A retired New Zealander policewoman & a Canadian Paralympian walk into a CrossFit box
Women of the 2023 CrossFit Open, Part 2
Flex is an edition of Women’s Barbell Club that highlights women who participate in strength in some form or fashion.
More than 140,000 women and girls participated in this year’s CrossFit Open, which ended in March. The CrossFit season has quickly moved on from the Open — Quarterfinals ended on April 2 — but we decided to camp out in the Open results for a while, get to know some new (to us) faces, and share some fun stories.
This is the second of a three-part series profiling women who landed top in their division of the 2023 CrossFit Open. Read part one here.
Pauline Sciascia (First Place, 65+ Division)
New Zealand - Oceania - CrossFit Central Wellington - 65 - 5’2”
Open Workouts
23.1 - 1st place (181 reps)
23.2a - 9th (113 reps)
23.2b (max thruster) - 10th (108 lbs)
23.3 - 1st (156 reps)
“I can’t tell people enough — man or woman — that you have to do strength-based training. There’s just no getting around it. As we get older, we get skinnier, our muscles disappear, and we’ve got to start pushing those muscles so they don’t actually get any smaller than what they are.” ~Pauline Sciascia
Last year, in Madison, Wisconsin, Pauline Sciascia found herself watching gymnastics rings blowing in the wind overhead. Then 64 years old, the New Zealander, who’d traveled halfway around the world with her husband and coach to compete at the CrossFit Games, wasn’t sure if she’d be able to get a hold of the rings once the workout started.
She could do ring muscle-ups, the movement prescribed for the workout. She’d gotten her first one at the age of 59, four years into her CrossFit journey. But jumping up and grabbing the rings in the windy open air?
“I can still see those rings moving,” Sciascia says.
Ultimately, she was able to catch the rings and string a few muscle-ups in a row. She took fifth in that workout, Mixed Mode Madness, and 10th overall in the competition. To her, the experience demonstrated: “If you know you can do something, it doesn’t matter what the environment is — you’ll do it.”
Sciascia is aiming for another Games qualification this year, this time in the 65+ division.
The former policewoman, international netball umpire, mother of five, and grandmother has been doing CrossFit since she was 55, when she tried a class with her daughter. “It was a sheer fluke, really, that I got into it,” she says. She started following CompTrain programming in 2016 to improve her overall strength and, in 2018, competed in her first Games at the age of 60.
One challenge that arises every time she competes in the Games is adjusting to the climate and time zone in the Northern Hemisphere.
“We come from winter and [the United States] are in the summer,” she says. “I go from like 6 to 8 degrees [Celcius; 42-46 F] to 30, 32 degrees [C; 86-90 F], and climatizing is one of the toughest things for me. It’s really hard to compete in that heat.”
To account for this, she tries to arrive in the U.S. about 6 days before the Games start to give her body time to acclimate.
While she hasn’t gotten her ticket to this year’s Games yet, she’s encouraged by her placement in the Open.
“After coming back from the Games last year, my coach and I had worked really hard on particular parts of my weaknesses,” she says. “The expectation of the Open was to do well, even though at the end of the day, it actually doesn’t matter so much because you only have to be in the top 10 percent [of competitors] … but you still get anxious and nervous and everything before you compete.”
Bayleigh Hooper (First Place, Lower Extremity Division)
Canada - North America East - 24 - 5”
Open Workouts
23.1 - 2nd place (180 reps)
23.2a - 4th (148 reps)
23.2b (max thruster) - 8th (115 lbs)
23.3 - 2nd (286 reps)
“My mom always says that I started dancing before I was even born. … I had a lot of energy as a child, so [my parents] were like, ‘Okay, how are we going to burn this kid out?’” ~Bayleigh Hooper
Bayleigh Hooper grew up at SickKids, aka The Hospital for Sick Kids in Toronto, Canada. Born with a cleft lip and palate, severe bilateral club feet, and amniotic bands on three fingers of her right hand, she had 16 surgeries at SickKids between when she was born and February 2017, when she was a senior in high school.
She and her parents would rise early in their small town of Owen Sound and drive the three hours to Toronto for Hooper’s morning appointments. Many days, when they got back, Hooper would go to dance or gymnastics class in the evening.
For Hooper, this was normal. She didn’t think anything of it — not her frequent hospital visits, not her constant athletic activities.
“The doctors told my parents I would never walk, and I proved those odds wrong,” she says, “but my left side didn’t develop as well as my right side, so I needed reconstructive surgery on that leg. And so that whole side below my knee, I have muscular atrophy on my left calf muscle and down. My range of motion is not very good, nor is my muscle power.”
But she never saw this as a limitation in her gymnastics or dance. She couldn’t rise up on her left foot, but she’d just work around it — well enough to take first for her dance solo in a national Canada competition and be all-around provincial champion in Ontario on balance beam.
When she left for college in 2017, it was only natural that she pursue some collegiate sport. She tried out for cheerleading and rowing — and made both. She decided to do rowing, but hated her first few weeks.
“In gymnastics, your longest routine is a minute and a half, and in rowing, your race length is two kilometers and that takes anywhere from 7 to 8 minutes,” she says. The shift from anaerobic work to aerobic work was tough, but she stuck with it.
After the fall rowing season, during a day of winter training, one of the coaches asked Hooper about her fingers. Three fingers on her right hand look different due to the amniotic bands that looped around them in her mother’s womb. “They were completely black when I was born and they were supposed to self-amputate, but never did,” Hooper says. Her pinky is missing the top knuckle and fingertip; her ring finger is red and chubby. “But I write with that hand. It has function, it just doesn’t look ‘right’.”
She explained this to the coach and then told the coach about her left leg, the atrophied muscle and overall weakness. That’s when the coach told Hooper she might be able to compete as a para athlete for the Canadian Paralympics rowing team.
Hooper was taken off-guard. She’d never considered para sports. She didn’t think of herself “disabled.” But after talking to another coach about the opportunity, she decided to go for it.
“Never close an open door,” she says.
Over the next few years, Hooper made the Canadian team, put school on hold, moved to British Columbia to train, and competed at the pandemic-delayed 2020 Paralympics in Tokyo in August 2021.
Now, back at home in Owen Sound, Ontario, Hooper splits her time between coaching gymnastics and dance at her mom’s studio, working as a personal trainer at Owen Sound Fitness, and training CrossFit-style at Built Strength & Conditioning. She started doing CrossFit last June for a change of pace.
When she found out about the Open this year, she looked into adaptive divisions and signed up to compete. The first workout, 23.1, started with rowing and toes-to-bar, aka leg lifts, one of her favorite gymnastics movements. She took second place in that workout.
The lower extremity division is one of three adaptive divisions that will go to the CrossFit Games this year — which means Hooper may be on her way to her first Games after less than a year in the sport.
“My first year into CrossFit, I didn’t expect to even be on the leaderboard, so everything else is just an extra little bonus,” she says.
Recommended Reading
What Would Happen if Women Athletes Got the Mythology Treatment They Deserve? (NY Times)
Menstrual-Cycle-Syncing Workouts Are Breaking Taboos—And Raising Questions (Well+Good)
How the Rise of Intuitive Movement Led Us to a Gentler Pace in Fitness (Well+Good)
What’s coming up:
Women of the 2023 CrossFit Open, Part 3 (last one!)
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