Competition doesn’t scare Armand McCormick. He’s been to the CrossFit Games five times—once as an individual in 2011 and four times with his team, CrossFit Kilo (2012-2015)—and as he faced three days of competition and 29 rival teams at the 2017 Central Regional in Nashville, Tennessee, he had zero fears and just one thought.
“Just fucking go,” he said. “You might think of fear, but as soon as you do something, there's not really fear anymore. The good is on the other side of fear.”
It’s a nice line for a motivational speaker, but McCormick’s words are weighted with experience—not only as a CrossFit Games veteran but as a veteran of the United States Marine Corps, and a decorated one at that. In 2003, his third year of service, he earned the United States Armed Forces’ third-highest military combat decoration for “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action against the enemy” during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The date was March 25, 2003. McCormick, a Lance Corporal at the time, was serving with the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, en route from Kuwait to Baghdad. The objective? Drive until they met the enemy.
They’d already spent five days ambling across the windswept terrain with no action to speak of, and things got boring, McCormick said. So McCormick—a rifleman—and Humvee driver Corporal Thomas Franklin decided to liven things up, swapping positions.
It was fun—until the boom.
Iraqi troops ambushed the platoon from behind a berm on the right, hitting the Humvee behind McCormick with a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). Machine gunfire filled the air. First Lieutenant Brian Chontosh, the platoon leader, commanded McCormick to drive straight into the berm, while Franklin unleashed a hellfire of his own. Franklin neutralized the machine gunners, and Chontosh, McCormick and a third soldier, Lance Corporal Robert Kerman, leapt into a trench berm, swarming with enemy combatants.
“We jumped in that sucker and there was just a shitload of them, just a shitload,” McCormick recalled.
The trio fought well, felling their enemies swiftly. But their platoon was not well-supplied for small-arms fire and their ammunition quickly ran out, forcing them to scrounge for discarded enemy weapons—like the RPG launcher McCormick plucked from the ground.
“I didn’t have a fucking clue how to use it,” he said. Neither did Chontosh, though he managed to use it to send a fireball rocketing down the trench, neutralizing the area save for one enemy soldier playing dead while preparing one last grenade. Chontosh shot him with an unused round he found in the dirt. The whole ambush lasted between 10 and 20 minutes.
All four U.S. soldiers were awarded honors in the months to follow. Chontosh earned the distinguished Navy Cross, the U.S. military’s second-highest decoration. McCormick earned the Silver Star. He was 21 years old at the time.
“Can’t really say I know where it’s at right now,” McCormick, now 35, said of his medal.
“It’s in the safe,” said Sarah McCormick, Armand’s wife and teammate, nudging her husband’s side. The couple, paired together in life and in fitness, labored side-by-side in Event 1 for the relay of running, strict handstand push-ups and dumbbell snatches.
“I don't really showboat that,” Armand continued. “Unless they've done their research, nobody would have any idea I was in the military.”
McCormick and Chontosh remained close friends after McCormick retired from service in 2004, by then a Sergeant. Shortly after, Chontosh sent McCormick a message: “Dude, you should look into this CrossFit shit.” (Chontosh would go on to become a member of the CrossFit Level 1 Seminar Staff.)
The pair had always enjoyed competing against each other. It started when, in his early service years, McCormick got demoted for fighting—“I was kind of a troublemaker,” he admitted—and was sent to start over in Chontosh’s platoon. McCormick recalled their first meeting.
The new guy in the platoon, McCormick ate lunch by himself. Mid-burrito, Chontosh walked over and demanded they go for a run.
“So we went up this hill—it was called the reaper, this big-ass, big fucking hill,” McCormick said.
Before long, the run turned into a race, and after that, everything was a competition.
“Whether it’d be the first to 100 pull-ups or sit-ups, whatever we could do,” McCormick said. “We didn’t know what CrossFit was back then, but we constantly were competing.”
By the time McCormick did learn what CrossFit was, in the mid-2000s, he knew it was for him.
“I kind of have a passion, I guess, for doing things that fuckin’ suck,” he said.
In 2009, he opened CrossFit Kilo in Cedar Falls, Iowa. The affiliate’s namesake team has been a dominant force at the North Central and Central Regionals since 2012, winning it in 2013.
Despite his team’s impressive resume, McCormick said he’s more excited by the process than the outcome.
“I just like to lead people to success—I like to build people,” he said, describing an affinity for taking on athletes with little to no experience. “Pretty much every year that we've ever done it, I can say that everyone on my team has ... started CrossFit with me.”
Kinsey Caldwell, Luke Schafer and Streat Hoerner, individual athletes representing CrossFit Kilo at the Central Regional, are three such examples. And all of CrossFit Kilo’s Games teams, McCormick said, have come from an ever-rotating stream of weekend warriors turned competitors.
“Thirty-ish different people that didn't have a fuckin’ clue what a muscle-up was ... that's been able to make Regionals and/or the Games under us,” he said. “I love winning, but it's a big pleasure to be able to see these people that are just normal people from a little-ass town in Iowa coming to something like this.”
Still, CrossFit Kilo is here to win.
“Fifth place is neat ... but I've only ever got one goal and it's to be at the top,” McCormick said. “Even first place sometimes isn't good enough for me.”
With 11th- and 13th-place finishes in Events 1 and 2, CrossFit Kilo ended Day 1 in 11th overall and will have to do some work to get into a qualifying position. (2015-2016's Affiliate Cup championship team CrossFit Mayhem leads the teams with two event wins and a record in Event 1, finishing the work in 14:33.51, more than 3 minutes faster than the previous record set by Functional Strength in the Pacific 13 hours earlier.)
But even if CrossFit Kilo does qualify for the Games, for the first time, it will compete without McCormick, who has accepted his invitation to compete at the 2017 Reebok CrossFit Games in the inaugural Masters 35-39 Division after taking 13th worldwide in the Online Qualifier.
“It was kind of an accidental qualification,” he said. “But leading is important to me, and leading by example is what I have to do. Leading by example, you gotta give all the fucking effort you have, and it turned out it happened—so now I’ve got to attack that.”
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