Pulling its weight
Columbia represented in CrossFit Games
The dark, red-brick building on Red Branch Road could be anything: office space, or maybe a warehouse. It certainly doesn’t look like a gym.
Nothing hints at the fact that athletes who will be competing on national television this week train here.
Around the back of the building, though, sit a half-dozen giant tires in an empty parking lot. They serve as one of many training tools for the athletes who work out at the 12 Labours CrossFit gym inside, which will send a team of six athletes to the CrossFit Games, starting Tuesday in Carson, Calif.
Not long ago, this ordinary road housed another similar gym. That gym, which has since moved about 7 miles across Columbia to Gerwig Lane, is CrossFit ReVamped, which will send two athletes to the CrossFit Games, marketed as a quest to find the “Fittest on Earth” using a wide spectrum of athletic tests.
Those who train at 12 Labours don’t have a definitive explanation of how eight people from one city have reached such an exclusive stage. It was a pure coincidence — and, at one point, potentially problematic.
Four years ago, when Gary Helmick and his wife, Alea, started ReVamped and the 12 Labours gym opened one of its three locations across the street, neither fledgling business knew about the other. One day, a member of the 12 Labours staff walked over and asked the Helmicks whether they were running the same kind of gym. They said yes.
“We did all of our research before we opened, so when we heard they were across the street, we were like, ‘How does that happen?’ ” Alea Helmick recalled. “I mean, we researched where gyms were and all of that to find the location. Well, they found it, too.”
The owners didn’t know whether the area could support two new CrossFit gyms. But as the sport’s popularity has risen in recent years, both gyms have found success in Columbia, and their athletes have flourished along with them.
The city’s fingerprints are all over this year’s Games. Both Helmicks will participate in the individual competition, while 12 Labours will field a squad of Luke Espe, Christen Wagner, Teresa Luz, Kevin Grear, Josh Arcona and Madi Mansberger in the team event.
Most CrossFit athletes have competed in team sports, but those days are over for many. When Espe was done with football, and Arcona with soccer, and Gary Helmick with baseball, and Alea with track, they needed another activity to feed their competitive desire.
“It fills a void for a lot of people who have been athletes for pretty much their whole lives,” Arcona said. “Once that’s over, whether it be college or high school or whatever, it’s hard to not do anything. So I think having an outlet for yourself is good. It gives you something else to do.”
Most practitioners use CrossFit — which employs a broad variety of athletic skills, from gymnastics to running to weight lifting — as a specialized fitness regimen. The Games athletes, however, treat the competition like a mainstream sport.
Espe, one of the three co-owners of 12 Labours, played football, basketball, baseball and track in high school, then continued with football at Division III Washington & Jefferson in Pennsylvania. After he played the last game of his career, he thought his athletic life was over.
“That was a really dark place, leaving a void of having something to train for,” he said. “You look at yourself as an athlete, and that [feeling] is gone. You don’t know what to do. To find this and still be able to train and think of myself as an athlete, it means the world to me.”
Espe started training in CrossFit in 2008. His team’s first appearance in the CrossFit Games was two years ago. Espe said they had no idea what to expect, but they finished ninth in the world, and returned last year to place sixth.
The 12 Labours Lions, as they call themselves, swapped in two new members last year and two more this year, making Espe and Wagner the only third-time competitors. Luz and Grear came onboard last year, and Mansberger and Arcona will debut this week.
Espe believes this year’s team is the most athletic one yet, but he knows better than to take anything for granted. Everyone in CrossFit knows better — perhaps none more so than the Helmicks.
The window of opportunity to qualify for the Games is brief, and at 28 and 29, respectively, Gary and Alea are already older than the average competitor.
The Helmicks first made the Atlantic regional in 2013, when they were CrossFit rookies. They went into their first competition with low expectations and shattered them. Gary placed second in the regional and, later, 38th in the world. Alea finished fourth in the regional, missing out on the Games by two points.
They thought it’d be the start of a long run of appearances.
Instead, as CrossFit became more popular and the competition intensified, the Helmicks fell short. In 2014, Gary broke his ankle jumping off a rope just before the regional, and Alea finished fifth, again failing to qualify for the Games. Alea slipped to seventh in 2015, missing qualification by two spots, while a groin injury sidelined Gary. After three years of taxing their bodies, the couple had to decide whether to keep going.
“He encouraged me to do it for another year,” Alea said. “He didn’t see it any other way. He wasn’t, pretty much, going to let me back down.”
The two jumped back into training in September and went through May. This time, both finished fifth in the regional, sneaking into the Games for their first time together.
“I don’t even know if there’s words to describe the feeling that we had that day,” Gary said.
The 12 Labours team doesn’t know what the future holds, either. It’s lost two members each of the past two years, and could face more attrition after this summer. For now, though, it’s just trying to enjoy the ride.
“Since I saw it on TV [in 2012], I was like, ‘I’m going to do that,’ ” Arcona said. “It’s been four years, a long four years. But it’s been a lot of fun, too.”