“The corridor lengthened as I stepped into it,” Corie Mapp says of the moment his vehicle hit an IED while he was serving a term with the British Army. “I had a voice say to me, ‘We’re not ready for you yet.’”
At the hospital, Mapp asked the nurse to help him loosen his boots, which he felt had become too tight. That’s when he learned he had lost his legs in the explosion.
Mapp, who had served as a police officer in Barbados, had a dream of returning to the force in his new home in the U.K., but that dream suddenly felt far away.
While in physical therapy, a friend recommended he take up bobsledding.
His reply: “I’m already broken enough.”
Mapp expressed similar resistance when another friend recommended he start CrossFit, but eventually, he walked through the door.
Anna Greco, a coach at CrossFit Cirencester, refused to take Mapp’s word for it when he thought there were things he couldn’t do.
“We don’t just focus on the body. It is the mindset as well, and for us, one is just as important as the other, and that is what transforms an athlete,” Greco says.
The other coaches and members of CrossFit Cirencester have been struck by Mapp’s mental transformation.
Mapp says of his experiences in the gym, “It assured me, if you have the right coach, the right atmosphere, the right system of training, you can achieve anything.”
He recently passed the fitness test to join the local police force and credits CrossFit with helping him achieve his goal.
Unbroken: Adaptive Athlete Gains Confidence