Where CrossFit Solid Core began:
In the summer of 2007, I was beginning my career as a Seasonal Firefighter for Cal Fire in Shell Beach, my hometown. We essentially were a wildland fire station right in the middle of a city. Because of the location, we went to everything; Medical Calls, Cliff Rescues, Vehicle Accidents, Ocean Rescues and the like, but we also went everywhere in the county when there was a Wildland Fire.
I had met Bill Grundler a couple years prior to working at Shell Beach, but I really got to know him as a Fire Captain and absorb everything he stood for in that summer. Bill had learned about CrossFit from some friends of his back in 2004, and he was known as a very in shape fire captain throughout the county at that time. I was lucky enough to be there the year he started to implement CrossFit. The beginnings of CrossFit workouts were not as polished and thought out as we see now. There were no CrossFit gyms within 300 miles. It was gritty, all out, till you puke type of training, and we all fell in love with it. Bill has passed on a few Ideas to me that I have used to grow and have shaped me as a person, and I will always be thankful for that.
As Firefighters, we realized that any incident we went to didn’t care what shape we were in. If we slept well or at all, or if we were sick or healthy, if we were mentally beat down or in a really good place in life, or if we were physically ready for the situation or not. We owed it to the citizens we protected to be ready at all times to best serve them, and that dictated how we trained. I remember that other fire captains thought what we were doing was crazy and dangerous, that we shouldn’t be doing that because of this or that, but they didn’t understand what we were doing, because they refused to try.
I remember a day, after we had been training consistently for about two years, that we did triple firefighter “Fran“,-I told you, those first days were gritty- one of the most famous CrossFit workouts named for its intensity, 21 – 15 – 9, Thrusters(front squat into an overhead press) and Pull Ups. We did this as fast as we could in full turnouts with a SCBA(self-contained breathing apparatus), we rested, and then did this twice more! We were pretty tired at this point to say the least. Later that day, around noon, we get a call for a wildland fire in the hills behind Diablo Canyon Power Plant, we would be on this fire all night. On this fire, was another crew from another station. That station’s training consisted of only wildland hoselays, because that is what that station did the most at that time. We had to do a long hoselay to wrap the fire and put it out quickly. We were assigned to the right flank, and they were assigned to the left flank. When we finished our hoselay, we went back to the engine to get more hose. We noticed that the other crew, that had about the same amount of work as us, not only wasn’t finished yet, they were struggling. This was my AHA moment. Starting out, we had already trained to our limit that day, we were tired, and were performing better than others.
In our lives, we consistently trained hard, and prepared ourselves physically and most importantly mentally, for the worst call in our lives, should it come. It was apparent that it was paying off. Everything else that was thrown at us was much easier. That is the Idea of CrossFit Solid Core, and this mentality is what we strive to pass down to our coaches and members. To this day, situations in our lives do not care about how we feel at the moment, and we at CrossFit Solid Core still train to be ready for whatever life throws at us, at any time.
-Craig