In the first episode of “Road to the Games,” presented by YETI, we take you behind the scenes and inside the day-to-day lives of 2025 CrossFit Open winner Colten Mertens and 2025 Mayhem Classic champion Austin Hatfield.
Both Mertens and Hatfield enjoy a rural lifestyle, and while you may think this makes them similar, they are very different in their daily lives.
Mertens works on his family farm in southeast Iowa, raising pigs, as well as farming corn and soybeans. When he’s not working on the farm, he’s training at his home gym, which is connected to his house.
Hatfield lives in Beckley, West Virginia, and trains out of CrossFit Coal. His social nature keeps him constantly involved in his local CrossFit community, as well as his adoptive CrossFit family, Rich Froning and CrossFit Mayhem.
They may have different approaches to training, but the one thing they have in common — they both want to win.
“I want to win. I want to be the best. And I want there to be no doubt about it,” Mertens says.
“Winning is in my nature,” says Hatfield. “It’s in my DNA. Just something I’ve grown up wanting to do all my life.”
Mertens and Hatfield will get the chance to be crowned the Fittest on Earth at the 2025 CrossFit Games, Aug. 1-3 in Albany, New York.