A little history behind WODstack.

When I hit 'deploy' I crossed my fingers and closed my eyes. It was only the third time that I had actually tried to launch a web application. I glanced up and WODstack was alive. Cool.

In August of 2010 I was just about fed up with training. I had been doing the same thing for 10 years and the last 2 years had been rough. Career change and babies make for poor sleep. My wife, sensing my frustration, suggested I try CrossFit. She had given it a go for a week and thought I might like it. My response was

Babe, I'm not really into bootcamps

But I told her I would give it a shot as I thought I remember my firefighter brother talking about it. After one class I learned 2 things:

1. I was terribly out of shape
2. That everything I knew about fitness was going to change

I worked my ass off in the coming months. Butterflies in my stomach on the way there and rips on my hands on the way back. I loved it. The community was awesome and I was re-learning what I already knew. Getting fit isn't complicated, but it's hard. Sleep well, eat good, and workout hard. What makes it difficult is that life has a way of pushing back. Work makes it hard to eat right. Babies make it hard to sleep, and working out hard is, well…hard. But you know what fights life back? Motivation. Motivation wins out over almost any obstacle. What I was finding in CrossFit was 2 types of motivation. The kind that comes from other athletes telling you to pick the bar back up, and the kind that comes from seeing you shave 3 minutes off your Fran time. Motivation creates progress, progress creates passion, and passion creates change…that lasts.

So what did I do? The same thing most people do at this stage. I started writing down my WODs. Then I went online. I started integrating my WOD results into my blog and then auto tweet them to Twitter. There I found other people like me. Now I was pumped to do the WOD and I was pumped to log it so I could connect with others.

So there I sat in November of 2011 contemplating the idea of piecing together some bits of code I had written in my attempt to learn Ruby on Rails (programming language). My simple thought was that others might like a place to log, retrieve, compare and share their WODs. A quick internet search lead me to believe there was room for such a solution. So, I tied together a blog, a Q&A app and an authentication system from another little experiment. It worked. I could post a WOD, edit it, delete it and comment on it…and so could others, at least on my local machine. I hit deploy, closed my eyes and it was alive. I created a Twitter account and followed 1000 people who had 'CrossFit' in their bios. Done and Done.

The next year was craziness. People actually started signing up and telling others about it. I scrambled frantically to keep the thing afloat and add features. Privacy, Tags, Benchmarks, etc. Traffic would go up, site would go down. I had no idea what I was doing but eventually it started making sense. I would smile every time I got a new-sign-up-email. It was awesome.

Mikael Joined me midway through 2011 to help build out several more features that were beyond my skill set and to help migrate the application to a better platform to as we were growing in popularity. He has been incredible.

What we have today is a unique app that allows CrossFitters from all over the world to log their WODs in less time than it took to do them. It allows them to follow and connect with other CrossFitters both on WODstack and in real life. It allows them to stay motivated by watching their progress and by encouragement from others. We've got an iPhone app close to completion and a team of people blogging. Just about 2,000 people have logged over 50,000 WODs and our numbers are growing everyday. This year we are averaging about 15 sign-ups a day.

We are so humbled that people want to connect here. We love the community and the fact that we can be part of supporting it like this is so fulfilling. The app is free to users and we aim to keep it that way. We've got some ideas for some premium add-on features in the future but nothing is set yet.

Come check us out. We're having a blast.