CrossFit goes to high school: John Marshall girls gaining physical, mental toughness
Dec. 9—ROCHESTER — The sun had already set more than an hour ago, but a group of eight girls were back at John Marshall High School, standing in together in the weight room in the school's basement.
Dressed in workout clothes, the girls stood in a half circle around a TV, where Nolan Fox was scrolling through a slideshow of pictures of a woman lifting weights and running marathons, among other things.
That woman, Candace Granberg, a pediatric urologist at Mayo Clinic, was a guest of Fox's JM girls CrossFit team — the only high school affiliated club in town.
Granberg was taking the girls through her experience in CrossFit and how it's helped her with daily activities as a doctor. Granberg traveled to Haiti six times in the years after the 2010 7.0-magnitude earthquake devastated the country.
"They don't have elevators in the hospital, and there was a kid who weighed 130 pounds that we had to get from upstairs to downstairs," she said. "They were like, 'What are we going to do?' I said, 'Well, I just clean and jerk 165 last week, so I think I could carry him down the stairs.' And I had to carry him down the stairs.
"I would never be able to do that before CrossFit. That was my first trip to Haiti. My biceps were as big as my wrist. I couldn't lift the bar more than twice."
While the high school athletes won't all become doctors and face the same challenges Granberg described, most of the room nodded as she described how CrossFit helped her transform her body.
The athletes at JM are watching their own improvement in real time. Athletes like sophomores Olivia Cox and Paige Cardwell, who started CrossFit during the summer of 2021 at Fox's house, are consistently setting personal records.
But most of the girls training this year are new to CrossFit. With a few months under their belts, they're also noticing physical improvements.
The JM CrossFit affiliate club initially started after Fox realized strength was a big weakness with his sprinters on the track team.
"I started bringing (the rig) because I have a background as a CrossFit coach," he said. "I decided that I wanted to bring some of those workouts in, and help them with their stamina."
The following summer saw Cox and Cardwell in Fox's garage three times a week, working out. Fox said the JM CrossFit club's first "season" began last fall — the team trained during the fall and winter, ending in March, weeks before the track and field season began.
Then, this summer, the rig was moved outside for training, along with other equipment, such as donated dumbbells and barbells from Detour, a Rochester CrossFit gym.
Though the CrossFit training began as a way to get in shape for track, it's more than that now.
Like any exercise regimen, athletes quickly realized that CrossFit was just as much of a mental game as physical.
"It's very much a mental push for all of us," said junior Lauryn Brady.
Fox added that each athlete "doesn't realize how far she can push her body."
But, as time goes on, each athlete has learned that they can do hard things — exactly what Granberg shared before their workout.
