The first time he walked into a CrossFit box about a year ago, 30-year-old Travis Brumbaugh was a chain-smoking sales manager whose weight hovered around 300 pounds. “I was doing all of the wrong things,” he says.
Brumbaugh wore size 44 pants and frequently worked 12-hour days. To counter the stress of his job, he ate pretty much anything and everything, and his weight skyrocketed as a result. After trying and failing numerous diets, he was on pace to become one of the 25.8 million Americans suffering from Type 2 Diabetes. And though he’d recently trimmed down to about 285 pounds thanks to a set of P90X DVDs, he’d fallen off the wagon and his weight was climbing back up when, in a last-ditch effort, he joined CrossFit 428 in Tampa, Fla.
Keddington, who coached the 5:30 a.m. class, was an Olympic lifter in college, and she had seen many newcomers set unrealistic goals, grow frustrated and give up. She convinced Brumbaugh to try a three-days-per-week approach, which would give him sufficient time to recover from each workout. The workouts were challenging, and Brumbaugh started off slowly, but he kept coming back consistently. He liked Keddington’s coaching and the team atmosphere of the gym and its members. Eventually he saw results.