This is the second installment in a series of posts I’m writing about my experiences at the CrossFit Games in 2026. I was at the CrossFit Games doing research for my forthcoming book, Strong, about the history of strong-bodied women. In this chapter, I’m looking at how the CrossFit community empowers women to be strong-bodied.
In the media room at the 2026 CrossFit Games, you get to know the other people who are there. Mostly, there are content creators, hoisting their high-end equipment around and sitting at tables frantically editing photos and videos. Many of whom are young people who travel from event to event and who post their content on social media. But on the first day at the SAP center, when I walked through the media room, there was an anomaly. A family at a table in the center of the room: a mom, a dad, and two little girls between the ages of six and eight. I was too curious not to approach them, so I walked up to the girls, introduced myself, and asked why they were at the CrossFit Games. Without a pause, the littlest one looked at me and said, “Because I’m going to be the strongest woman in the world someday.” The parents soon told me I had just met the Duboc Sisters: Winter and Sky, whose Instagram account, Dubocsisters (123K followers), went viral when Sky was featured in a Dove commercial that aired during the Super Bowl.
The ad is part of Dove’s 2024 Real Beauty campaign, which pushes back against narrow stereotypes that control the portrayal of women in advertising. It seems fitting that it features a young girl who grew up in a CrossFit gym. The ad features Sky gleefully running down a sidewalk with Bruce Springsteen’s anthem, “Born to Run,” playing in the background. Then the following text appears: “At 3, these legs are unstoppable.” More gleeful running (and maybe a few cute giggles), then the heartbreaking text passes across the screen: “At 14, she’ll think they’re unbearable.” A sentiment that speaks to the whole purpose of this book.
So what does this have to do with CrossFit? When Sky’s father was interviewed about the commercial, he said, “As a family, we believe in the importance of movement, confidence, and keeping girls in sports…It’s something that everyone in the CrossFit community can relate to, and we are honored to be part of it.”
Legend CrossFit athlete, Annie Sakamoto, who didn’t start CrossFit and find a community that empowered her relationship with her strong body until well into her 20s, had a completely different experience than girls like Sky and her older sister Winter, whose parents basically raised them in a CrossFit Gym, or women like CrossFit Games athlete Olivia Kerstetter who grew up hanging out in the CrossFit gym with her older sisters while her dad did workouts. She began competing in CrossFit competitions at the age of nine. When I asked her what it was like to grow up in a strong body, she said, “I just grew up around people that were muscular and athletic, and so I never really thought that I was different than anyone else.” After she competed at Wodapalooza and won the 10-12 year-old division (at age 9), she returned home to her affiliate where elite CrossFitter Jacob Heppner was also a member. She remembers, “I came home and went to the gym, and I had my medal on, and [Jacob Heppner] came up to me and was like, ‘ Oh my gosh, can I get my picture with you? And I was like, star-struck.”
After that, Heppner and Olivia’s father arranged to have Olivia and her sisters to train at his barn with a small group of people. After school around 4 PM Olivia’s dad would drive the girls to his barn where the workout takes place. Olivia, her sisters, and her Dad would join the serious, Game-Focused athletes training there. Then COVID hit, right when Olivia would be transitioning to High School. But instead of trying out for the basketball team, Olivia focused all of her energy on training CrossFit, which has paid off tenfold. She competed in the Rogue Invitational and then her first CrossFit Games at the elite level in 2023, and at the 2026 Games she won two events and placed sixth. Having a former Games athlete as a close friend and mentor helps. In an interview, she noted that she often turns to Hepner for insight into how to prepare for and approach Games workouts. This includes the first event of Friday, July 24th called “Climbing Snail ’26.”
The 400-pound round object called a snail hadn’t appeared in the CrossFit Games since 2016, so few athletes in the field had worked with the implement before. Heppner had, and he could give Olivia tips on how to work with the odd object. During training, other athletes posted videos of themselves rolling gigantic round hay bales to try and recreate the implement. This was part of preparing for the unknown. The snail, made by Rogue, isn’t an implement that you can find at your local gym, or really any gym, as they are custom-made for the CrossFit Games competitions.
Rogue officially became a sponsor of the CrossFit Games in 2009. Then began their own major CrossFit and Strongman competition in 2019. I attended the 2025 competition held in Aberdeen, Scotland, last fall. On the CrossFit side, many of the athletes were the same as the ones I saw here at the Games. Notably absent at the Games this year was one of the crowd favorites, Dani Speegle. But Dani is an important part of the story for how strong-bodied women are empowered within the CrossFit community. Dani and I had a chance to sit down and talk last fall about her experience of being a strong-bodied woman growing up in the sport.
Dani is thirty-two years old, so she didn’t grow up at a CrossFit gym like Olivia. Instead, she grew up competing as a gymnast. She remembers having her first run-in with the idea that her body was different from what was considered normal for young girls when she was in middle school at gymnastics camp, “one day…we got pulled into the office and we all got weighed….I’ve always been very muscular, but at that time, I was lean, like the other gymnasts, but I was always built; most of the girls [weighed around] 120 and I weighed 140. And I remember being told that I should start skipping meals. But, even at that age, it wasn’t something where I was like, yeah, I’m not gonna do that. It was something where I was like, I don’t know if I’m gonna do this [sport] anymore.” It’s funny how Dani’s experience echoes the sentiment in the Dove commercial that featured Sky. Yet, instead of internalizing the feedback about her body as negative, instead of finding her strong body unbearable, Dani pushed against those who upheld the social norm. She admitted the comment left her in tears, but on the way home she asked her father to take her to get an ice cream. Dani grew up in a supportive family where activity and eating were a priority. A fact that likely enabled her to fight back against unreasonable norms that were pushed against her even at a young age.
Dani found CrossFit in college after she left a bad relationship. She remembers, “I had a really, really bad relationship. Very emotionally and physically abusive, and CrossFit got me out of that. Someone was like, hey, why don’t you just come and try it out? I think you’d be good at it. You need a community….I put it off for months. Then, when I finally went, I immediately started drinking the Kool-Aid. Getting into CrossFit [is] where I started feeling empowered and understanding the difference in my body compared to others. The first time I ever snatched, I hit 155 lbs. I think that was the day when I realized I have natural strength that other people just aren’t blessed with, and that is so freaking cool.”
In 2022, Dani launched the Girls Who Eat movement and campaign, which fights toxic diet culture by encouraging women to view food as powerful fuel for strong, capable bodies rather than restricting calories to achieve an arbitrary thin ideal. At the Rogue Invitational she wore a shirt emblazoned with the words, “Girls Who Eat.”
The 2022 Rogue Invitational was also Olivia’s first elite competition. Jacob was there to support her, but when the first workout was announced, it was an offsite trail run, and no coaches were allowed on the bus to the event site. So that morning, on October 28, 2022, sixteen-year-old Olivia boarded a bus by herself. A bus filled with the elite athletes she’d only at that point looked up to drove her an hour away from Dell Diamond Stadium to the Texas Hill Country, where the event would take place at a private ranch. She ran the race, a 4.2-mile trail run which included rucking a 20 lb. backpack, and hoisting 70 lbs. sandbags over a barrier made of hay bales. When Olivia finally made it to the finish line, she was dead last and few people were left to cheer her on. But Dani Speegle, who finished 2 minutes before her, in second-to-last place, was standing there, cheering her on to finish. When Olivia looked disheartened about her finish, Dani turned to her and told her not to worry about all those other athletes who beat them, “We’ll crush them in the lifting events.” Olivia, who looked up to Dani, remembers the moment vividly: “It was super nice of her to say that to some random little girl that she doesn’t even know.”
Indeed, later in the competition, during the Texas Oak event, a classic strongman log lift where athletes competed in groups to find a one-rep max, Olivia got tenth place lifting 190 lbs, and Dani not only lifted the heaviest weight (205 lbs), she went on to lift a heavier bar: the Texas Oak that weighed 215 lbs. She wore a shirt emblazoned with her “Girls Who Eat” campaign title as she cleaned and then lifted the massive weight overhead to the roar of the entire stadium.
Later during the last event, called Heavy Grace, Olivia won her heat (and nearly the event). The event consisted of 30 clean and jerks for time at 165 lbs. Grace is one of the named workouts in CrossFit, a series of workouts named randomly (as Annie Sakamoto put it, like naming storms) after women. Grace is normally 30 clean and jerks at a significantly lighter 95 lbs. But, just as Dani had predicted, the heavier weight on the bar gave Olivia her moment to shine in her first elite competition. Later that year, she’d go on to qualify for her first CrossFit Games and continue to find her way up the leaderboard.
As Jacob put it, the words of empowerment that Dani said to sixteen-year-old Olivia at her first competition made all the difference. Dani’s words made Olivia see her body for what it could do, not what it could not do.
Back at the SAP stadium for event 8 of the 2026 Games, the athletes entered from the side and had to run out to their starting blocks at the beginning of their lanes. To increase the difficulty, the women wore sixteen-pound weight vests. They ran to their starting blocks. When the buzzer sounded, they ran down their lanes to where the 400 lb. snails rested and got under them until the massive snails began to roll slowly down the lane. They had to roll them 60 feet, then run underneath the looming rig called Zeus (also created by Rogue) to complete two legless rope climbs (meaning climbing, in their weight vest, up a rope to a tape mark at the 12-foot mark with only their arms and then dropping back down). Then they walked a few steps to the pull-up bars to do 30 toes-to-bar, (a movement where athletes hang from the bar and bring both feet up simultaneously to touch the bar) Then back to the rope for 4 regular rope climbs (meaning this time they can use their legs), then they finished by running back to the snail and pushing it back to where it started). Once the snail was pushed past the yellow line, they could run to the finish line, where they had to push a buzzer.
Alex Gazan won her heat and the event with a time of 4:55.22 for her second event win of this year’s games (after her massive 170 strict press and her breaking of the CrossFit Total record on day 1). Paige Rodgers got second with a time of 5:08.00, and Danielle Brandon got third with a time of 5:23.00.
Alex is twenty-five years old and, like Olivia, grew up competing in CrossFit from a very young age but not quite as young as Olivia. Alex started CrossFit in 2017 at the encouragement of her high-school PE teacher, who saw her potential. She signed up for her first Open in the Girls 16-17 division in 2018, and by 2022, she had qualified for her first CrossFit Games after finishing fourth at the Granite Games. Gazan placed 24th in her Games debut. Then, in 2023, she placed fifth. In 2024, she placed eleventh. 2025 was the year of her devastating injury when she qualified for the Games but had to withdraw due to her injuries.
After the snail event, Alex grinned during her interview. You could see that just as she had told the audience during the Press Conference the night before, she was having fun, and doing what she loved, and her incredibly strong body was making it happen. She had seen how quickly you could have your strong legs taken away from you during her car accident during the 2025 season. And now she was even more grateful for what her legs could do.
After this event, I was escorted to the athlete area again, where I saw athletes preparing for the next event: another odd object event. Except this time, the object had never been used in this way. The next event was the 3D Throw, which required female athletes to throw a 20-pound kettle bag. For most of the athletes, this was a new skill. Many were warming up using wall balls, slamming them against the cement wall in the athlete area. Part of what’s amazing about the CrossFit Games is how each event tests another type of athletic modality. Sometimes, curveballs like a kettlebell bag toss are thrown in, introducing a skill many athletes may have never done before the day of competition.
When it came time for IE 9 3D Throw, athletes lined up in rows based on their heats below Zeus. Each athlete aimed for maximum combined distance across three distinct kettle bag (20 lbs) tosses (one throw with the right foot forward, one with the left foot forward, and one backward over the head). Abbie Domit won with throws totaling 108.2 feet. (She’d won her heat, the 2nd, and no one matched her throw) This was Abbie’s first event win. 2nd Place went to Hannah Black with a throw of 106 ft while 3rd Place went to Alex Gazan with a throw of 100 ft.
Later, Abbie mused how funny it was to win her first individual event on an odd object throwing event. Like Dani, Abbie grew up doing gymnastics, but she also did track and cheer in high school. She found CrossFit in 2020 and started going because her husband bought her a three-month pass. Within a week, she was hooked. Prior to joining CrossFit, Abbie spent years as a professional model. According to an interview she did with The Barbell Spin in 2023, modeling was what helped her become “comfortable in my own skin. All issues I had with my body were resolved during that time in my life…by the time I got to CrossFit I had already had the mentality that I will be in control of what happens to my body, and I’d never let someone’s opinion of how I look impact me ever again.” She would go on to say, “This whole body image thing we have going on in the CrossFit space…to me it’s all about power. I’d say it goes deeper than looks; I think it’s more about owning your shit. Taking full responsibility for everything that happens in your life, now that’s powerful. When you feel that, things like how you look just won’t bother you; you rise above it. But only you can claim your power.”
After the 3D Throw event, the next event of the day was IE 10 Run Hang Squat Clean. The event consisted of four rounds. During each round, the athletes ran 660 meters from their starting block inside the stadium, and then out of the stadium and then out along Barack Obama Blvd., the street that runs next to the stadium, where there was a turnaround. After each run, the athletes returned to the stadium and completed ten squat cleans at 155 lbs. Emma Lawson won with a time of 14:56.52, with Lucy Campbell fought hard to catch her, but not quite doing it with a time of 14:58.00. Ellie Turner came in third place with a time of 15:22.
Lucy, who grew up in England, also began her athletic career as a gymnast, where she competed at a national level until the age of 12, when she switched to swimming. She competed internationally until she lost confidence and struggled with her body image and relationship with food after being constantly told by coaches that she wasn’t small enough to become a successful international swimmer. That’s when she decided to transition to CrossFit. In the CrossFit community, she immediately felt more at ease in her body.
“Coming from swimming and gymnastics, I feel I grew up half naked a lot of the time, so I've always been very conscious of my body and how I look. But I felt like with CrossFit, when I was performing well, there were no comments about my body, and when I was performing well in swimming there were comments about my body. It felt different coming into CrossFit Boxes”
Back at the stadium on Day 2, the events just piled on; the next event, IE 11 Handstand Sprint, was a handstand walking course which began with the athletes kicking up and then walking over a ramp. Then, they had to do five freestanding handstand pushups before hand walking to the next station, where they had to do a pirouette on a square and then another on an elevated riser. Finally, on a pair of low parallel bars, the athletes had to go into an L-sit, then kick up into a handstand, walk across the low bars, and then walk down a ramp to the finish. Paige Rodgers won with a time of 1:56.58, Elisa Fuliano got second with a time of 2:03.55 3rd and Lydia Fish (whose fan base might have the silliest costumes – they all dress up like bright orange fish) got third with a time of 2:36.49.
Just two years ago, in September 2024, Paige Rodgers thought she wouldn’t be returning to the sport when she discovered she was pregnant, but after giving birth to her daughter, she found renewal instead. As she said in an interview with CrossFit.com, “it was truly the reset I needed to find my fire for competing again.” In many sports when you compete at an elite level and you become pregnant it is the end of your career. But in CrossFit, athletes who become mothers often return even stronger than before.
Two months after giving birth, Paige competed in Mayhem Classic, which reminded her of how much she loves the sport. By the following year, 14 months postpartum, Paige won the Women’s Division of the Mayhem Classic. “(Mothers) are way stronger than they know,” she said. Another mother who thought she would leave the sport after becoming pregnant was Arielle Loewen (who we will be hearing about in Part 3)!
The final event of the second day was IE 12 The Hopper – this was the program that was chosen by the community. The champion, Tia Claire-Toomey, programmed it. Tia won the CrossFit Games a record eight times. Only missing one year when she gave birth to her daughter, Willow, and a second year (this year) when she gave birth to her son, Coda, both of whom are no doubt growing up in a CrossFit gym.
The workout she programmed consisted of three rounds for time of 21 Toes-to-bar, 7 unbroken power snatches at 65 lbs, 7 unbroken hang snatches also at 65 lbs, and 7 unbroken squat snatches at 65 lbs. This time, Lucy fought her way to win the event with a time of 5:02.48. Abigail Domit got second place with a time of 5:04.36, and Danielle Brandon got third with a time of 5:04.93.
At the end of this massive day of events, I was in awe of all I had seen. So many different types of female bodies, competing at such a high level. It was empowering just to watch! I was beginning to understand that being strong-bodied as a CrossFit athlete meant many things but most of it meant that you never had to feel like your powerful legs (or any other part of your body that is strong) were unbearable. Instead, CrossFit was a place where you would be empowered to become the strongest version of yourself you could become.
And what I’ve found is that this sentiment is not just one that occurs in the sport at the elite level. At my own box (as CrossFit gyms are called), this same spirit of camaraderie exists.
More about this next week in Part 3.
October 1, 6:30 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at for Marin Poetry Center at Mill Valley Library, Creekside Room, 375 Throckmorton Ave Mill Valley, CA 94941.
October 13, 7:00 PM Litquake - National Book Critics Circle and Cita Press present The Author/Critic Dilemma, at Page Street, San Francisco
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