When former track-and-field star Marion Jones-Thompson stepped into CrossFit Texas, the coaches were perplexed: how do you coach such an accomplished athlete?
The answer was simple: treat her just like everyone else.
“I don’t expect when I sign up for there to be, like, balloons and all of that,” Jones-Thompson says with a laugh. “I’m an athlete. I wanted to work out.”
Also a former basketball player for the Tulsa Shock of the WNBA, the 37-year-old had been looking for a workout routine that wasn’t boring. A friend told her about CrossFit.
“I was hooked from the first time. It was a challenge. I loved the challenge,” she explains.
What she saw was women who were older and smaller doing “20 more pull-ups than me.”
Jones-Thompson started training at CrossFit Texas just a few days a week. That has since grown to four days a week.
“It’s given me a new community to live life with,” she says. “As you get older and move on in life, things become different in terms of priorities. You kind of figure out that that’s really what life is about: living life with people.”
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Additional reading: The Marlins Go CrossFit by Paul Fournier, published March 4, 2010.