"It's one thing to have a guy with 10 fingers and 10 toes telling you that you can do something when you're missing both your legs. It's another thing entirely when you hear it from an amputee and a veteran." ~Brian Wilson
Everyone has to start somewhere. Even the most naturally gifted athletes don’t show up at the Home Depot Center without logging hundreds of hours in the gym, building their endurance, learning new movements and refining their technique. Somewhere in the dawn of time, top CrossFitters like Chris Spealler and Jason Khalipa had to learn what a burpee was, and how to do a muscle-up.
Jason Sturm is a coach at CrossFit Walter Reed and CrossFit Rubicon. If you ask him about his athletic background before enlisting in the U.S. Army, a vaguely amused expression forms on his face. While he occasionally lifted weights and threw the shot put and discus in high school, he says, “If I ran around a track, you’d have to time me with a sun dial.”
After enlisting in the Army, Sturm says he had to train himself to run. “The first thing I did was go on really long walks, like three or four miles.”
When he showed up to basic training, the first physical training test was two minutes of push-ups, two minutes of sit-ups and a two-mile run. He passed the push-up portion, but failed the sit-ups, and in his own words, “failed miserably” on the run, putting him square in the sights of all the drill instructors.
In order to start passing his PT tests and become a better soldier, Sturm began working out on his own. He started lifting, doing crunches and running approximately three miles. This is when he began to take an interest in fitness.
Sturm hit a major setback in 2002 when he lost a leg in a live fire artillery training accident at Ft. Drum in upstate New York. Two soldiers lost their lives in the accident.
Initially doctors were able to save both of his legs, but after eight months of physical therapy, Sturm came to the conclusion that his left leg was useless for anything other than causing pain. After a lot of discussion with his doctor, Sturm made the decision to have it amputated.
On the day of surgery, Sturm wrote, ‘Take this one’ on his bad leg. On his good leg, from ankle to hip he wrote, ‘Not this one!’ As he woke from surgery, he didn’t feel anything. For the first time since the accident, he wasn’t in pain.
With rehab and physical therapy, Sturm reached the point where he could walk with a cane and decided to join a local gym. In 2003, he couldn’t find much information for amputees on lifting weights. Since the trainers available to him didn’t know how to work with an adaptive athlete, Sturm hit the books. He went to the library, watched videos, checked out books and searched YouTube.
In 2008, he lost some of the weight he gained after his accident and started running again. Eventually, he decided this wasn’t enough, and he wanted to obtain functional movement-based fitness.
One evening, his wife came home from work and told him about some co-workers who were doing some crazy workout, running up stairs and jumping around. For Sturm, this was the first time CrossFit popped up on his radar. He took a look at CrossFit.com and the workout was rope climbs. He decided he wasn’t doing that, and moved on to other things.
He and his friends decided they were going to do a race called Metro Dash that included Tabata movements, kettlebell swings, rope pulls, sled drags, and bear crawls. Sturm hit the Internet again to look up the movements, and again, found CrossFit.
After playing with some of the more gymnastic-based workouts at home, he eventually made his way to CrossFit Manassas where he attended his first class. The workout was a Tabata PVC pipe squat medley – front, back and overhead – with the last movement being deadlifts. “I did it, and I got out to the car and my legs were shaking,” Sturm recalls. “I sat down in the car for a minute, said, ‘Alright, I’m cool.’ Took a swig of water, started the car, pulled to the end of the parking lot and put the car back in park because I realized I was not in any way, shape or form ready to drive. About 10 minutes later, I was ready to drive home and that was my formal introduction to CrossFit.”
While Sturm enjoyed his time at Manassas, he took to doing some of the CrossFit workouts on his own. He also began some Strongman training with Edge 2.0 owner, Barry Von Perkins. When one of the coaches learned Sturm had been doing CrossFit on his own, he suggested he start working out at CrossFit Reston, where Edge 2.0 was located at the time.
Sturm remembers talking to Maggie Dabe, owner and head coach at CrossFit Reston, before joining. She told him, “Look, I’ve seen you in here. You have the ability to do this stuff. Let’s just get you in here and we’ll see what you can do.”
Dabe helped Sturm scale the workouts so they worked for him. When learning the snatch, she had him start from the hang so he could get the hips firing. When she realized he was having difficulty with the squat snatch, she told him to do split snatches instead.
After a workout at Reston, Sturm was talking with Games veterans Christy Phillips and Tim Adkins who asked him if he had ever heard of CrossFit Walter Reed. They suggested he go up there for a workout. Sturm contacted Brian Wilson, CrossFit Walter Reed co-founder and director of training, who convinced him to come up and workout with them.
“I loved it,” Sturm says. “It was just working with other amputees and seeing what other amputees could do. People always tell me, ‘You inspire me in the gym.’ You think I inspire you? How do you think I feel when I see guys that have above knees or missing two legs doing the same things I’m doing?”
He loved it so much he rescheduled his time at work so he could go to Walter Reed’s and workout. Soon, Sturm approached Wilson about coaching himself. “When Jason volunteered to start coaching, I knew we were going to drastically improve the relationship with our athletes,” Wilson says. “It’s one thing to have a guy with 10 fingers and 10 toes telling you that you can do something when you’re missing both your legs. It’s another thing entirely when you hear it from an amputee and a veteran.”
Sturm then approached Dabe and told her about his desire to help out more and coach at Walter Reed. If he wanted to coach them, Dabe told him it would be beneficial to attend the Level 1 Seminar.
A few days later, Dabe sent Sturm an e-mail saying she and Jeff Tincher, co-owner and head trainer at Reston, would like to offer him one of their spots at the next Level 1 hosted by CrossFit Reston.
“We knew Jason was helping at CrossFit Walter Reed and we wanted to help him increase his knowledge and understanding of the CrossFit methodology, as well as give him more tools to coach wounded warriors,” Dabe says. “We had a spot available and we didn't hesitate to offer it to him.”
Sturm says he was floored by the decision. “First of all, the generosity, and the second part of that was that Maggie and Jeff thought highly enough of me to give me a spot at the next certification class they had. I was just floored,” he says.
“The class was incredible,” Sturm says.
He obtained his Level 1 certificate and began coaching other adaptive athletes at CrossFit Walter Reed.
It was through Facebook, Sturm and David “Chef” Wallach of CrossFit Rubicon first met. Sturm remembers chatting on Facebook and expressing interest in going up to Rubicon, and coming in for their strength days. Wallach’s initial impression of Sturm was, “Hard driving, dedicated CrossFitter. Eager to share experiences and so thirsty to learn, he could have had chapped lips. My first and very selfish impression was, ‘I want this guy on my team.’”
A video on CrossFit.com featuring amputee, and CrossFit Rubicon athlete, Matt Ramsey showed up. Not only was Ramsey a fellow left leg below the knee amputee, but he and Sturm were also in the same military unit in the Army: 10th Mountain Division.
Subsequent conversations between Wallach and Sturm led them both to realize they wanted to mentor and teach wounded warriors, as well as all adaptive athletes. They wanted to spread the message, CrossFit is for anyone and there are ways to make it work, regardless of limitations.
One of the things Sturm realized while at Rubicon, was he wasn’t treated any differently. “If I turn to Maggie, or if I turn to Jeff, and say that I can’t do double-unders, then she says, ‘You’re going to do attempts.’ … She would never allow me to change the workout,” Sturm says. “She never allowed me to say, I can’t do that. I never really said that, but she would never allow me to.”
With all Sturm has worked through and all he has accomplished, he’s still just out of the gates on his CrossFit journey. When asked where he sees Sturm in the next few years, Wallach said, “Hopefully planning huge events with me. I'm a selfish bastard and want to see him running our Wounded Warrior Program and charity, SIX. He was born to help others, he's good at it.”
Wilson has similar ideas about Sturm’s future. “I see Jason as really carrying the guide on for this whole movement,” he says. “He's coaching at Walter Reed, he's coaching at Rubicon, he's pushing himself as an athlete and this is really his main focus. I think he's going to turn into the go-to guy for most folks when it comes to Wounded Warrior training.”
For more information on CrossFit Walter Reed, Rubicon, the charity SIX and Jason Sturm visit:
http://www.realworldsix.com/
http://crossfitwalterreed.com/
http://www.cfrubicon.com/
http://jasonisturm.blogspot.com/
