A Nanaimo athlete competed at a world championship sporting event that invites only the very fittest.
Graham Giske, a former VIU Mariners basketball player, represented Nanaimo at the adaptive CrossFit Games in Las Vegas this month, finishing as high as sixth in his best event.
CrossFit is a strength and fitness regimen, and the CrossFit Games are a chance to turn it into a sporting competition consisting of a series of workouts. Giske has trained at CrossFit Nanaimo for a few years, and this year the 40-year-old broke through by becoming the only Canadian to qualify for the games in his division. Getting to that point came with a lot of pride, and it was a big motivator, he said, to think about the games as an opportunity he had worked for.
A little over a decade ago, while teaching in China, Giske was cycling when he was struck by a drunk driver, resulting in the amputation of his left leg above the knee. He recalled that even in his hospital bed, he was thinking about adaptive sports and feeling like he needed to do something special.
“That’s been in me the whole time and I’ve just been trying to figure out what that is, at the same time, making sense for my life,” Giske said.
He tried adaptive athletics. He showed an aptitude for wheelchair basketball, but declined an opportunity to move to Toronto and train with the national program, choosing Nanaimo where he was “rebuilding” his life. He’s now a teacher-counsellor and coach at Nanaimo District Secondary School, as well as a clinical counsellor.
A friend introduced him to CrossFit just about the time that the sport was becoming more inclusive for athletes with disabilities.
“They started building adaptive divisions and every year just got better and better,” Giske said.
This year he advanced through the online open and semifinal qualifiers and met the standards to go to the CrossFit Games. At that point, he stepped up his training, which CrossFit Nanaimo coach Alana Parrett said involved a lot of technical movements and lifts.
“He truly shifted gears … Having that life balance, but making sure that this was a priority in order to excel.”
Ultimately, Giske said he still felt like he ran out of time to prepare for all the different kind of workouts that make up a CrossFit competition. He was middle of the pack in the weightlifting, with his best event the max strength barbell complex consisting of three deadlifts, two cleans and one press, but he didn’t fare so well with the gymnastics, struggling with handstand pushups and hurting his shoulder on the challenging handstand walk.
“I had to kind of change my mindset a little bit,” Giske said. “I came to terms that I might not win or do as good as I want to, but I’m competing against myself and not giving up and that’s what it’s more about for me, anyways, this year.”
He and his coach know better now what he needs to work on, and Giske said the idea of having a year to improve on specific things is a bit of a “hook” to keep going.
“[I’ve] always had that in my head to try to get elite in something new that I can do,” he said. “Because if you focus on something that you can’t do anymore, that’s going to make you frustrated and sad. But there’s a million other new things that I can do, differently, and this is one of them.”
