As a child, Annie Thorisdottir took ballet. It didn’t stick for long, though. Like her cousins, she wanted to try gymnastics. She made it to Iceland’s national team but quit to focus on high-school studies.

“Going from training 24 hours a week into training not at all didn’t really work out for me,” the 23-year-old two-time CrossFit Games champion says with her quintessential smile.

So she started ballet again, and dance. That, too, didn’t stick for long.

“I loved it and I loved the shows and everything, but you don’t really compete in ballet, do you?” Thorisdottir asks.

Then it was pole vaulting. For the two years she took up the sport, she was the national champion. She had a plan to go to the Olympics, but something was amiss.

“I didn’t feel like I was getting enough,” Thorisdottir says. “I felt like I needed to sweat more.”

“Iceland Annie” started signing up for competitions all over her country; one was a CrossFit competition. The rest is history. She’s competed at the CrossFit Games four times and finished on the podium every year since 2010.

Today, she’s healing from a late-March back injury that took her out of Open competition.

But Thorisdottir is, at heart, a competitor, and she’ll fight to return to form.

Video by Ross Coughlan.