A new documentary has landed on the CrossFit® YouTube channel, and while it’s entitled 17.03: Birds of Prey, there’s not much talk of this year’s squat-snatch and pull-up-laden 17.3 Open workout. Instead, it’s an intimate look at three of the sport’s top female athletes as they prepare for the 2017 Reebok CrossFit Games.

They’re are all very different. First we visit Kari Pearce, the 5th fittest woman on Earth who is currently living in Garwood, New Jersey and training in New York City. Then we look at Jamie Greene, winner of the 2016 CrossFit Open, based in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. The third athlete is Camille LeBlanc-Bazinet, winner of the 2014 Reebok CrossFit Games who is living and training in Boulder, Colorado.

Three very different lives in very different cities, united by their thirst to be the Fittest Woman on Earth™. Watch it below.

There’s a lot to like about this video, and what might appeal the most to functional fitness fans is that you get not only a look at the personal lives of the athletes, but also the actual workouts they’re doing as they hone their skills to their peak.

Image via CrossFit® on YouTube

 There’s some real nitty gritty about diet, coaching, peaking, and fear of failure, but the most intimate part of the documentary is Camille LeBlanc-Bazinet talking about the pressures she has faced as the former Fittest Woman on Earth.

You start to have pressure to perform, and I mean everyone ranks you, right? So everything is about your rank, everything is about, ‘you’re worth this because you’re ranked that,’ or ‘you’re worth this because you have that.’

And you know all that is kind of B.S. I’m worth me because I’m me. And you kind of lose sight of that as things pile up, and you get nervous about losing your sponsor (…) is my career gonna be over if x, y, and z? But all of that shouldn’t have any effect on who you are because who you are is who you are. But going through that you lose a bit of yourself.

Every one of the ladies in this video has said they can win the 2017 Reebok CrossFit Games. It looks like they’re all going to put up a heck of a fight.

Featured image via CrossFit® on YouTube.

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Nick English
Nick is a content producer and journalist with over seven years’ experience reporting on four continents. His first articles about health were on a cholera outbreak in rural Kenya while he was reporting for a French humanitarian organization. His next writing job was covering the nightlife scene in Shanghai. He’s written on a lot of things.After Shanghai, he went on to produce a radio documentary about bodybuilding in Australia before finishing his Master’s degrees in Journalism and International Relations and heading to New York City. Here, he’s been writing on health full time for more than five years for outlets like BarBend, Men's Health, VICE, and Popular Science.No fan of writing in the third person, Nick’s passion for health stems from an interest in self improvement: How do we reach our potential?Questions like these took him through a lot of different areas of health and fitness like gymnastics, vegetarianism, kettlebell training, fasting, CrossFit, Paleo, and so on, until he realized (or decided) that strength training fit best with the ideas of continuous, measurable self improvement.At BarBend his writing focuses a little more on nutrition and long-form content with a heaping dose of strength training. His underlying belief is in the middle path: you don’t have to count every calorie and complete every workout in order to benefit from a healthy lifestyle and a stronger body. Plus, big traps are cool.

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