Rich Froning has found his way with the ladies.
"It's a tough thing to work with two different genders. You've gotta learn how to talk to women and talk to guys,” he said days after his squad, Team USA, suffered a crushing loss to Team World in the 2013 CrossFit Invitational in Berlin, Germany.
At the time, Froning was in his fourth year of CrossFit Games individual competition and had won for his third consecutive year. The year before, Froning and Team USA ran away with the Invitational in London, England.
In an interview with CrossFit Games Director Dave Castro, Froning had said he needed to learn how to talk to women in a competition setting.
“There's two different ways to motivate people. You have to learn that different people are motivated in a different way,” he explained then.
He added that the men on that year’s Invitational team could be motivated in similar fashion.
“We can yell at each other,” Froning had said. “With the girls you have to be a little bit more tender.”
He continued: “... with the ladies, yeah, I may not have taken the correct approach. It’s tough to do something two or three days with people you don’t really know.”
When reminded of his comments Friday morning, the four-time Games champion chuckled.
“It honestly helps when you get to create a relationship with people over time,” he said as his team, CrossFit Mayhem Freedom, began warming up for the day’s first event, Triple Deadlift. The defending Affiliate Cup champions started the day in first place overall.
Froning, 29, also attributed his improved female rapport to simply maturing.
“I guess I just got older,” he said with a smile.
He also noted the obvious: There isn’t one way to motivate every athlete, much less every woman.
“Kristin you yell at, Elly you baby and Lindy does her own thing,” he said with a smile, referencing Mayhem’s female team members, Kristin Reffett, Elly Kabboord and Lindy Barber.
He admitted, though, that he’s not good with “nurturing.”
When tears fall, “I just walk away and get awkward,” Froning said.
This was demonstrated when Kabboord recorded a disappointing performance on Open Workout 15.4, an 8-minute AMRAP of increasing handstand push-ups and cleans.
“I didn’t have a good workout,” Kabboord recounted. “My bottom lip started quivering.”
Froning, she said, got awkward.
“‘James, hug her or something,’” Kabboord said Froning told fellow Mayhem teammate James Hobart.
That quivering lip, Reffett noted, is what the rest of the team calls “the Elly lip.”
“Elly is a ball of emotions,” Reffett said.
She’s also the butt of all the jokes, and sometimes that doesn’t go as intended, Reffett said.
“It’s a learning process for Rich in terms of how far he can push it sometimes.”
After six events, Mayhem remained in first place overall.
