Heading into the 2025 TYR Wodapalooza in Miami Beach, Lucy Campbell didn’t have a leaderboard goal.
And why would she?
The 2022 CrossFit Games rookie was returning to competition after having spent the better part of two years recovering from two wrist surgeries due to a condition the surgeon didn’t think would allow her to return to CrossFit.
- In fact, her first surgeon told her, “We cannot do anything with this,” Campbell said in an interview with the Morning Chalk Up.
So when Campbell defied the odds to even qualify for TYR Wodapalooza, she admitted that she didn’t have any massive goals. She was simply looking to compete.
- “I just wanted to see what it was like to be on the floor again, see if my wrist could handle a weekend that is that intense with the workouts we had,” she said.
Six workouts later, Campbell became the 2025 TYR Wodapalooza champion, beating out the 2023 CrossFit Games champion, Laura Horvath.
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Three weeks since her win, Campbell said life has mostly returned to normal.
- “It has been back to normal. Friday [after Wodapalooza], it was a 6 a.m. start at the gym, sweeping the floor and Hoovering. It was all quite unglamorous,” she laughed.
Campbell added: “Having said that, I think the potential for this year and how exciting this year can be is massive, so in some ways, no change [to my life], and in some ways, everything is going to change.”
The Road to TYR Wodapalooza
After finishing 16th in her rookie season at the 2022 CrossFit Games, Campbell started having pain in her right wrist, which eventually led to exploratory surgery in March 2023.
- Campbell said that the surgeons discovered “multiple chunks [of bone] floating around.”
She was soon diagnosed with Kienbock’s disease, a condition where the lunate bone in the wrist loses its blood supply, causing the bone to die. The cause of the condition for Campbell is because her ulna bone is abnormally short compared to her radius bone, two important bones in the wrist’s movement.
After discovering the fractures during her surgery, the surgeon closed Campbell’s wrist back up and told her there wasn’t anything he could do other than fuse her wrist, but then she wouldn’t be able to extend it at all.
- She explained to the surgeon that she needed wrist extension for CrossFit, and his reply was, “You need to find another sport.”
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Campbell wasn’t about to take one surgeon’s opinion as gospel. Instead, she searched for another surgeon, and after speaking with two more, she found one who thought he might be able to help.
- That being said, she was told there was only a 70% chance the surgery would work.
In the summer of 2024, Campbell underwent a second surgery, this time to remove 5 millimeters from her radius so it would sit level with her ulna, she explained. A plate was then put into her arm to pin her bones together.
At that point, the thought of competing again was so far from her mind. Campbell’s focus was purely on rehabilitating her wrist so she could live a pain-free life.
- “I didn’t think that I would get back [to where I was],” Campbell said. “For a lot of the recovery period after the second surgery…it wasn’t about getting back to the sport. It was [about] if I wanted any chance of not having a really, really painful and inconvenient wrist for the rest of my life, I had to go through the rehab.”
She added: “It was only once I started to be able to try ring muscle-ups [last fall] that I was like, ‘OK, well, maybe I could get back to competition.’”
Through most of her rehab, Campbell didn’t even watch any high-level CrossFit competitions, saying it was too hard because “it seemed so far away.”
Then an opportunity came up for Campbell to work as a commentator with broadcast teams at the Dubai Fitness Championship and the Europe Semifinals.
As much as she enjoyed the experience, Campbell admitted it only made her feel even further from being competition-ready.
- “The further and further away you get from the sport as an athlete, the more superhuman the girls feel, the more insane it feels what they’re doing,” she said.
Ultimately, this only led to more self-doubt.
- “I just didn’t believe that I was there yet,” she said.
Lucy Campbell’s TYR Wodapalooza Weekend
With a “just here to get back out there” attitude in Miami, Campbell made a statement on the first event of the weekend, “Two Rounds too Many,” finishing second.
- However, the event had running, box stepovers, and biking, so it wasn’t exactly a test for her wrist.
But she followed that up with another second-place finish, as well as a seventh-place finish on an event where every single movement posed a serious test to her wrist – heavy double-unders, handstand push-ups, handstand walking, dumbbell snatches, single-arm overhead dumbbell lunge, and legless rope climbs.
To her surprise, after Day 1, she was leading all competitors.
- Campbell, though, knew her biggest test was yet to come, so she didn’t really put any emotion into the fact that she was leading at the halfway mark.
The test she was expecting to knock her out of contention was Day 2’s first event — “Worth the Weight” — a clean complex of one clean plus one hang clean.
Until recently, Campbell’s wrist had prevented her from being able to hold onto the barbell to even perform a clean, let alone lift a heavy double. Further, she explained that heavy cleans had always been a weakness, even before her injury.
- “Almost as soon as the clean event was announced, I sort of almost wrote off any major goals that I might have had because I knew I would be one of the bottom [athletes]…and I thought that would really put me out of any top half finish,” she said.
“Worth the Weight” arrived, and Campbell surprised herself. She hit 210 pounds on the clean complex, a number that isn’t that far off her all-time PR.
Still, she did finish near the bottom — 36th — but because she had performed so strongly on Day 1, Campbell didn’t lose much ground. She was only 20 points out of the top spot and had two strong events to go.
- That’s when Campbell realized there might be a chance for her to stay on the podium.
She started to wonder whether she might get asked to join the World Fitness Project’s (WFP) line-up of professional athletes if she were to finish in the top three.
- “I [asked] my manager, ‘Are they here? Are they watching this?’ And she was like, ‘They are here.’ But I was very much not getting carried away with where I was on the leaderboard until the end of the clean event because I knew the clean event would drop me down. And so when I was still top three, I think, going into the Cuban Press event, I thought, ‘OK, this could still be something good,’” Campbell said.
Campbell went on to put together two more second-place finishes in the final two events, doing just enough to earn the top spot, five points ahead of Horvath and 20 points ahead of Alexis Raptis.
- Best of all, though she always has “a level of pain” in her wrist, it held up a lot better than she was expecting.
That same evening, after accepting her $75,000 prize, the World Fitness Project came knocking and invited Campbell to sign as one of their 20 professional women for the 2025 season.
Looking Ahead, Feeling Grateful
Campbell showed up in Miami just looking for “an accurate representation” of where her fitness was at.
She left as the champion.
Since then, all kinds of doors have opened for her, from the WFP to a newfound confidence in her abilities.
- “I am fitter than I thought I was. I’m probably in some sense fitter than when I left the sport,” she said.
Next up for Campbell is the CrossFit Games Open and Wodland Fest in Malaga, Spain, an In-Person Qualifying Event (IPQE) for this summer’s CrossFit Games, where Campbell is hoping to earn one of two invites to the Games so she can complete her own “personal redemption story,” she said.
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If not, she will be looking to qualify for the Games through the In-Affiliate Semifinals this May.
After that, Campbell is hesitant to announce any performance goals.
- “I don’t even know now. I genuinely don’t know,” she said. “I just want to see what I can do now…I feel so proud of how far I have come already. I was so pleased with where I was at TYR Wodapalooza before I even won the whole thing, she said..
Regardless of what happens the rest of this season, one thing is for sure: Lucy Campbell isn’t taking any moment for granted.
- “Everything of the last two years, to be honest, has been so shit, that just being back here, I have so much more appreciation for it now. And I would hate to forget all of that because I didn’t hit an arbitrary number [on the leaderboard] that I wanted to at an event,” Campbell said.
That being said, it also feels pretty good to feel confident in her ability to compete with the best in the world again.
- “I didn’t realize that a good day for me would ever be that good. So I think it has given me the confidence that if I can show up my best on the day, that my best is objectively quite good,” she said.
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Featured Image: Heather Weir, @hweirphotography / Instagram
