Joey Siela sat alone in his home.
His girlfriend had taken the kids and left, and the power company shut the electricity off. He had no hot water. So he did the only thing he could do to feel better: shoot up some heroin.
“It was kind of rock bottom,” the 31-year-old said after finishing Team Event 4 as part of team CrossFit 913 this morning.
Siela is a recovering addict. He started drinking at 8 or 9; marijuana came at 10. He tried his first pain pill at 12 or 13, stolen from his grandmother’s medicine cabinet.
“Once I got ahold of opioids, my addiction kind of went crazy from there,” he said.
Still, he managed to play basketball throughout high school. He played at the state tournament his senior year and went on to play college ball. After, he’d play in the semi-pros, he dreamed.
His drug use got him kicked out of college after just one semester.
“Then my using got really bad because I didn't have anything to keep me accountable or to stay clean for because sports were done,” Siela recalled.
He deteriorated quickly after that, wasting to 145 lb. at 6 foot 2.
He stole pain medication from his stepfather, ill with terminal cancer, and after too many second chances, his girlfriend took his two children and left. He couldn’t keep a job because he couldn’t pass a drug test.
“I did a lot of things that I regret,” he said. “Basically, anything I touched in personal life or my work life, it had an expiration date. Relationships, jobs, cars—anything like that I couldn’t keep because eventually I would trade it for the dope.”
So when he got a call in 2011 from friends asking him if he wanted to come with them to a narcotics anonymous convention, he had nothing to lose.
“I went there and I got clean on April 12, 2011, and I haven't picked up heroin or cocaine or drugs like that ever since,” he said.
He spent the next two years attending 12-step meetings and building a mental, spiritual and social life around sobriety. Still, there was a void.
“When I got kicked out of college, I just felt like I’d failed,” he said. “That was my dream—I remember ever since I was a kid, all I wanted to do was play basketball. I wanted to compete.”
He was watching TV in 2013 when he saw a Reebok commercial featuring Annie Thorisdottir; “The Sport of Fitness has arrived,” the screen read.
“I was like, ‘Well, I gotta try this,’” he said.
He paid a visit to the only CrossFit affiliate in town at the time, B-Fit CrossFit in St. Joseph, Missouri.
“I went there and the workout was 100 pull-ups for time,” he recalled. “It wrecked me, and I've been doing it ever since.”
Though he’d already done the hard work of getting clean before starting CrossFit, Siela said CrossFit has been instrumental in his continued sobriety.
“Because if I go start using again, I can't do this, and this is really something that I love to do,” he said. “I took the principles of CrossFit—eat healthy, work out, take care of yourself, don't put trash in your body—and if I practice those, I stay clean; I'm not gonna be a heroin addict. I'm not gonna be an IV-drug user.”
CrossFit has also given him a supportive community to belong to.
“When you go to meetings you become part of a recovery community, and then when you go to CrossFit, you're part of another community. It's like a second home. They welcome me with open arms,” he said of the crew at his current gym, CrossFit 913.
But CrossFit didn’t just give Siela a second community—it gave him a second chance at his dream.
When his expulsion ended his basketball career, he felt like he’d “missed an opportunity, and ... was a failure," he said. “Getting into CrossFit, I get to compete again.”
As an individual, Siela has improved from 76th in the North Central after the 2016 Open to 37th this year. This weekend, he helped CrossFit 913 to a 29th-place finish at the Central Regional, and next year he hopes to compete as an individual. Not just for himself, but to show his children—now 9 and 7, with a third at 18 months—what’s possible with hard work and determination.
“That's the whole reason I've been trying to get to Regionals,” he said, adding that his oldest children were in the crowd cheering him on this weekend.
“My kids know my story, and ... they know this is a goal of mine. I just want them to know that if there is a goal they set in their life, no matter what, you can do whatever you want to do, but you have to be dedicated to do it.”
