Mat Hotho and Jed Snelson pick up where they left off—on the thing Jed says separates first place from tenth. Mindset. 

Jed spent years as a strength coach for pro motocross racers, watching guys who were untouchable on a practice track finish seventh on race day, and he built training specifically to fix it. 

He walks through the pressure-cooker workouts he designed, the two words he repeated to athletes mid-suffering, and one  tip he'd give any CrossFitter that costs nothing and works immediately. 

Then the conversation turns to movement standards in adaptive competition—what Jed saw at the Games this year, why he doesn't blame the judges, and the solution.

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Mat Hotho talks with Jed Snelson—seventeen years racing motocross, a strength coach for pro racers and X Games athletes, paralyzed in a 2014 race crash, and now one of the few people coaching seated adaptive athletes full time. 

This is part one of two. Jed's rule is simple and harkens back to the CrossFit methodology: function first, everything else second.

He walks through what that means for a seated athlete—core to extremity, out-of-chair rowing, air deadlifts, balancing on the lip of his own hot tub. These functional movements have given Jed and his athletes more freedom in their day-to-day lives.

And that's what matters.

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Mat Hotho talks with Katie Weymouth, one of the OGs of adaptive CrossFit. 

She competed at the 2021 WheelWOD Games in a packed affiliate in North Carolina, where nobody left the floor until the last athlete finished. 

Five seasons later she took second at the 2026 Games in her own backyard, on a final workout that gave her twenty seconds to set up instead of two minutes. 

Katie is the only bilateral below-knee amputee in her division, the result of bacterial meningitis three weeks into her freshman year of college. She talks about relearning to walk, a body that can't sweat through its own skin grafts, why snowboarding gave her back a feeling she'd lost, and why the real reason she trains has nothing to do with a podium. 

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In September 2023, Sam Constantin hit the ground at 100 kilometers an hour on a skydiving landing and was paralyzed from the waist down. Thirteen months later, he stood up. 

Mat Hotho talks with the Quebec athlete about the parts of the comeback that never make it to Instagram—banded leg curls from a wheelchair, an hour on the bike on bad days, and a deadlift that climbed from 75 pounds to 275 in under two years. 

Sam explains how how his mascot transitioned from the butterfly to phoenix, and what it's like to walk to the barbell during a competition while everyone else runs. 

He's back to skydiving solo, studying physiotherapy, and building a coaching philosophy around a simple idea: you have a disability, and there's still so much you can do.

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Courtnei Lopez was in a car accident a week before the 2026 Adaptive CrossFit Open. Six months later, she stood on the Adaptive CrossFit Games podium in third  after securing the spot in the very last workout. 

Mat Hotho talks with Courtnei about the doubt she carried into the season, the moment she decided to make it you versus you, and why she says the whole thing was mental. 

Courtnei also opens up her sponsorship playbook, built on her mom's advice that no's are free, and traces how a conversation at the 2023 Games in Madison turned into her first deal.

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Sue Jordaan qualified for her rookie season and then made the call not to go because a $4,000 flight from South Africa deserves the fittest version of herself. 

Mat Hotho talks with Sue about a 2013 car accident that broke her back in three places, cost her her job, and left her raising two daughters from a wheelchair. 

What came after is amazing. Wheelchair rugby, a community that pulled her out of isolation, a CrossFit gym in Pretoria that put five athletes in the semifinal top ten, and scuba diving—where she dives fully independent, and puts other adaptive athletes in the water through her nonprofit.

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Emma Hood walked off a roof (literally) and landed on both feet, shattering her ankles and heels. Months later she was back in the gym, and this year she's a rookie at the Adaptive CrossFit Games in the Vision division. 

Mat Hotho talks with Emma about aniridia, the rare condition she shares with her dad and grandfather, and how growing up her family never asked whether she could do something—only how. 

They get into her jump from jiu-jitsu to CrossFit, finding WheelWOD by stalking another vision-impaired athlete's Instagram, and fighting back from illness to place fourth at Semifinals. 

It's a conversation about doing hard things your own way, and the community that shows up to cheer you on.

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Mat Hotho talks with Tori Clinch, a rookie competing in the Seated Two division heading to the 2026 CrossFit Games in San Jose. Tori's year has been anything but expected—she got back into CrossFit in January purely for her own sanity, never intending to compete, and ended up finishing first in the Open and first at Semifinals. 

She opens up about her path to adaptive CrossFit: an above-knee amputation after months of sepsis and surgery, the box that turned her away once she started using a wheelchair, and the new box, CrossFit Brough, that welcomed her without hesitation. Five of its members are flying to San Jose just to cheer her on. 

Tori also talks wheelchair basketball, the Matt Hampson Foundation, and what she'd tell the younger version of herself sitting in a hospital bed.

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Mat Hotho sits down with Noah Cook, a 25-year-old vision athlete gearing up for his first CrossFit Adaptive Games appearance after going completely blind by age 18. 

Noah lost his sight to glaucoma-related injuries, never touched CrossFit until after he went blind, and now trains under his dad, who's also his handler on the competition floor. 

They talk prosthetic eyes, producing hip-hop tracks in Logic Pro by feel using VoiceOver, and the blind soccer and goalball club Noah's building in San Antonio with his team, San Antonio Fuego. 

Noah opens up about wanting to start a nonprofit to make blind sports more accessible, and closes with a message for anyone new to this community: it's okay to be afraid. That's where the growth happens.

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Mat Hotho sits down with McKenzie Kravetsky, a rookie Lower Minor athlete heading to her first CrossFit Games. In 2013, a head-on collision left McKenzie with injuries that reconstructed nearly everything — including a right ankle that's now fused and immobile. 

She walked into a CrossFit gym mid-recovery with one request: make me strong and unkillable. Thirteen years later, she's a black belt, a registered nurse, and an athlete reshaping what's possible in the rural Mountain West. 

McKenzie talks about training around a fused ankle, the breathing discipline she carried over from judo, and the limb-salvage brace that let her run again after three years. She's also been knocking on doors across Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah to push for adaptive divisions at local competitions.

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