From Lifetime Distance Runner to CrossFitter

CrossFit Journal (Video)

From the age of 15, Anne Sargent had been a distance runner. After a year and a half of CrossFit, the 46-year-old decided to run a half marathon with no additional training. She bested the time she set at 38 by about a minute and a half.

“So almost eight years later, I ran the same distance using CrossFit training rather than traditional running, and I got a personal best,” she explains. “I thought, ‘Wow, it really does work, doesn’t it?’”

Sargent has been a member of CrossFit Relentless/CrossFit 033 in West Hartford, Conn., for about two years.

After the first workout, she was sore for three days.

“I thought that I was fit, and that one experience taught me that fitness was a lot more than the endurance and the cardio and so forth that I definitely had in my wheelhouse,“ Sargent says.

“The more I got into it, the more convinced I was that it really was a fitness program and a lifestyle that I could easily embrace and was gonna actually enhance my running—and it’s definitely done that.”

6min 22sec

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Additional reading: Less Is More for Champion Runner by Parker Morse, published June 9, 2009.