"I'm 42 years old and I'm in the best shape of my life because of CrossFit."
Rob Dillon started doing CrossFit for the same reasons many others did: to lose weight and get in shape. He couldn’t have known then it would save his life.
On August 22, 2011, Dillon, a detective with the San Jose Police Department, had to fight for his life against an assailant who wanted to take his firearm. The altercation lasted for three minutes and 12 seconds before more officers arrived on the scene. It cost Dillon some teeth and a knee injury, but he survived. “It was the CrossFit mindset. I was thinking, ‘I’m on my own. Nobody’s going to do this for me. Just 10 more seconds,’” he recalls. “Over and over. ‘Just 10 more seconds.’”
Dillon was always a big guy. “Before [CrossFit], I was around 240 or 250, but I was working undercover and eating a lot of bar food and drinking a lot of beer, and it got a little out of control. When I got up to 270, it was really out of hand,” Dillon says.
In early 2010, a member of CrossFit One World in Union City, Calif., told him about CrossFit, and he attended a few of the open Saturday classes there and at CrossFit CSA in Dublin, Calif. He began working out in the gym at the SJPD. He lost around 30 pounds, and a few months later he started following the paleo diet and lost more. At the time of the fight, he weighed 205 pounds, which he has maintained since.
“You don’t realize how serious it is. I didn’t realize that until later. The guy thought, for whatever reason, that I was going to kill him, so he decided to kill me first. He came from behind to try to take my gun,” Dillon says, remembering the confrontation. “The witnesses came up and said it was incredible. When someone tries to take your gun, you try to keep the gun in the holster. While I was getting punched, I was head-butting the guy and just trying to survive. He had me out weighed by about 40 pounds. He also had rage and fear on his side. I just had fear. In a fight like that, a lot of times you’re grappling, and this was three minutes of all out fighting, punching, twisting, trying to keep myself on top. At the end I felt like I was going to throw up.”
Above all, Dillon says it was CrossFit that put him in the best shape of his life and got him through the experience. “It was a scary event. It changed my attitude about a lot of things, how quickly things can be taken from you. It brought a new appreciation for my fitness and well-being,” he says. “Things happen for a reason, and because of all the hard work prior to that fight, I was in a place where I needed to be.”
As a result, Dillon needed two surgeries on his knee, and learned the knee still has to be reconstructed. He doesn’t let that stop him from working out. He can’t run, but he modifies movements he can do, like staying relatively light when he squats and doing burpees on one leg. He also started cycling to strengthen his leg.
“I’m a total CrossFit promoter now. People tell me they can’t do it because of injuries, but I tell them that I know they can if they are willing to try to work with it. My nephews and I do things like Fight Gone Bad, and we’re breaking a sweat and busting our butts, and it’s not preventing me from doing it,” Dillon says. “I work around what I can’t do. It’s like those commercials – I’m 42 years old and I’m in the best shape of my life because of CrossFit.”
In addition to working out at SJPD CrossFit, Dillon has set up a complete home gym of his own. He has mats on the floor, kettlebells, dumbbells, squat racks, barbells, pull-up bars, rings, plyo boxes and homemade parallettes. He even has a prowler. His nephews and his daughter are now doing CrossFit with him, and he says it’s a regular family affair.
“I like unorthodox workouts, like slam balls or moving bricks from one place to another. It doesn’t have to make sense, it’s just a great exercise,” he says. “If you want, you can turn anything into a great workout. Anything that requires quick bursts of energy over a short period of time.”
Dillon says his experience has inspired a lot of people to get serious about getting fit. “It changes their mindset about getting in shape and not giving up. I can name about a dozen people who started working out, and now they’re doing CrossFit as a result of what I went through,” he says. “They are the kind of people who used to make New Year’s resolutions, and then gave up after a month, but now they’re working out regularly."