When Your Cool Down is Stopping a Robbery For Time

The story.

Rachelle Davis is a coach at CrossFit HNL in Kailua, HI. On Tuesday, October 2nd, Rachelle and a few friends were having dinner at Whole Foods after they finished working out.

Suddenly, someone walked up to their table, leaned over it, and knocked all of their drinks over. When he took off running with her purse, Rachelle’s instincts kicked in. “Before I knew it, I was up and out of my seat running towards him. I had no idea what he took, but as I was running I realized he probably took one of our purses from the table,” she told us in an email.

She chased him all the way across the parking lot.

So she sped up.

…and caught him. Rachelle tackled the kid and took him down, the two colliding into a string of shopping carts. Rachelle jumped on top of him. He covered his face and said, “You win! I’m sorry!”

Sorry, not sorry.

She got her purse back from the teen and stood up. Now that the adrenaline had settled, Rachelle got a little bit scared. “I didn’t know who he was, or if he had a weapon, or what. I just knew that on principle, he was doing something wrong and I was not going to just stand by and let it happen.”

Security caught up to them and the teen continued to apologize, but Rachelle had one last thing to say to him before she walked back to Whole Foods.

“I turned back and yelled at him, ‘Be a better fucking person!’ which now has become a slight motto of our gym and friends group, but I guess in that moment, it was all I could come up with to show how disappointed I was in how he was treating others and himself.”

This is our new life motto.

She got her purse back but she also ran so hard and fast that she pulled a hamstring, laughing that there are no warm-ups for a theft situation. But Rachelle thinks it was a life lesson that she would never have had if not for CrossFit.

“If not for the functional fitness I have gained through Crossfit, I would have never been able to have that quick of a reaction, intensity to chase someone down, mental capacity to still react while performing at max effort, or the relentlessness to not give up on the chase. It really made me think about how far I have come and all the things in life that Crossfit has prepared me for… I literally chased down what I thought was right and what I wanted. This is what you train for – you don’t just train for competitions. You train for life.”