Just a couple of minutes remained on the clock as Nathan Carey ground through Open Workout 17.2, a 12-minute AMRAP of lunges, toes-to-bars, cleans and bar muscle-ups—this week with twice as much dumbbell.
As the 28-year-old finished his third round, his forearms began to burn, and his grip was “wrecked.” Still, he managed to knock out four pull-ups in Round 4 before the time ran out.
He relaxed his grip and dropped from the bar, landing with a soft thump in the wheelchair waiting below. Paralyzed from the waist down, Carey is one of about 15 adaptive athletes who call CrossFit Overcome home. He was injured at 19 while working for a moving company when a 2,000-lb. crate fell from a forklift onto his back, fracturing his T12 vertebrae along with a few ribs.
A nonprofit affiliate founded in 2013 by U.S. Air Force veteran Christopher Block, CrossFit Overcome serves athletes with physical, developmental and cognitive disabilities. And just like the tens of thousands of affiliates all over the globe, CrossFit Overcome is #intheOpen.
“It's no different than any other box,” Block, 38, said. “We get the clipboard out, we get excited, the timer goes, and we count the reps. The only thing different is we just don't post scores.”
Nathan Carey pushing fellow gym member, Jose Enrique Soto. (All photos courtesy of Elaina Janeale Ronai)
CrossFit Overcome operates out of a former fighter maintenance hangar at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, a U.S. Army and Air Force base in Anchorage, Alaska. The space and equipment, which belong to the base, are shared with Arctic CrossFit, where Block began his own CrossFit journey seven years ago.
After years of lifting heavy loads with the Air Force’s mortuary affairs search and recovery team—serving on deployments to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Qatar, among others—Block was diagnosed with degenerative arthritis in his back in 2006. He transitioned to the Alaska Air National Guard soon after.
His new role was more sedentary, and by 2010, he weighed nearly 300 lb. at 6 feet tall. After struggling to assist with the search and recovery of soldiers when a local military transport aircraft crashed that year, Block was accidentally copied on an email from his doctor to superior officers.
“It was basically like, ‘Why would we keep him?’” Block quoted the email. “It was a big eye-opener.”
Soon after, a friend invited Block to try a workout at Arctic CrossFit. It was Filthy Fifty.
“I think I scaled it to 25 (reps per movement), and it probably took me an hour plus,” he said. “But I liked it. There was nothing that pushed me harder, it didn't hurt my back, and I was excited.”
One year later, he’d dropped more than 100 lb. Block was a longtime snowboard and ski instructor for Challenge Alaska, an organization dedicated to “improving the lives of people with disabilities ... through adaptive sports, therapeutic recreation and education,” and he saw an opportunity for CrossFit to help adaptive athletes the same way it had helped him.
Block became a Level 1 CrossFit Trainer in 2011, and CrossFit Overcome was born two years later. A nonprofit affiliate, the gym runs on crowd funding and the generosity of the base and the affiliate’s coaching staff, all of whom are volunteers. The gym began with one athlete, a young woman with cerebral palsy. When she started CrossFit, she couldn’t run 100 meters. Nine months later, she was running 800s during workouts.
“Right then and there we just understood how powerful CrossFit was,” Block said.
Today, Block and his team train athletes facing a variety of challenges from paralysis, cerebral palsy and spina bifida to traumatic brain injury and autism. Coach-to-athlete class ratios are often one-to-one, and athletes’ recreational therapists and other care providers often work out alongside them.
Though athletes at CrossFit Overcome might come with extra hardware or need other accommodations, the focus is the same as at any other CrossFit gym: functionality.
“I want them to be able to pick things up off the ground or be able to transfer to and from the chair to other things,” Block said.
Functionality is a spectrum, he said. What might be functional for one athlete isn’t always appropriate for another, and real-life application is the number-one goal. For athletes with cognitive disabilities, “functional” might simply mean movements or workouts that are both physically and socially stimulating.
In either case, the question is “how will this movement make them better with daily tasks?” Block said.
But physical functionality is just half the equation. For athletes at CrossFit Overcome, the gym provides a supportive community where “you aren’t the ‘different’ person with a disability. You are an athlete that is focused on doing the best that you can,” Block said.
The Open, he continued, is the perfect way to express that focus on functionality while also being part of the greater CrossFit family.
“The Open has given us an opportunity to be a part of the community,” he said. “Everybody does it and we're all together for five weeks of pain. We always focus on ability and increasing what is capable for each athlete, and it also is an opportunity to push themselves and to really grow within the process.”
For many CrossFit Overcome athletes, that means the Open workouts might look a little bit different than the official workouts posted on the CrossFit Games website. Instead of walking lunges and toes-to-bars, Carey performed 100-foot weighted sled pushes and good mornings in his chair. He performed the dumbbell cleans as written with a scaled weight, and he had no problem with the scaled substitute for bar muscle-ups: “I can do more pull-ups now in a chair than I could before I broke my back,” he said.
Carey says he feels connected to the greater CrossFit community by doing the Open.
“Everyone has the same hurt after,” he said.
Carey recalled seeing some friends around town that trained at other CrossFit gyms.
“You could see them walking a little bit with a limp and you would start a conversation and just say, ‘17.2?’ It's a shared workout, and everyone's on the same page.”
The pain isn’t the only unifying feature of the Open: there’s also the push.
David Flaherty, 25, is another CrossFit Overcome athlete. He has high-functioning autism, and he loves pull-ups and deadlifts. Though able-bodied, Flaherty struggles with aspects of social interaction. Reading facial expressions and social cues as well as working as part of a group can be challenging for him—something his mother, Kim Flaherty, said CrossFit has helped to improve.
“With CrossFit, we’re able to work with a community, and even though we’re working with a team, everybody’s working on different goals and objectives,” she said. “It’s been a really perfect platform for him to learn people's differences. We all have our struggles, and we're all working on them.”
When he first started CrossFit about two years ago, David “was kind of socially tougher,” Block said. “He spoke in phrases. He wasn't very social, just very quiet. Now he'll go up and talk with everybody. It's really cool to see him connect with everyone. He's not an athlete with autism. He’s just there to do CrossFit.”
He was up for some CrossFit on the night of 17.2. Block recalled watching him perform round after round of lunges, knee raises and jumping pull-ups. Though David’s workouts are often dictated by his moods, something was different about the atmosphere of the Open workout.
“In a workout normally, he would have stopped halfway through,” Block said. “And at first, he told me no, he was done. And then a minute later, he went back and started doing more lunges.”
David was still in good spirits a few days later.
“Just taking a break—that’s all,” he said cheerfully.
And though CrossFit Overcome posts no scores on the official CrossFit Games Leaderboard, Block said the Open “is a completely fun way for us to look at our progress year over year,” he said.
He drew an analogy to the athletes he coaches each week with Challenge Alaska.
“I always tell them, ‘You’re not an adaptive athlete. You’re a snowboarder’ or ‘you’re a skier,’” he said. “So for the Open, we feel like we’re CrossFitters.
“Some of these guys have been looked at differently their entire lives, and in (the Open), they just get to (do) CrossFit. It might not look exactly like everybody else’s, but they’re still doing it.”
