NEW: Masters Blog Coming Soon
Hey guys, my name is Diana Peña and I am thrilled to be starting a Masters blog series to share with you! Starting things off with a little info about me and how I came into CrossFit.
I am 45 years old and will be celebrating 5 years at CrossFit Round Rock. Most of you know my husband, Marcos Peña, who is on Landon’s LA Guns (4:30 and Strength crew) tribe. He’s also a Masters Athlete. I am on Adrien’s Witness the Fitness tribe. We have two beautiful children, a daughter who is 11, going on 15 gearing up to start middle school (nope, still not ready for that) and a son, who is 9 and about to go into 4th grade. I am a Senior Global Campaign Manager for a cybersecurity company called Forcepoint. It’s a pretty fun job as you can imagine.
I started CrossFit 10 months after I turned 40, which was really a very happy coincidence. It was not a situation where I was freaking out about it and I needed to do something. It was quite the contrary. I was looking forward to being 40. That said, we had settled into a fairly sedentary lifestyle with sub-optimal nutrition. We knew we needed to make a change. But we were not into the traditional gym thing and I was specifically looking for something more challenging, something to give me a good kick in the ass. I had no idea how much CrossFit would fit that bill and then some.
Once I started CrossFit, like most of us, I got really into it. I watched, listened, and studied every aspect. We also changed our nutrition to Paleo and saw immediate results.
In August ’14, Coach Adrien recruited me to join her Oly class. I had no idea why as I did NOT feel like I was Oly material. But she saw something in me I didn’t at the time. It continued as she then recruited me to join her CompRx class in November the same year. This class was for those who were at a higher level of fitness and wanted to compete. I completely felt out of my element but decided to take it on. Counting this last Garage Gym Throwdown, I’ve done 12 competitions, including the Open. For the most part, they have been team comps. I scaled back over this last year-and-a-half to focus on specific goals and making improvements to movements. I hope to do individual comps, even Masters ones fairly soon.
The thought of being a Masters Athlete didn’t really cross my mind until recently. I was just a girl getting her fitness on every day. It puts an interesting perspective on things, something I will get into a little more in an upcoming post.
My goal for this blog series is twofold – share what I hope will be helpful insight for the other Masters athletes at CFRR and offer a perspective which could be beneficial for everyone else. If there is any topic you’d like me to cover or questions you have, let me know. I’m also trying to think of a clever name for this blog so any ideas are welcome. Just keep those old people jokes to a minimum!
-Diana