Growth Through Crossfit
How the sport helped Carrie Dudley transform from a struggling teen to an elite-level athlete
Story by KIT HIPPLE | Photos by KERRI HOLLEMAN
CONTENT WARNING: This story contains references to eating disorders.
Carrie Dudley walks across the gym at CrossFit Iron Industry, a smile on her face as she takes a break from her long day of training.
“I’m so excited we’re doing this!” she says.
It’s noon on a Monday, and Carrie has already completed some of her training for the day with more to go after her lunch break. Snacking on blueberries that she has pre-measured, she sits down and reflects on how she got started in the sport that ended up changing her life.
“My sister [dragged] me to a CrossFit class with her at 6 a.m.,” she says, thinking back to spring break visiting her siblings in Idaho a few years ago. “I left the class just obsessed immediately.”
This past season, Carrie, a former distance runner, placed as the sixth fittest woman in the Northwest region, earning her a spot to compete at the regional level. While she did not make it to the CrossFit Games this year, she looks back on Regionals as an incredibly fun experience.
“I always said if I got there, even if I got last place, I’d still be standing there like, ‘This is so cool!’” Carrie now coaches classes at CrossFit Lynden in-between her training sessions.
While she is more than achieving her goals now, Dudley did not always have the strong, positive relationship with fitness and nutrition that she does now. During her middle and high school years she struggled with an eating disorder. Having a sensitive stomach forced her to cut certain foods out of her diet, which resulted in weight loss.
Dudley describes herself as an “all or nothing” person, and as an eighth grader, that attitude played a role in restricting her caloric intake based on the amount of daily exercise she got. She lost significant weight between her eighth grade and freshman year of high school, and began experiencing symptoms of anorexia such as hair loss.
Her eating disorder took a toll on her social life as well. Her friends didn’t understand what was going on.
“I was embarrassed,” she admits. “My parents and my sisters were the people who still had my back so all I wanted to do was be at home.”
She credits her family with saving her life and is certain she would have been hospitalized had they not stepped in and helped her towards recovery.
“My dad devoted himself to my eating,” Dudley says. “He would sit down with me at night and we would log all the food I had eaten that day and then plug in how much exercise I did.”
Her dad made sure she weighed in every morning and that she ate enough food each day to gain weight.
“I didn’t like eating alone,” she says. “My poor dad would sit there until late into the night eating with me. He stuck with me until I started having a better relationship with food.”
Dudley says that a cycle of starving herself and then binge eating continued throughout her high school years. It wasn’t until she started doing CrossFit that she no longer saw food as the enemy. Since she fell in love with the sport, she realized her relationship with food would need to change if she wanted to improve.
“The whole concept of ‘food as fuel’ completely fixed my brain somehow,” Carrie says.
She now works with a nutrition coach to make sure that everything she eats aids her in her performance in the gym and helps her reach her goals. She credits the entire atmosphere surrounding CrossFit with helping her. The varied movements, the community, the support and how she felt after a workout helped her learn to trust food again.
Carrie and her husband just moved back to Washington state, as they lived in Bozeman, Montana for the past few years. During that time she was approached by a powerlifter who saw her potential and wanted to coach her. While he had never trained a CrossFit athlete before, he wanted to see what the two of them could do during a time when Dudley had reached a plateau in her workouts and did not feel that she was getting any stronger.
Her response?
“Dude, I have nothing to lose, yes!”
She saw progress soon after, which prompted her to write “Regionals” on the goal board in the gym.
Her sister Joanie has seen enormous changes in Carrie as well. “She’s a lot more confident and self-assured,” she says. She describes her sister as disciplined, loving and hard-working.
“She is an incredible coach. She actually loves what she’s doing,” Joanie says. “She genuinely is that in love with CrossFit.”
While Carrie has more than overcome her eating disorder, she has had new experiences surrounding body image since becoming an elite-level CrossFitter. People are often thrown off when they see her muscles, since women with that level of physical strength are not seen as common in society.
“It’s only normal in a CrossFit gym,” Carrie says. “You just get looked at a lot.” She sometimes pulls a weighted metal sled around town as part of her training, and gets mixed responses from people driving by. Some cheer her on and ask what she’s training for, while others slow down and give her dirty looks.
Carrie has overheard women in the gym trying out CrossFit make statements that they want to be fit but don’t “want to get big.”
“At first it kind of made me mad,” she says. “But then it’s funny because in order for them to get quote on quote ‘big’ they would have to devote their entire life to it.”
Joanie has noticed the looks people give Carrie when they’re out and about.
“People do stop and stare at her and it’s very surprising to me,” Joanie says.
While frustrating, Carrie doesn’t take these situations too seriously. “I kind of just use them to either fuel me or I just shake it off and kind of laugh,” she says.
Training and competing at the level she does now, every aspect of Dudley’s life revolves around her work as a CrossFit athlete, from tracking all her food to getting enough sleep at night. While she makes time for her family and friends outside of the gym, she does not think that having balance as a full-time professional athlete is the most realistic expectation.
“If you’re going to devote all your time to something, you can’t really have balance,” she says.
Local CrossFit athlete Shenelle Higbee has been training with Carrie for the past five months. They’ve been friends for a few years and are now training partners as well, constantly pushing each other to be better and reach similar goals. Shenelle describes her as determined, humble and uplifting, and realizes the mental dedication that Carrie has to the sport in addition to the physical.
“It takes a lot of mental fortitude to do that,” she says. “She’s a really neat athlete because part of it is being humble and always striving to do better.”
Carrie’s goals are to make it back to Regionals this coming season, place in the top 10, and make it to the CrossFit Games within the next five years.
Carrie’s efforts have not gone unnoticed by those around her. In a sport that has such varied movements, she has made it a goal to work on her weaknesses for the upcoming competition season.
“It takes a lot of guts to do that,” Shenelle says.
Training at the high level that she does, Carrie credits her upbringing with her drive to succeed.
“I was raised to not ever quit,” she says. “That’s just not an option.”
