Balancing It All, With a Little Help From Brent Fikowski: Shelby Neal’s Sophomore Season
It is hard to be a CrossFit Games athlete.
- As Sean Woodland famously said in the 2017 documentary Fittest on Earth: A Decade of Fitness, “You don’t know how good you have to be just to suck at the CrossFit Games.”
Throw in a demanding full-time job as an engineer into the mix and it seems almost impossible to qualify even once for the Games.
North Carolina native Shelby Neal says, “Hold my beer.”
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Understanding the CrossFit Hype
Neal found CrossFit as a teen through her gymnastics coach, who came in one day talking about a workout she did that included 100 pull-ups. Neal smiles as she recounts the story in an interview with the Morning Chalk Up.
- “I couldn’t fathom how she was doing 100 pull-ups,” Neal remembered. “Even though she was a former gymnast, that’s still a lot of pull-ups. I thought, I’m young and supposed to be strong, and she’s beating me at pull-ups!”
Neal started CrossFit in January 2015, participating in her first Open that March.
- Neal: “Once I tried it, I understood the hype, and I accepted the challenge and wanted to see if it would do the same thing to me — push me like it had my coach.”
Spoiler alert: It did.
Neal took to it quickly, and the timing couldn’t have been better, as that was the first year the Games hosted the Teen Division.
Neal didn’t qualify her first year, but watching the teens at the Games in Carson, CA, that year motivated her. “I started thinking about how cool it would be to be out there myself,” she said.
Her training background and competitiveness as a young gymnast translated well to CrossFit, and she qualified for her first CrossFit Games in the teen division in 2016.
- “Going to the Games was a surreal moment for me and my coach at the time,” Neal shared. “I was coming from a smaller local gym, and they wanted their athletes to make it to the Games and I had done it for them. It was cool to realize that dream.”
Making the Jump
After two years of competing in the teen division, Neal aged up and jumped to individual. But, as she noted in our interview, that jump “was pretty big” at the time.
- “It’s a little less now [the difference between teen and individual], just because the teenagers have gotten so good,” she said. “But back then, there was a big difference between a teen athlete and a Games athlete. It was intimidating.”
Neal did well, finishing 12th at the Atlantic Regional in 2018. She and her support team had gone in just intending to have fun, and doing that well pushed Neal into thinking she was knocking on the door to Games qualification.
All she had to do was work on a few things, and she could make it.
It ended up being a longer journey than initially anticipated because life happened. During the 2019 and 2020 seasons, Neal was considering a military career and, a few days after graduating from High School, entered Officer Candidate School.
- Neal had been contemplating the Marine Corps but ultimately chose a different path.
She ended up attending NC State University to pursue a degree in Chemical Engineering and worked hard to balance school and competing, because, well, she had no choice.
- Neal graduated from university in 2022 and competed at the Granite Games in 2021 and at the MACC in 2022, shortly after earning her diploma.
Finding Balance and Brent Fikowski
Because of her busy schedule, Neal quickly learned that training would not always be perfect.
- “Sometimes I couldn’t get it all done,” Neal remembered, “but if I got frustrated, it made it worse. If I got into a negative state of mind because of it — I already didn’t get the training in, and now I’m frustrated. It was doubly bad.”
Neal enjoyed her rookie debut at the Games last year and it showed.
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As an individual rookie, she finished in 19th place and left Madison having achieved her goal of competing the entire weekend (avoiding the cuts) and having fun.
Heading into the 2024 season, she wanted more.
Brent Fikowski was the answer.
Neal spent time talking with the Games vet and Professional Fitness Athetes’ Association executive committee member in Madison and at the Rogue Invitational and followed up with some short, pointed questions via DM.
- “I got back these beautifully crafted responses with video clips and everything,” Neal giggled.
She felt drawn to Fikowski’s personality immediately and appreciated his approach to training as a solo athlete not attached to any specific training camp.
- “He’s extremely thorough,” she giggled again. “You do not have to pull teeth to get information—he is willing to share and has a lot to give. I liked the fact that he wasn’t attached to a camp; That was the number one thing I was looking for–I wanted to find a coach who didn’t work with multiple athletes or my direct competitors.”
Neal was looking for a mentor, and who better for that job than the man nicknamed “The Professor”?
- Fikowski was honest with Neal, explaining he wouldn’t have the bandwidth to coach her directly and compete simultaneously, but offered her his coach, David Spurr, and volunteered to serve as an assistant coach and mentor.
The two athletes meshed immediately, and Neal went to Fikowski’s home in Kelowna, British Columbia, to tackle the 2024 Quarterfinals together.
Neal’s CrossFit approach has gone through a lot of trial and error over the years, but she finally feels like she has found the best approach with Spurr and Fikowski.
Before connecting with the Professor, Neal worried that she was too “type-A” given her career and natural tendencies toward over-analysis.
- Instead, she “tried to relax and figure it out in the workout,” Neal said. She tried to combat her anxiety by tracking her data and performances less, “but that actually ended up causing more anxiety,” she concluded.
This year she’s gone completely in the opposite direction under Spurr and Fikowski’s tutelage.
Now, in an approach similar to what has allowed Fikowski to remain at the top of the sport for so many years, Neal prepares down to a granular level.
It’s incredibly cerebral and involves a lot of spreadsheets.
- “We’ve started keeping track of things more and scheming things out so I would have a solid plan in the face of competition,” Neal describes. “[So now,] game day will come, and all I will have to do will be what I have always done–I don’t have to worry about it because I know exactly what I’m capable of because we’ve written it out on paper and done it at least three times.”
The 2024 Games Season
The planning and rehearsals proved effective as Neal executed her plans perfectly at the Semifinals, especially in Event 5, the snatch ladder.
In pure Fikowski-esque form, she attacked the barbells with surgical precision, came in second in that event, and left the weekend with a fifth-place finish overall at North America East, and a return ticket to the CrossFit Games.
Neal’s eyes brighten again as she talks about her Semifinals performance. “I have an overwhelming large sense of pride–it went really well.”
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As her first in-person competition with Spurr and Fikowski, she was realistic about her expectations, especially in the stacked Knoxville field.
- “I was realistic about what was possible for me and my fitness,” Neal said, “and finishing fifth was the best I thought possible. And we did that!”
Balancing her job as a full-time Engineer and Games training is hard.
- “It’s brutal. This last couple of weeks have been tough, just because some work stuff has been overwhelming, and I have been trying to get back into a schedule.”
The girl loves a routine, and hopefully, this routine will help her finish higher at the CrossFit Games this year, making her and the Professor proud.
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Featured image: @shelby__neal / Instagram