’ but I realized along the way that I was always trying to find time to work out.”
During her travel, Abbott managed to squeeze in the 2013 Open workouts. She placed 98th in the Australia Region, despite failing to submit a score for 13.5. She caught dengue fever and was hospitalized.
“It was awful,” she recounted. “But one thing I did take away from it was when I started to feel better, I can remember being so joyous. Every moment of health I was grateful for. I was so happy I could use my body again. I could run, and eat and drink and be out in the sun. What a way to gain some perspective after being sick. It makes you so grateful.”
The Road to Regionals
After recovering from her illness, Abbott moved home to Calgary and began coaching at CrossFit Currie Barracks.
“After a month of being really sick, CrossFit called me back,” she said. “I began training as much as possible.”
She also began to consider competing.
“I was sitting in my room, and I remember talking to (Craig), and being like, ‘I really think I can do this CrossFit thing. I need to start training seriously,’” she recalled.
At the time, Craig was a member of Heavy Metal CrossFit, a new affiliate inside Justin Thacker’s The Lab Gym in St. Louis. Impressed by Thacker’s credentials and work as a national-level Olympic lifter and coach, Craig encouraged Abbott to connect with him.
“He said, ‘You gotta train with this guy,’” Abbott recalled. “So I sent the email to Justin.”
Last July, she made the trip to St. Louis to train with Thacker for a week.
“I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn’t very good. My Olympic lifts weren’t very good because I was pretty new to them,” she said. “But after just one week of training a couple hours every day, I realized I got so much better and it was so empowering. It was such a great atmosphere, and I knew that if I stuck with his programming, I could get better and I could get better fast.”
“Immediately, (Justin) was invested in me,” she added. “I think that was … a life-changing experience because everyone really believed in me there.”
After that week, Abbott returned to Canada, but continued training under Thacker’s tutelage.
“We wrote all of her programming for her and she would shoot videos and we would just kind of correspond with her that way,” Thacker said of their correspondence. “It’s pretty amazing for her to take that little bit of hands-on guidance and be able to execute so well in such little time.”
Believing it would take two to three years to make the Games, Abbott trained twice a day with Thacker coaching her remotely from St. Louis. CrossFit Currie Barracks owner Eric Barber wrote most of her programming starting in January, leading up to the Open.
Performing consistently throughout the five-week competition, she qualified for the Canada West Regional in fourth place.
“Regionals was just the craziest experience of my life,” she said. “The whole weekend, my main goal was to have fun and not be so serious. I knew this was my first year, and I was just not going to worry about anything but myself and just do what I had to do. I think that carried me through.”
With last year’s Games qualifiers from Canada West—Heather Gillespie and Erin Light—out of contention, there was a window of opportunity for two new women to earn tickets to the Games.
The stars aligned for Abbott.
In fifth place after Day 1, she won Event 4 but struggled with her rope climbs in Event 5, tying for ninth. Feeling deflated, she headed to a rower where a friend told her she was in first overall.
“I was just thinking that I was pretty much done for the weekend,” she said. “I was like, ‘No way!’ and I looked at the standings and I was in first place. I was absolutely shocked.”
“I remember going with (Craig) to eat a big steak and potatoes,” she continued, “and we were thinking about the idea of going to the Games, and I was like, ‘There’s no way, I’m too green.’”
Then she won Event 6.
An 11th-place finish in Event 7 was still good enough to maintain the overall lead. She was going to the Games.
“That whole weekend I was really proud of myself because I stayed calm,” Abbott said. “I didn’t freak out. I didn’t push myself past my redline. That’s something I’m definitely going to have to remember for the Games.”
Games Bound
Abbott has quickly created a plan for the Games.
“All of a sudden, I’m kind of thrust into this position where I have to get really good really fast,” she said. “It was kind of an instinct that I needed to get uncomfortable again.”
Getting outside her comfort zone spurred her to move to St. Louis for the summer to train full time with Thacker.
“She had a more normal lifestyle leading up to this, but now she’s got nothing to do but train,” Thacker said. “Being as new as she is, there are so many little things to polish off, so we’re just trying to get all the practicing and conditioning in that we need.”
“Now, she has more attention than she probably even wants,” he laughed.
With a high-volume schedule, Abbott has shifted from doing two-a-days, lifting in the morning and at night while fitting in skill work in between, to focusing mostly on her biggest weakness: gymnastics.
“Gymnastics is going to be a huge thing for me because I don’t have that in my background,” she said. “I’m just basically this big, heavy basketball player that used to lay girls out on the floor.”
Though she’s enjoying the training, she said it’s a mentally challenging time for her.
“Every day I show up at The Lab Gym, it’s the hardest day,” she admitted. “And then I’m like, ‘OK, I got through that. Awesome.’ And the next day is even harder. I’m being pushed in the right direction because this is how the Games are gonna be.”
While some might find it difficult to live and train away from home, Abbott said she and her family have embraced it.
“My dad was in the Air Force when he met my mom, and they were both in Germany and fell in love there,” she said, adding that her siblings are spread out around North America and Europe. “They really value traveling around. When I told them I wanted to go to St. Louis to train seriously, they were all for it.”
Abbott said she would consider moving to the U.S. permanently.
“At the same time, I can see myself back in Canada as well, back at CrossFit Currie Barracks, doin’ the same thing I just did for the past year,” she considered. “I’m in two different worlds and they both feel so right. After the Games, I’m definitely going to have to make a decision about where I want to be.”
While she remains focused on her day-to-day training, Abbott is looking forward to competing in Carson for the first time without the burden of high expectations. Her goal is simply to perform each event to the best of her ability.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” she said. “I may not get back there next year, or the year after that, so I’m just going to soak it all in. I’m just so excited to work my ass off. I’m so excited for the challenge, and I’m so lucky to have this opportunity.”
