The Surprising Truth Behind 6 World Titles

I was not talented. I was not special. And I definitely was not destined to be a six-time CrossFit Games champion.

In fact, I didn’t even start CrossFit until I was 38 years old. Before that, I spent 20 years living a mostly sedentary life. I wasn’t training. I wasn’t competing. I was just living “normal life.”

When I walked into the gym at 38, I wasn’t chasing podiums. I was chasing health. I was stiff, beat up, and honestly pretty average. There was never a movie moment where I looked in the mirror and thought, “Yeah, I’m built for this.”

So, what changed?

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It wasn’t intensity. It wasn’t motivation. And it definitely wasn’t talent.

It was consistency.

But not the kind of consistency you see on Instagram.

The biggest lie I see Masters athletes buy into is the idea that they are “behind.”

You feel late to the game. You feel like you wasted your 20s or 30s. So, you convince yourself that you need to train harder to make up for lost time.

You think consistency means training until you drop, every single day. You think it means never missing a session and always pushing the intensity redline.

That isn’t consistency. That is impatience dressed up as discipline.

That mindset almost broke me.

Real consistency is actually incredibly boring.

It doesn’t look like a highlight reel. It looks like:

There were weeks where I trained less than I wanted to because my joints felt “off.” There were sessions where I didn’t PR anything. There were days I shut it down early.

At the time, those felt like failures. But looking back, those boring decisions were the magic. They allowed me to keep stacking years. Not weeks. Not months. Years.

At some point in my journey, I stopped training like an amateur.

An amateur trains based on how they feel. If they feel motivated, they crush it. If they feel impatient, they overtrain. A professional trains based on what the plan requires.

This doesn’t mean ignoring your body—it means respecting it. It means being honest about your recovery and your stress levels. It means being honest about where you are, not where you wish you were.

Once I stopped trying to prove something every single day, my performance took off.

I didn’t win six world titles because I trained the hardest. There were plenty of guys in the warm-up area who could lift more or run faster on any given Tuesday.

I won because I stayed healthy long enough to matter.

My titles didn’t come from big, heroic moments. They came from thousands of small, unremarkable sessions done correctly.

It’s not sexy. It doesn’t make for a viral TikTok. But it works.

If you are reading this and you feel “behind,” stop. You aren’t. If you are frustrated because your progress feels slow, good. That probably means you are doing it right.

Consistency doesn’t shout. It whispers. And if you can learn to listen to it, it will carry you a lot further than talent ever will.

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