What Does It Take

10 Time CrossFit Open Veteran, Mike Foster

“Fitness is to Health as Weather is to Climate.”
– CrossFit Level 1 Seminar

Deep Squats (Thoughts)
The following is an excerpt from an article from The CrossFit Journal titled:
“Come to the Light and Lift Heavy” by: Andrea Maria Cecil

At 20 years old, Roselle Dull tried to kill herself. Twice.

The first attempt was at around 2 o’clock in the afternoon on Friday, Sept. 11, 1992—about half an hour after her 43-year-old mother died of cervical cancer. She had been diagnosed two months earlier.

Dull dropped off her 3-month-old son, Michael, with his father’s sister and drove to a nearby church parking lot with a stone wall. “I went from the back of the parking lot as fast as I possibly could,” Dull recounted.

Moments before hitting the wall, she slammed on the brakes. “It’s gonna sound really weird, but I heard a voice, and it said, ‘What are you doing? What’s going to happen to Michael?’ And I literally—not even a half second before I would have hit the wall—I stopped.”

More than a week later, Dull tried again by cutting her wrists.

“My mom passed away when I was 20 and literally gasped her last breath, like, in front of me,” she explained. “So, I went into a massive depression and didn’t want to function and closed myself off to everyone and everything. “

Although she had survived two suicide attempts, Dull did not truly live the next 20 years of her life.

“I was a hermit.” Many days, Dull wouldn’t get out of bed. When she did, she didn’t bother getting dressed. At home, the shades were drawn, and the answering machine always came on—regardless of whether anyone was home.

In 2015, that started to change. In June of that year, Dull’s doctor pressured her into scheduling gastric-bypass surgery. First, Dull had to lose more than 90 lb. The next month, she signed up for a boot camp. Three weeks later, she canceled the procedure. “The risk of death kept resonating with me every time they explained the surgery,” said Dull, who is now a grandmother as well as a mother to three sons.

She came to a realization: She had simply been too lazy to go to the gym. Now that she had finally started a workout regimen, she would just keep doing that, she reasoned. But Dull grew bored of the repetitive boot-camp routines. On a whim, she stopped by the CrossFit gym that had opened down the street from her job: CrossFit Prosperity in Walpole, Massachusetts. When Dull walked into CrossFit in December 2015, she weighed roughly 215 lb. at 5 feet 2 inches tall.

Today, Dull’s life is much different. “Through being in the gym and doing things outside the gym with people from the gym, (it) has taught me and showed me that the world isn’t the most horrible, awful place that I made it out to be.”

Dull, now 46, is no longer afraid to be in places with other people. “I’ll carry on conversations, I’ll say hello. Before, you wouldn’t catch me anywhere outside my house.” The person she credited most for her behavioral change is gym owner Craig Robertson. “He actually helped me become me again.”

“If you’re having a bad day, the best thing to do—for me, anyways—is walk in the gym and pick up a barbell. You zone out. You forget about the outside world. You’re just concentrating on what’s going on in front of you.”

Dull lost roughly 60 lb. training CrossFit and following the Paleo Diet after having lost about 13 lb. at the boot camp. Today, she weighs about 155 lb. and trains three times a week. CrossFit, Dull noted, is her “happy place.”

“I just want people to know that it’s not impossible to do. People that are in situations like mine—whether it’s depression or they have weight to lose and just don’t think they can do it—just try. The only thing you have to do is set your mind to it,” she said. “For me, what happened to my mom, I used it as an excuse to cut off the world, and it wasn’t the world’s fault she passed away. It wasn’t my fault she passed away.”

Today, Dull is more confident and social and just feels better, noted her husband, Chris. Like his wife, Chris also had a life-changing experience at CrossFit Prosperity, losing more than 100 lb. and eliminating his three cholesterol medications.

Both Roselle and Chris participate in local competitions and have found joy in motivating others.

“Things happen that you have no control over, and you can’t curl up in a ball inside yourself and use that as an excuse to become nonfunctional,” Roselle stressed. “There is light in the darkness. For me, CrossFit is my light in the darkness.”

See you in class.

Tim

What’s Going On?

New Year, New Teen Class

Who: Boys and Girls aged 12-17
Dates: January 7 – February 27th
When: Tuesdays/Thursdays at 4pm
Led by: Coach Rebecca
*Email [email protected] to sign up*

CrossFit Open
March 1st – March 15th, 2025
9am at CFPA

Overheard in Class:
“Moving better is getting better.”

 

Timfluencing

The First Rule of Mastery by: Michael Gervais

Performance psychologist Michael Gervais presents a guide for overcoming what may be the single greatest constrictor of humans, our fear of people’s opinions (FOPO). FOPO shows up almost everywhere in our lives—and the consequences are great.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Michael Gervais shows us that the key to leading a high-performance life is to redirect our attention from the world outside us to the world inside us. He reveals the mental skills and practices we need to overcome FOPO—the same skills he’s taught to the top performers in the world., The First Rule of Mastery is a much-needed wake-up call that when we give more value to other people’s opinions than we do our own, we live life on their terms, not ours.

Tim’s Takeaway: I really enjoyed this book. It’s a quick read/listen with plenty of good nuggets to challenge your current mindset. Chapter 8 put me in my place by telling me that I really don’t know what other people are seeing/thinking. It may or may not be about me or any myriad of things. Challenging my own assumptions is a good thing.

Thank you for your support.

I look forward to what we will do together.