Kathie Smith is the latest addition to the Ripple Effect staff! A longtime member of the gym, she’s now entered our coaching internship! She’s working on her coaching certification through Two Brain Coaching, meeting with Coach Chris every week, shadowing classes, and working every day to increase her knowledge and confidence.
We are so excited for her to coach for us. She is extremely dedicated, caring, funny, and takes time and effort to improve her movement.
We asked her a few questions to help you get to know her, and why she wants to coach!
- Why do you want to be a coach? Fitness has made such a huge difference in my life, it’s really motivated me to find a way to share that and help people the way others have helped me. When all hell broke loose this year (COVID-19, the murder of George Floyd, CrossFit HQ implosion) and I saw how Coach Chris and Coach Bryan handled the situation, I was convinced that I wanted to be a bigger part of the Ripple Effect community: one that openly embraces inclusivity toward the common goal of better health. I want to be a coach, but more importantly, I want to be a coach at RECF.
- What’s your fitness superpower? My superpower is that I have no superpower? I’m about as average as a person could be as far as skills go. That being said, I love an endurance challenge: share 200 miles of running with six people over 30 hours, walk 50 miles in twenty hours with a weighted ruck, do a marathon row, bear crawl a mile, run on trails for hours–I’m foolhardy when it comes to such things. The mental challenge is as tough, if not tougher, than the physical challenge. And honestly, the thing that has gotten me through most of it is that I’ve had friends tough as nails by my side. So maybe my superpower(s) are my friends!
- What kind of athletic background do you have? I’m late to the physical fitness game. Organized sports were never my thing, and I always felt that working a physical job was probably enough exercise. But in my late 30s things started to shift: I started cleaning up my lifestyle and started exercising. I joined the YWCA and started to explore what they had to offer: yoga, pilates, spin, HIIT, karate, and eventually fell in with a boot camp class that finally flipped a switch for me.
- What makes a good coach? A good coach is one who can inspire you–inspire you to try something new, inspire you to work a little harder, inspire you to keep coming back.
