Lindsey Smith: A Proper Ambassador of the Sport
What most people know about Lindsey Smith is that she’s the embodiment of the modern female athlete: strong, smart, savvy, fast, scrappy, tough, and determined. These are the same traits that she aims to portray, on a daily basis, at the Columbus School for Girls. There, Lindsey currently serves as the Athletic Director of the 115 year old, all-girls prep school in the Bexley area. She recently achieved the role after her mentor, Kippie Crouch, stepped down.
The dichotomy of this athlete’s life is a notable one. You won’t find her walking into a CrossFit affiliate every morning to coach up her flock of clients before training during the afternoon dead time. Instead, she arrives at the school and drops off her young daughter at her academic building. Then she sets off to handle the administrative duties of a woman dead set on continuing the tradition of the winning athletic program by developing young women – strong in character and strong on the field. You can see her desire to fulfill her goals for the Columbus school, all the way from Dallas.
This is a job that she focuses on from 8 AM to 8 PM during the week and during her breaks from her other passion – the CrossFit Headquarters Seminar Staff. She travels to coach 2-3 weekends a month with her team of instructors that are considered to be many of CrossFit’s best coaches.
But when does she train? According to her, “When my work is done.” When Lindsey Smith steps into the stadium on July 13th for the 2012 Reebok CrossFit Games, it will be her fourth straight year of achieving the Games berth. But even with her professional demands, she’s never trained harder for the sport – clocking 2-3 hours DAILY of heavy lifting, gymnastics, endurance work, auxiliary training, mobility, and combine preparation. She trains at Rogue Fitness’s headquarters or with Graham Holmberg at his CrossFit affiliate. Her capacity to remain in the top flight of CrossFit’s female athletes as other-worldly. And to think, many other women likely have similar stories of sacrifice before training time.
Lindsey’s goal is to win the CrossFit Games. Her regional qualifier performance only fueled her fire a bit more. After her long weeks in the office and five straight weekends of seminar travel, she mustered enough strength to finish 2nd overall in one of the toughest regions. But with the school year is over and her travel toned down, she can now train like the athlete that once finished atop the Big East Conference – in three different sports. Her goal to podium at the 2012 Games. All of her bandwidth is now going to this one goal, to show her student athletes and their parents that you can still focus, rigorously, on academia and character development while achieving ultimate success on the field.
She hopes to show the young women at the Columbus School for Girls that, even with their daily workload and academic rigor, they can be the best athletes in the city and state. What she is asking of her athletes, she will demonstrate at the Home Depot Center stadium this summer, as she attempts to become one of the world’s best prepared athletes and the fittest on earth.
After the CrossFit Games, she’ll have a few days to rest before Ohio’s fall sports season is in full swing. And she wouldn’t have it any other way.
[...] Crossfit. I stumbled across some websites and patrolled them daily checking out athletes like Lindsey Smith, and Camille leblanc Bazniet. I knew I wanted to do what they did. Initially, my goal was purely [...]
[...] am way more active. From playing with my Nike XBOX Kinect training system (instead of lounging) to CrossFit with Lindsey Smith, every chance I got. A vast improvement in my sullen, sedentary, and pitiful attitude from just [...]