Semifinal Spotlight: How Erica Folo’s Time at University (and a WWE Tryout) Cemented Her Love of CrossFit
Every year, a handful of names seemingly come out of nowhere to make a statement close to the top of the CrossFit Quarterfinals leaderboard. They’re impossible to ignore.
This year, one of these names was Erica Folo.
Twelfth in the world and fourth in North America East, one big question comes to mind heading into Semifinals: Just who is this 23-year-old from Burlington, Ontario?
We caught up with Folo heading into the 2024 CrossFit North America East Semifinal to learn more about her journey.
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Folo’s Story
Folo started CrossFit at CrossFit Connection in Burlington as a 14-year-old. A young track and field athlete at the time, she noticed one of the boys at her track club looked “really jacked” and wanted to know what he was doing on the side.
Folo’s track coach didn’t want his athletes to do any weightlifting, so when the boy told Folo he did CrossFit, he quickly followed up by telling her, “Don’t tell the coach.”
After that, Folo checked out CrossFit Connection with her dad, but she wasn’t sold.
- “Immediately, I was like, ‘I’m not working out here. This is so weird,’ because I had never seen a CrossFit gym before,” Folo told the Morning Chalk Up.
But her dad convinced her to try anyway.
She came around pretty quickly, and before she knew it, she had qualified for the 2018 CrossFit Games as a teenager. She went on to place 12th in the world and thought that was it for her as a competitive CrossFit athlete.
- “I genuinely thought I couldn’t get any better. I finished 12th, and I was like, ‘Yeah, I think that’s it. I think I’m done in terms of CrossFit Games training,” she admitted.
One and Done?
Satisfied with her one Games appearance as a teenager, Folo stepped away from competitive CrossFit and focused on enjoying a university experience and all the things that go along with dorm life, including letting her diet slide.
Folo continued to do CrossFit while completing her bachelor’s degree in kinesiology. She competed in the CrossFit Open every year, but at this point, she was a lifestyle athlete who spent an hour a day at the gym doing the regular group classes.
Then, in 2022, Folo was asked to join a team and thought, “Oh, shit, I haven’t done this in a while,” she said.
- She decided: “Why not give it a try?”
Folo competed on a team in 2022 and 2023, making it all the way to Madison, WI, where they placed 24th at the 2023 CrossFit Games.
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Ultimately, the two years competing on a team reignited her passion for the sport.
She started taking her training a bit more seriously a year ago and began following Josh Woolley’s Mammoth Training Methods programming. (Woolley also coaches 2023’s Games silver medalist Emma Lawson and 2023 Games rookie Jack Farlow, both of whom live in the same area of the province as Folo.)
Still, though, Folo wasn’t sure of her plans this season.
The 2024 CrossFit Games Season
At one point, Folo said she traveled to Colorado to train with a team she was considering joining and thought, “This is it. I totally want to go team again.”
But then, out of the blue, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) reached out to her to see if she wanted to try out to become a professional wrestler.
The problem was the WWE tryout conflicted with the team Quarterfinals week. It seemed like a chance of a lifetime, so Folo flew to Philadelphia, PA, for a three-day tryout.
- “It was totally out of my comfort zone…I got my body absolutely wrecked. I was so sore after, but I realized it wasn’t for me,” she said. “And then I kind of had to compete as an individual after because this WWE thing didn’t end up working out.”
Four Quarterfinals workouts later, Folo found herself 12th in the world and fourth in North America East, ahead of veteran athletes like Tia-Clair Toomey-Orr, Haley Adams, and Carolyne Prevost.
Since then, Folo has been doing everything she can to prepare for the Semifinal.
Most recently, this meant traveling to Kitchener, Ontario, to go through a mock Semifinals weekend with Lawson and Farlow.
- “Emma beat me on all the workouts, but I expected that…she’s the top of the top,” Folo said. “But this weekend for me wasn’t [supposed to be] about building confidence. It was about learning.”
“[I] was there to learn and see how the workouts feel. So I just had to keep reminding myself that because there were a few times where I kind of got caught and felt a little bit beat up, like ‘Oh my God, again she’s beating me,’ and it was expected, but at the same time I was trying to not let it hit my confidence,” she said.
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While in Kitchener, Folo also noticed that both Lawson and Farlow eat less sugar than she does. Folo admits she has a sweet tooth, and while she tracks her macros and her main meals are “well balanced,” she builds some sweet treats into her days because, if she doesn’t, it’s all she can think about.
Her treats of choice are Chips Ahoy cookies, Teddy Grahams, Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal, and even gummies.
- “My teammates last year made fun of me because they said I eat like a child, which I think I do a little bit,” she said, laughing. “I’m trying to get better at food quality, but it’s hard.”
Considering her performances so far this season, it seems like the cookies and gummies are working for Folo.
And while her ultimate goal is to qualify for the CrossFit Games this summer, her nutrition coach, Mike Molloy, told her that she’s “playing with house money at this point.”
- “I kind of have already exceeded my expectations, so I think at this point I’m kind of going into Semifinals with the mindset of…seeing how far I can get, and just trying my hardest and see what happens,” she said.
The Big Picture
At 23, Folo is still young, but she has been doing CrossFit for 10 years already.
While she says her strength is her ability to push through grunt work-style workouts, her real secret weapon might just be that she hasn’t taken CrossFit seriously for the entire decade.
This allows her to avoid burnout and be as excited as ever to compete a decade in.
She credits allowing herself to have a great university experience with helping her see that there’s more to life than CrossFit.
- “When you’re in CrossFit, you can get so focused in on it. You’re constantly thinking about it,” Folo said.
“When I was a teen, I was really focused on training. And I think that time in university, just seeing what a normal 18 to 21-year-old does, was kind of refreshing. It was the little break I needed to understand balance and working out six hours a day isn’t the only thing to make you happy,” she added.