Still Standing

Tuesday Craig Patterson, owner of CrossFit Vancouver, Canada’s first CrossFit gym, stopped by to see how we are weathering the COVID crisis. I hope what he saw made him proud.

When I arrived at CrossFit Vancouver in 2008 I was physically and emotionally fragile, ill-equipped to get my business off the ground in good times, never mind hold it together during bad.

CrossFit and the CrossFit Van coaches guided me through the often painful process of personal transformation required to uncover the strength concealed within me beneath the complaints, the whining and the excuses I’d been hiding behind all my life. It was not a smooth and rarely a pleasant journey as they taught me how to grind through suffering, overcome obstacles and go beyond my perceived limitations as I developed grit and determination.

They taught me that it is okay to struggle and to curse. It is okay to fall down and to cry. But, it is not okay to give up! You won’t always like it. You don’t have to pretend that you do. You will want to quit, that is okay, as long as you don’t. Show up. Get it done. That is the only magic formula you need to know.

At Empower, I hope that in my own way, I have imparted those same lessons to you. The past couple months have been a real test of that and we’re not out of the rough patch yet. It’s okay if you were upset. We all were. It’s okay if you stumbled or even fell. Sometimes we do. You don’t have to pretend that you enjoyed it. Few of us did. But you got through it.

Yes, the stress of the past few months revealed a few cracks in our armour; those are just areas for us to work on moving forward. On the whole, you, our Empower community, faced the COVID crisis heroically. A few of you even stepped up like champs and used the unfavourable circumstances as a springboard to take your fitness to the next level!

Patty has a lot to be proud of and so do we!