If you’ve talked to me for more than about 3 minutes you know how passionate I am about fitness in general, stereotypically and specifically CrossFit. Honestly, I thought on the race my love for it would slowly subside, but quite the opposite has happened. I’ve gotten to drop in to quite a few gyms on this crazy adventure. Serbia, Romania, Thailand, South Africa, and soon to be Zimbabwe have all allowed me to see the CrossFit community in different cultures and environments. What I love so much about it is that pretty much everywhere is the same welcoming, challenging, beautiful environment I fell in love with my freshman year of college. The whole “distance makes the heart grow fonder” has been so true for me.
CrossFit has this thing called the open, where everyone in the whole world does the same workout. They take your score and rank you in your region/state/age/etc after each of the five workouts. Ask my team, I was SO sad about missing it this year. I even cried at reading my gym’s open watch party announcement because I wanted to be watching with them so bad. It has just recently ended, and I figured that Zimbabwe, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic wouldn’t have any CrossFit affiliates. I kind of prepared myself to not see another barbell until I returned back in America in three months, man was I wrong.
This month we are working with some guys from Youth For Christ (basically YoungLife) and they were getting to know us the first day of ministry. They found out I did CrossFit and one of them told me they know a CrossFit affiliate pretty close to where we are staying that we could go on our off day. HOW COOL. They even introduced me to one of the members of the gym at church on Easter Sunday!
We also went to a children’s home where we got to share the gospel, play games, and disciple them a bit. One of the kids was wearing nano 3.0 CrossFit training shoes (pictured later). It filled me with so.much.joy.
All in all I am so believing that I am not done with CrossFit and I can’t want to see how the Lord weaves it into my story in the future. It’s been a surprise a lot of the time (Serbia @ team abundance/Zimbabwe @ team goat) and I am SO excited for more.
It’s so beautiful to be how the Lord has fed this passion and excitement I have for this sport, and how sometimes he surprises me with things just to make me smile.
Here’s a few pics of how it’s shown up on the race:
Novi Sad, Serbia
Sofia, Bulgeria
Chang Mai, Thailand
Pretoria, South Africa
Bulawayo, Zimbabwe
Until next time,
Alexis 🙂
