09/25/2025
You can't pour from an empty cup.” Some of the best advice I've ever been given. To our athletes, it comes out sounding more like, “take care of yourself first, make sure you are the best possible version of yourself to show up for your kids, your spouse, your family and your friends.” You can't do that if you are rundown and not taking care of yourself. Your health, both mental and physical, is what drives everything around you. Spending time in a CrossFit Box, that hour a day, is what helps prioritize everything. The other challenges of the day don't seem so hard when you've already fought through a hundred burpees and deadlifts. Carrying your 50 pound kid on your shoulders for hours doesn't even phase you when that 300lb bar went up and down for reps. Those voices and cheers and the shared suffering of those folks, those friends, around you when you are within the walls of the box echo in your head hours later, “we are in this together, push harder, you got this.”
That is just one little piece of the Magic of CrossFit. The work doesn't care what your identity is. A benchmark workout is a benchmark workout, the barbell doesn't care where you are on the political spectrum, what your religion is, where you came from or who you are going home to. Those identities and those egos get left at the door on the way in.
Crossfit is a brand of fitness that doesn't care who you are, simply how much you can give to yourself. The Whiteboard is there, but it is only there to hold you accountable, to see if you are better than yesterday.
A decade and a half ago, I fell in love with CrossFit. I wanted to bring it back to my hometown, my county. A county that has a staggeringly high rate of Diabetes, of Heart Disease, of basically all metabolic diseases. A county whose average lifespan is almost 20 years shorter than Cobb County, less than 20 miles away. Polk County, an area, where I had seen so many families shaken by early death and illness, mine included, an area where I thought we might be able to move the needle, to nudge it some, to save another family from growing up without a parent or a grandparent. An area that we might be able to change the culture from fast food and ice cream to weekend hikes and fresh food, from weekly pharmacy trips and daily McDonalds runs to daily physical activity and weekly Farmers Market outings.
At a stage in my life, I would have brought in someone to do onsite Blood Sugar testing for free for anyone that walked by just to help open their eyes.
This little idea of SCCF has changed so many lives, we have seen bookuu of kids born to healthy Mama's. We've seen diabetes and asthma resolved, we've seen more people than I can count being able to go off tons of daily meds for blood pressure and blood lipids and hundreds of other “chronic” ailments, we've seen athletes recover faster than Dr's ever thought possible from needed surgical interventions.
I feel like we have done much good in the world, but that has come at a price. Specifically, a price to me personally. Silver Comet CrossFit was never about making a huge return. It has always chugged along, making it worthwhile and allowing us to reinvest in our community. To this day it does that. However, Silver Comet CrossFit, at this stage in its life cycle, requires a fairly high level of input from me personally, on a daily basis. That level of input is getting tougher and tougher for me to provide even as we have realigned classes and simplified things.
To provide the experience that I would want as an athlete requires a drive, an effort and an almost evangelical fervor as an owner.
Guys, I just don't have it right now. It's been a difficult year for my family and I've had to choose the gym vs where I needed to be way too many times; and my own fitness, both mental and physical, have taken a hit. My cup is running dry. The time has come for me to refocus, on my family and my own health.
I really wanted Ari to grow up in this culture, to see that adults play, practice, train, learn new skills and support each other, that there is a tribe of people who do hard things for fun that make other things not so hard.
This hasn't been an easy decision, in fact, I've been fighting with it for a while. The time has come.
Tuesday October 14th will be the last day of classes at Silver Comet CrossFit as you know it now. After the 14th we are going to pause operations. Honestly, I'm not really sure what that means, SCCF will still be a CrossFit Affiliate through at least March of 2026, we aren't going to break down the gym immediately and we are going to keep the space for a while. We may do some things, workouts, etc after the 14th. At this stage, I'm not entirely sure what that might look like but I should get some clarity in the next few weeks. For now, I need to step back, pause, take a breath and figure out how to attack the next rep.
So - to my athletes, your September billing was your last monthly billing. To my athletes and prior athletes – I'm going to open up the gym on Oct 11th (Saturday) as a free drop-in day. Treat it like a reunion, a homecoming or just a plain old party. For my current athletes, those of you who remember, we are going to go out on the 14th like we came in April 12th, 2021, four and a half years ago, but we are also gonna see if we can't blow some other gym PRs out of the water.
Final thoughts. I would really appreciate it if y'all gave me a little grace from now until the 14th. I may have to cancel some classes at the last minute…and I know that this is not something we have ever done before even through fires, floods and funerals and it isn't something I do lightly.
Thank you to everyone who made Silver Comet CrossFit come alive in the past half decade. Hopefully we made as positive an impact on your life as you did on ours.
