Juan Howard

About Coach

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My CrossFit journey started in 2018, after a bit of a wait. I’d become aware of CrossFit as a thing a couple of years prior. A friend posted something about the Games on social media, and I was intrigued. I thought at the time -- incorrectly, as I came to find out -- that I didn’t have the time or financial resources to actually join a box. Like almost everyone I know who enjoys CrossFit, my only regret is that I didn’t start much sooner! Like many of us, I played sports my whole life. Being from Northeast Ohio, football was a big deal and I started playing in fourth grade. I played football and lacrosse through high school, and earned some All-America recognition at Division III Wittenberg University. The weight room was a significant part of my time playing sports, and I learned to love it. When football was over, I continued to lift, but my relationship with strength training started to become an on again/ off again affair. Things went truly off the rails when our second child was born; I was spending too much time at the gym and getting nothing done. My nutrition was poor. I gained weight. I started to hate my gym. Turns out, I missed the team. I missed being a member of a community of people working towards a common goal. While everyone’s fitness journey is their own, I feel a shared sense of purpose and camaraderie that makes even the most brutal WODs a joy (admittedly after the fact for some of them!). I want others to feel what I’ve felt in the gym: that sense of a shared purpose, with everyone working hard to achieve something they weren’t sure they could do. That’s why I wanted to become a coach; to pay forward some of the sense of contentment that CrossFit has helped me return to my own life. When I’m not in the gym, I can generally be caught playing video games with my son, being told what to do and how by my daughter, or cooking dinner for my wife. I also make cocktails in a professional capacity.