Kai Rainey: 720 hours

Kai Rainey could see the future: At over 300 lb. and in steeply declining health, she knew she was going to end up losing her ability to move without a mobility device. So Rainey decided to lose weight and transform herself instead.

Rainey’s watershed moment came in the produce aisle at the grocery store. She recalls dropping a peach while shopping and laboring for three to four minutes in front of the prying eyes of strangers as she struggled to pick it up. This wasn’t the life she wanted.

When she started CrossFit, she didn’t realize right away that she’d found her tribe. As she pushed to become healthier, she just wanted to be able to walk further without getting tired, and she felt miles away from the other athletes in class. But her accomplishments started to add up. She could tie her shoes on her own. She could strap herself into the rower. She was making progress and had moved from sickness to wellness on CrossFit’s health continuum.

By November 2017, she had been to about 720 CrossFit classes—the same number of hours contained in a month—and she’d moved beyond wellness into fitness.

“(CrossFit) is about every day improving in these incremental, tiny little ways that add up to this huge change,” she says.