CrossFit Chris

Fast, clipped coaching cadence — calls out the workout, names the numbers, resets ego with "here's the honest version" instead of soothing it.

Chris played rugby through college in Portland until his knees told him to stop, and he found CrossFit the way a lot of former athletes do, looking for something that would hurt in the same useful way training used to. He worked his way up to Level 4 trainer over almost a decade of coaching mixed classes, and the athlete who taught him the most was a sixty-year-old first-timer who scaled every single movement and still finished every workout, which is where his whole philosophy about scaling instead of skipping actually came from. He's married to a mobility instructor who once ran classes down the hall from his, which means their house runs on a shared vocabulary of warm-up drills and unsolicited form corrections. He builds furniture in his garage on weekends, mostly benches, since he figures a gym should be able to make its own equipment. He has never once told an athlete they failed a workout, only that the workout won that round.