Affiliation Application

 God I Love You!!!  I am pretty pumped about how much you have changed in the last two weeks.  I'm very excited to start this chapter in our lives and I think it will remarkable for both of us and our family.  I love you with all of my heart.  I hope my essay was good enough.  Email said two weeks to hear back on the affiliation due to the volume of applications.  Cleaned up the website and blog to reflect more CF influence.  Can't wait to see the new, improved you...

Here's what I sent in on our application to CrossFit:

First let me start by saying that it is an immense relief to finally realize what I want to be when I grow up.  I've spent 14 years in the military trying to answer that question so I would have something to look forward to after 20 good years of service.  I spent a year in Iraq bored out of my head (mostly), REALLY trying to figure out what I wanted to be.  It was there that I finally said, $hit or get off the pot and started up a fitness website to start dabbling in personal training as a hobby.  I had just read up on everything I could find from Matt Furey and his Combat Conditioning products and I thought that was going to be my future.  His bodyweight workouts were tons better than the crappy Army PT I'd been slogging through for years.  Then I ran across some kettlebell workouts and ended up with 5 bells for my birthday and a new addiction.  Did I mention I am madly in love with my wife?  She has helped me and supported me and motivated me to work on achieving any crazy goal I've come up with and she is the motivation for "Crazy Wife CrossFit".  Not sure if that would really be the name, she also likes "CrossFit Warriors" or "Warrior CrossFit".  Last choice would be "CrossFit Nomads" since we are both still active duty Army Officers that still have 6-8 years of moving around every 2-3 years in front of us so our "Gym" would end up spreading the word in many places around the world before we are done.  The only problem with the kettlebells and the Matt Furey workouts is that they let me down when it came time to take my bi-annual PT Tests.  There wasn't enough focus on running which is my kryptonite at 6'3" and 220 pounds.  This was September of last year and I was nearing yet another let down at the October PT test after spending a few really good months training with kettlebells.  I started an Army PT website on our internal AKO email websites that only we can view and someone posted the link to the CF site and I checked it out.  Immediately I was hooked, the Pregnancy Pull ups video sealed the deal for me.  I have always hated pull ups more than anything in this world because I was always terrible at them.  I was either 6'3" and 145 pounds in junior high and too weak to do them or 75 pounds heavier and still too weak to do them.  After reading the articles and watching all the videos, I was hooked.  As an Army Instructor, I've gotten my boss to buy off on incorporating CF principles in our PT sessions for our classes of 100+ students.  This JAN-MAR class had some very positive feedback for the variety and intensity in the workouts.  In my next small group of 15 students that starts next week, we are going to try to figure out a good rotation at the gym with dumbbells and barbell work to really show them something new and different.  Once I started CrossFitting as much as I could last OCT (after another crappy PT Test) I've acquired a C2 rower, a 24" "man" box, barbell, bumpers, the 5 Kbs, sandbags, a big a$$ tire, gonna get the sledgehammer set this weekend, rings, dynamax medicine balls (20/14) AND a GHD bench.  More than enough stuff to train probably 10 people at once if I really had to.  Wouldn't that be fun to try to figure out.  So all of this has led me slowly but surely towards finding my way into the CrossFit community but it wasn't until the wife got sent away to Tampa for a month for work that we (she) started to get serious about it.  She's been CrossFitting every day with CrossFit Sparta for the last two weeks and she is finally dropping the last of her baby weight and truly feeling good about herself.  We have worked out together in the past but I could never convince her that she could conquer anything she put her mind to.  It's been her experience at CrossFit Sparta that has shown her that she can do ANYTHING.  I love it, I love talking to her on the phone again, it's like when we first started dating and we thought we could do anything (like get married and stay 3,000 miles apart for the first three years and still make it work).  She signed me up for the Level I cert in May in Houston last week, is talking about Level II and Olympic Certs too, and this week she deadlifted for the first time in her life and pulled 225# and now she wants to go to the cert with me (if there is space) and she wants to open up an affiliate and get other people addicted to CrossFit just like we are.  Wow, not sure if any of this makes any sense so let me just say that we really, really, really want to affiliate with CrossFit so our kids can grow up and grow strong in our little garage/box.  Thanks for our attention.  Mike & Lillian

Love you babe,

mdp