Facing diagnoses and lifelong struggles with strength
Women of the 2023 CrossFit Open, Part 3
Flex is an edition of Women’s Barbell Club that highlights women who participate in strength in some form or fashion.
Welcome to the last of our three-part series, Women of the 2023 CrossFit Open. Over the last few weeks, we’ve profiled a handful of women who landed top in their division of this year’s Open, with a special focus on Master’s and Adaptive athletes. Today’s profiles of Amalia Ortuno and Jenn Ryan cap off the series.
(Read part one and part two now if you missed them.)
Amalia Ortuno (First Place, Seated with Hip Division)
Costa Rica - North America East - 38 - 5’5”
Open Workouts
23.1 - 1st place (180 reps)
23.2a - 2nd (130 reps)
23.2b (max thruster) - 1st (117 lbs)
23.3 - 2nd (187 reps)
“It’s been very important for me to be able to see that I can do things again, that I can compete, that I can be an athlete again.” ~Amalia Ortuno
Amalia Ortuno was training for an Ironman Triathlon when she started feeling something strange in her hips. Around 30 years old, Ortuno had participated in some sort of sport since she was a two-year-old learning ballet. She thought maybe this pain was just from too much endurance training, normal wear and tear. But it wasn’t getting better. Before long, she couldn’t train because the pain was too excruciating.
Her doctor ran some tests and came back with a diagnosis: congenital hip dysplasia, a degenerative condition that puts the hips at risk of repeated dislocation, often due to how they formed in utero.
Since that diagnosis seven years ago, Ortuno has had multiple surgeries. One caused neurological damage to her left leg, further limiting her ability to rely on that leg. Today, she gets around in a wheelchair or, for short distances outside competition, crutches.
Early on, her doctor told her she wouldn’t be able to do sports anymore, but in 2017, at the recommendation of her physical therapist, she tried CrossFit. This was before adaptive CrossFit had gone global, so the coach Ortuno worked with didn’t always know how to adjust workouts to her abilities. Ortuno would just skip the lower body movements, but that meant the workouts weren’t challenging enough for her.
Then, in 2018, she started working with a coach who’d taken a course through the Adaptive Training Academy.
“The second day that I went to the workout, I was exhausted,” she says. “I was like, ‘Okay, I think this is what I like, the intensity that I like.’”
Ortuno’s condition means every workout is an upper body workout. And the rest of life — whether she’s on crutches or in her chair — she’s reliant on her upper body to move from point A to point B.
“In the beginning, you don’t have any strength in your shoulders or stability of strength in your upper body, so it’s hard to go [anywhere] in the wheelchair by yourself,” she says. That can lead to feeling a bit helpless or frustrated or stuck.
Along with giving Ortuno an athletic outlet, CrossFit has helped her build upper body endurance and strength that supports her in everyday life.
“Since I started doing CrossFit, it helped me regain my motivation and self-love,” she says. “In the emotional part, it’s been very important for me to be able to see that I can do things again, that I can compete, that I can be an athlete again. That helps a lot … and then in the physical part, I’ve become so strong from my upper body that … I can do a lot of things by myself that I couldn’t do before.”
Even more than competing at — and winning — Wodapalooza, WheelWOD Games, and Wodcelona, it’s regaining independence and building strength for life that mean the most to her.
“If I could see at that time [of my diagnosis] what I would be able to do … I would tell myself, ‘Be patient. Enjoy the process. Good things are coming,’” she says. “Even if you have a limitation, that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be able to achieve something.”
Jenn Ryan (First Place, 40-44 Division)
US - North America West - CrossFit Invictus - 43 - 5’2”
Open Workouts
23.1 - 3rd place (217 reps)
23.2a - 1st (167 reps)
23.2b (max thruster) - 63rd (177 lbs)
23.3 - 3rd (11:53)
“I knew I was really small for being a CrossFitter … so I purposely tried to gain weight. … In all of my life at that point, [age] 30 or 31, I had never wanted to do that before. That is when that shift happened. I wanted to be competitive, and I knew I had to get stronger and get a little bigger to be able to do that.” ~Jenn Ryan
**Note: Eating disorders are mentioned.**
It wasn’t until Jenn Ryan was 37 that bulimia became a thing of her past. For more than twenty years, starting when she was a high school sophomore, she intermittently turned to binging and purging as an attempt to cope with stress and grasp for control. Sometimes the bulimia was worse than others; other times, it faded to the background. But it was always there, ready to rear its ugly head.
The whole time, Ryan was an athlete. In high school, she played multiple sports. In college, she signed up for club soccer. In her twenties, she frequented fitness classes, ran, and occasionally lifted weights. “I loved all things fitness,” she says.
In 2009, after losing a bet to some friends, she went to her first CrossFit class. It was a hot, humid summer day in Columbia, South Carolina. The gym wasn’t air conditioned, but its garage door was open, giant fans moving air through the space. Ryan remembers that the workout involved running and some sort of barbell movement, maybe sumo deadlift high pulls, maybe overhead squats.
It was hard, and she loved it. The whiteboard where everyone wrote their workout scores stirred her competitive side. But she wasn’t sure the minimalist workouts of early-era CrossFit were enough, so she kept going to her other gym while attending CrossFit classes a few times a week. She didn’t fully commit to CrossFit until over a year later.
“At that time, still, exercise and eating was all about body composition, self-image, ‘I want to be smaller,’” she says, but gradually, her mindset started to change.
One day, the workout was a simple 10 rope climbs for time. She couldn’t finish that many in an hour, but she wanted to.
“I was slowly starting to appreciate my body more for what it could do, as opposed to what it looked like,” she says. “That, I think, was extremely helpful.”
Competition helped her fully turn the page. In November 2010, she participated in her first partner competition and took third. The following spring, CrossFit had its first Open, and she signed up.
Seeing other athletes, how much muscle they carried, she realized she was small for a CrossFitter, so she decided to intentionally gain weight.
“That is when that shift happened,” she says. “I wanted to be competitive, and I knew I had to get stronger and get a little bigger to be able to do that. … It was mind-blowing to me that I was consciously making the effort to eat more.”
In late 2014, she started working with a nutrition coach to make sure she was eating enough. The coach gave Ryan guidance on how to hit her macronutrients (carbohydrate, fat, protein) every day.
“I learned I was trying to fuel my CrossFit workouts with way too high of fat and not enough carbohydrate,” Ryan says. “I certainly was not eating enough, because I still had that mentality of, yes, I want to get a little bit stronger and bigger, but I also wanted to maintain a certain body composition.”
Ryan still struggled with seeing certain foods as “good” or “bad”, but learning about her macronutrients — and seeing how much more she needed to eat — helped her start to understand how different foods fueled her. And while tracking can be harmful for some who struggle with disordered eating, it proved helpful for Ryan: “It allowed me to say it’s okay to eat all of this and not want to purge,” she says.
Today, Ryan works as a holistic health and nutrition coach, drawing from her background as a nurse and her experience in and out of the gym. Competing in CrossFit is a way to have fun and show her clients that she’s walking her talk. So far, she’s gone to the Games five times: three times on a team, twice as a Master’s athlete.
Her biggest surprise from this year’s Open?
“How consistent I was,” she says. “If you look at everyone’s score, you’ll see my consistency. My biggest weakness is absolute strength, and that’s what a thruster is. … The fact that I took 63rd in [the thruster] and the other placements were a third — there’s no other woman in my age group that was that consistent, where their biggest weakness was that close to their strengths.”
Recommended Reading (and Watching)
Are Cycle Syncing Workouts Worth the Hype? (Reading Between the Lines from Christine Yu)
What’s coming up:
The magic of the hip hinge
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