Sharon Broady was mortified. There was no way she was going to fit through that hole.
It was Staff Day 2015 for the high school where the then-53-year-old worked as a secretary. A whole day of icebreakers and team-building exercises, most of which the 232-lb, 5-foot-6 woman could not do: Footraces. Paddleboarding. An obstacle course.
But this was just too much. Stretched before Broady was a web of elastic bands, criss-crossed in every direction to form a small hole in the center. Broken into small teams, employees were tasked with hoisting their teammates up and through the hole, passing them along to their colleagues waiting on the other side.
After an embarrassing, fumbling attempt, Broady quit the course.
“That was hideous,” Broady, now 60, recalled.
As awful as that experience was, it wasn’t the worst repercussion of her lack of fitness. She felt sluggish and forgetful. Her hips ached constantly. And she’d developed gout — a painful form of arthritis — in her right foot. She couldn’t even raise it high enough to climb a single stair. Her blood pressure topped the charts at 157/102, high enough to put her in the range for Stage 2 hypertension.
“My doctor told me that I needed to make a change or be prepared to take medication for the rest of my life,” she said.
Broady couldn’t quite recall how things had gotten so bad.
“I kind of looked in the mirror one day … and I’m like, ‘How in the heck did that happen?’” she said.
For the last couple decades, her routine had remained the same: Wake up at 6 a.m. and head to work at the school. Lunch was whatever was on the students’ menu — “and all of it was fried and breaded,” Broady said.
Support staff to the stars, Broady would often work overtime before shuttling her two kids to social events and sports practices.
The schedule left little time for herself — unless you count vegging on chips and cookies alone in front of the TV.
“I’d wait until my husband got home, and then I’d cook dinner and go to bed and start it all over again,” she said. “It wasn’t a very fulfilling life, that’s for darn sure.”
By 2015, Broady weighed well over 200 lb. The weight was as much a strain on her marriage as it was her joints.
“It kind of feels to me like you’re dying,” Broady’s husband said to her.
At that point, he’d been training at Telluride CrossFit for about a year, working to get in shape for the FBI National Academy. He implored her to come to CrossFit with him.
Though Broady now understands her husband’s concern for her health, at the time, “what I heard was ‘You’re fat and not attractive,’” she recalled.
Eventually, she grew so tired of his admonitions that she relented.
“I thought, ‘Either I get divorced or I go to CrossFit.”
Broady joined Telluride CrossFit in August 2015 along with her daughter, for accountability. In the back of her mind, she couldn’t help but remember the embarrassment of trying to run and climb and jump with her colleagues at Staff Day. But her experience at Telluride CrossFit couldn’t have been more different.
“I walked in the gym and everyone accepted me for who I was,” she said. “And I was certainly overweight and not wanting to be there, and they were OK with me like that — and then they encouraged and supported me, and helped me find the person I could be.”
The acceptance went further than kind words. Telluride CrossFit coaches worked with Broady to customize every workout to her abilities. Initially, she performed all barbell movements with a PVC pipe. Instead of running, she walked. Push-ups she performed from a standing position against a wall.
It didn’t even matter that she couldn’t jump rope.
“Jumping rope was having the rope in front of me and walking over it — because I couldn’t get both feet over — and then swinging it around my head,” Broady said. “They were great at making modifications for me so that I could finish a workout.”
By the time she finished the monthlong introductory program, Broady felt at home in the gym. But it wasn’t just about being more comfortable with the movements. She found in the affiliate something she hadn’t even realized she’d been lacking: meaningful social connection.
Instead of working late and going home to a bag of chips and a sitcom, she went to the gym — where there was always someone to talk and sweat with.
“And that’s a pretty cool feeling,” she said, “to go from not having anybody to having everybody.”
Broady’s gout disappeared within her first year at Telluride CrossFit.
And today, after seven years of CrossFit — including following CrossFit’s recommendation to eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar — Broady is down about 80 lb. She can deadlift around 200 lb and do toes-to-bars and double-unders. Her blood pressure is a near-textbook 124/77 — without medication. She completed the CrossFit Level 1 Certificate Course and coaches classes at the gym. Her marriage is better than ever.
And the stairs? Not a challenge anymore.
“From dragging one foot up the stairs to being able to do a box jump is pretty dang cool,” Broady said.
She recalled a recent trip to the playground with her 2-year-old granddaughter.
“And she so badly wanted to go down the slide, but she was too little,” Broady recalled. “And I was able to go down that slide with her.”
“I’m so blessed, and I’m so very grateful for CrossFit,” she continued. “It changed my life.”
“Because I CrossFit, I Can … Live My Best Life”