MY WHY: COMPETITION

2 hours ago

3 min read

A note from Coach James:

I’ve played and enjoyed sports my entire life. I love competition. I love new activities, new challenges, and putting myself in situations where I’m not guaranteed to be good at something.

At some point, though, you have to fall in love with the process.

A true competitor understands that you can’t be great at everything. But there’s a hell of a lot of satisfaction in identifying where you’re weak, putting in the work, and becoming better than you were yesterday.

I think that’s a big part of why I was drawn to coaching—and eventually to CrossFit.

There is always something to work on.

Get stronger.

Develop a skill.

Fix a weakness.

Retest a metcon.

Learn something new.

Be generally physically prepared for the unknown and unknowable.

And, maybe most importantly…

Be harder to kill.

My goal with CrossFit was never just to become better at CrossFit.

I wanted what I did inside the gym to make me more capable outside of it.

Hiking. Jiu-Jitsu. Flag football. Snowboarding. Motorcycles. Whatever challenge came next.

I’ve ridden motorcycles through extreme conditions and dangerous terrain. I’ve jumped off cliffs on a snowboard. I’ve put myself into plenty of situations where being strong, conditioned, coordinated, and difficult to break mattered.

You have to keep the machine moving.

And I can directly thank nearly two decades of CrossFit for giving me the physical capacity—and probably some of the confidence—to keep saying yes to those things.

Through CrossFit, and through the brand’s longstanding relationships with military and law-enforcement communities, I also developed a greater appreciation for shooting.

I’ve had opportunities to shoot some pretty cool firearms.

Unfortunately, most of them weren’t mine.

Then I discovered The Tactical Games.

For more than a year, I watched.

Every once in a while, I’d mention it to somebody. Usually I’d get a smile, a nod, and a look that basically said:

“James is crazy.”

Most of them didn’t even know what The Tactical Games was.

Eventually, I had the opportunity to talk with someone who was wildly knowledgeable about firearms and competition. I started asking questions.

I told him all the things I thought I needed to do before I could actually sign up.

More practice. Better equipment. More experience.

Then he used my own philosophy against me:

“Isn’t that like someone saying they need to work out before they come to CrossFit?”

Well…shit.

I signed up.

Next thing I knew, with the help of members and some great friends, I had pieced together a kit and was headed to Zanesville, Ohio, for my first Tac-2 Gun competition.

That was all it took.

Colin Shine and Tactical Games Ohio put on a phenomenal event.

And the community?

The community was the shit.

I showed up wanting to be a sponge. I wanted to compete, but more than anything, I wanted to learn.

A few competitions later, something changed.

Now I wasn’t just training with GPP as the destination.

GPP became the foundation for something else.

We train for The Tactical Games.

And now, at Centerville CrossFit, we’re building a place for other people to discover it too.

We have space for the person who is curious and wants to learn what this sport is all about.

We have space for the athlete who wants another way to express the fitness they’ve built through CrossFit.

And we have space for the competitor who wants more—who wants to train seriously, step onto the competition floor, and perform at local and Regional Tactical Games events.

This is the next evolution.

Same philosophy.

Same willingness to do hard things.

Just a different arena.

We are Centerville CrossFit Tactical.

We are a Tactical Games Affiliate.

And we’re just getting started.

— Coach James Recob