Akron Life May 2023

FOREVER YOUNG

“I had a really good coach that was working with me. I was able to get multiple rope climbs,” says the now-59-year-old Canton res ident and certified CrossFit coach at Midnight City CrossFit in North Canton. “You start feeling this satisfaction of, Maybe I can do this . It was a challenge. It was something different.” Shay had been an athlete all her life, starting competitive swimming at just 5 years old. She also did another endurance-based sport, run ning, and then played volleyball, basketball and softball in middle and high school. But she chose to go to medical school to become a gastroenterologist, and she put sports on the back burner. She competed in a few mara thons and triathlons when her work schedule allowed it, and about eight years ago she was looking for a new challenge. Shay found exactly that after she read an article about CrossFit, which consists of constantly varied functional movements with high intensity. “It can involve anything from gymnastics to running to jump roping to barbell movements — it’s the unknown,” she says. In all her years of sports, she hadn’t done a lot of weightlifting or gymnastics-type movements,

so when she first started CrossFit, she felt out of place. But accomplishing the rope climb lit a spark in her to keep going, and she eventu ally began to tackle more movements. She can now do a bar muscle up, where you’re under neath a bar, get on top of it and straighten your arms. She’s still working on a walking handstand. One of her recent goals is gaining strength. She has seen the numbers she can lift triple and quadruple over time — and now she can deadlift 290 pounds! Shay has spent so much time mastering CrossFit that she decided to get certified as a coach, and for the past two years, she’s been teaching a weekly class on Tuesdays at Midnight City. The hourlong class is incred ibly demanding. Students tackle movements to elevate their heart rates, mobility, strength or skill work and a workout of the day. During workouts, Midnight City members can record their scores on a whiteboard, and Shay says sometimes people get too fixated on numbers. She helps them shift their mindset beyond just setting records.

“Sometimes the biggest challenge of the day is just getting into the gym and doing a work out,” she says. “So your win for the day or your intention is, I’m just going to move .” She has learned to strengthen her mental game and set intentions before each workout and competition through about five years of training with her master mindset group. Members encourage each other to develop healthy habits like getting up and journaling, staying off phones before bed, engaging in body care like massage and maintaining ade quate sleep and nutrition. But talking through obstacles is equally important. “Part of the process is just knowing that there’s always something you can improve upon, so it can be frustrating at times,” Shay says. “It comes back to developing, Why am I actually doing this? I’m doing this because I want to be fit. I want to be able to do things as I get older.” Currently, Shay spends an average of three hours working out daily to prepare for com petitions, with the ultimate goal of making it

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MAY 2023 | akronlife.com