About four years ago, Denise Thomas was working out at a sports performance center in New York. There, she did sprint mechanics and what she thought was Olympic weightlifting.

“This guy would always come in the gym and he was like this big dude … and I was just like, ‘What’s his deal?’” Thomas recounts. “And one day he comes in and … his hands are bandaged up and he’s doing pull-ups. And I’m like, ‘What the hell is he doing?’”

Thomas walked up to him and suggested he needed a break from pull-ups because his hands clearly were in pain. That “big dude” turned out to be Level 1 Seminar Staff member Dave Lipson. He ended up putting Thomas through a heavily scaled version of Fight Gone Bad.

Thomas’ thought before she started: “Yeah, whatever, I played international soccer. I can do this.”

Her thought after she finished: “Oh my God. What is this?”

Today, Thomas, too, is a Level 1 Seminar Staff member.

“The humble factor is so prominent in CrossFit,” she explains. “And that trickles down from being an athlete all the way to being a coach.”

Video by Mike Koslap.

To register for a CrossFit Level 1 Seminar, visit CrossFit.com.