How Mia Mellon Made it to Wodapalooza Two Years After Finding CrossFit
Some background.
Mia Mellon was working as an intern in Washington D.C when she first heard about CrossFit. It was Justin LoFranco, our Founder and Editor-in-Chief, who introduced her to it. He hadn’t started the Morning Chalk Up yet, but he was for sure CrossFitting on the daily.
“He definitely had a reputation as ‘That CrossFit Guy’. He was the only one there doing it as far as I know,” Mia told us in an interview at Wodapalooza.
But it took three more years for Mia to try CrossFit. “I kinda thought it was a fad,” she told us.
The final push.
After her internship in D.C. was up, Mia moved back to the CA Bay Area. Her boyfriend, now husband, was a rugby player and Mia had taken up running in D.C., running full marathons. “We couldn’t really work out together. It was so opposite.” So they tried CrossFit.
The first class Mia dropped into, the WOD was the CrossFit total, the opposite of endurance sports. It wasn’t until she tried another class in another box that it clicked. The second time it was “Elizabeth” and Mia couldn’t do a single ring dip.
And she was not pleased.
Those ring dips rekindled the competitive spirit that Mia loved about marathons. “I made my boyfriend take me to the park and teach me ring dips on the little bars. I told him we had to go back to CrossFit.”
Mia settled in with coach Todd Wise who was coaching at Sundown CrossFit at the time. She asked him to help her improve. “It went from something I had to get better at to what do I need to do to excel in this?”
Todd told her that step one was to show up three times a week, for one hour. She did, religiously. Then, she went to Todd and asked him what she needed to do to be able to compete.
“I told her, okay. Come train with me and the team every day at 5:00 PM. And she did it, every night she showed up. She works a full-time job and is relatively new to CrossFit and she still showed up every night,” Todd told us.
And it got her to Wodapalooza.
Just over two years later, Mia competed at Wodapalooza in the RX division Team of 3 as a Brute Athlete, coached by Todd.
“That’s the beauty of CrossFit,” Todd said. “It varies in degree, not in kind. The byproduct of this is that you can share that with the general population. That’s where she started and now look. Everyone needs to be doing what Mia is doing.”
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