Karuna Barla

Karuna Barla is an engineer. She builds things with code, and she'll be the first to tell you what that means for her body: she sits. All day. It's the tradeoff for work she genuinely loves.

She's also someone who loves sports — watching them, playing them, being around people who play them. In 2020, a friend introduced her to CrossFit and she took to it immediately. Then COVID hit, the gym closed, and that was that. She tried treadmills. She tried the elliptical. Neither one held her. She needed variety, and a machine couldn't give it to her.

When things opened back up, she saw that her town's recreation department was starting a women's spring softball league — weekend games, nothing serious. It sounded like a fun way to play a sport she loved and get some exercise on the side. She signed up. Her family came out to watch.

And they filmed her. Exactly the way she had filmed her twin girls through all of their softball years — camera up, recording every at-bat, every run to first.

Then she watched the footage.

Her body had been telling her the same thing, just less bluntly. She enjoyed the games. She was sore and cramping after every single one. Between the tape and the recovery, she knew what she was missing. She needed CrossFit back in her life.

She found us through an online search. But a search result isn't what got her through the door — she says what made her actually show up was reading the testimonials. Other people's stories, in their own words. That's worth sitting with for a second, and I'll come back to it.

She booked a No Sweat Intro and signed up not long after. And she came in hot — so fired up to be training again that she was at the 5am class every single day. When the work-from-home era ended, 5am stopped fitting her life. So instead of quitting, she worked the problem: she tried every class time we run, one at a time, until she found the ones that fit. She landed on 4pm and 5:30pm. She's been there ever since.

What Actually Surprised Her

Here's the thing about Karuna: she wasn't a beginner. She had already trained at a CrossFit gym. She knew what a class was supposed to feel like, and she walked in expecting more of the same.

To one's ability for that day. That's the part I want to underline, because that's not a happy accident — it's the job. A workout on the whiteboard is a starting point, not a prescription. What a coach is there to do is take that starting point and meet the person actually standing in front of them, on the day they're actually having.

Karuna spent those first months rotating through class times, which meant she met nearly every coach on staff. Her answer, when I asked which one meant the most to her, was that she wasn't going to pick. Every one of them, she said, pushed her where she needed pushing and pulled her back when she needed to take it easy. That's what got her showing up every day.

The Numbers

Karuna joined us in September 2023. Since then she's signed in 553 times and logged 133 personal records. That second number is the one I'd point at — 133 individual times she picked something up that she hadn't been able to pick up before.

Her first logged bench press was 45 pounds. She's now benched 85. Her first back squat was 65 pounds. She's squatted 115. Her deadlift went from 85 to 145. She's front squatted 115 and hip thrusted 235. Every one of those started from a number that felt heavy at the time.

But when I asked her what she can do now that she couldn't before, she didn't lead with any of that. She listed lifting weights and running a little farther, and then she got to the part that clearly mattered most to her: doing all of it without being too wrecked to come back. The next day, and the next. That's the whole game. Anybody can have one hard workout. Being able to stack them is what actually changes something.

Where It Shows Up

She can work out with her girls now and keep step with them. That's the same girls she used to film from the sidelines.

And there was a work outing to Level99 — the place is a maze of physical challenge rooms, all climbing and crawling and hauling yourself around. She went in with colleagues who are considerably younger than she is and held her own with all of them. She said it surprised her. It didn't surprise me.

Ask her how her life would be different if she'd never walked in, and she won't even attempt it. "Wow I can't even imagine that!" is the entire answer. Three years in, the version of her life without this in it isn't available to her anymore.

She came here for stamina, strength, and some variety in her week. What she found was a room where the coach adjusts the day to her, where she looks up to the members older than her for how well they're training their bodies to age, and looks up to the ones younger than her for their discipline. She didn't come for that. It's what she got.

"I'm hoping to be a good steward of this life God gave me, and me taking care of my health is the best gift I can give myself and my family."

I told you I'd come back to the testimonials thing. Karuna found us in a search, same as a lot of people do. But she says what actually made her show up was reading other members' stories. Not our marketing. Not a promo. Just people describing what this place did for them.

That's the entire reason I started writing these. Sixty-eight days in, somebody is reading Karuna's story right now the same way Karuna read somebody else's — sitting at a desk, sore from something they used to be able to do easily, wondering if it's too late to fix it. It isn't. She was three years from where she is now, and the only thing that separated the two was walking in.

The part of her story I keep thinking about is the video. Most of us never get to see the gap between how we think we're moving and how we're actually moving. Karuna got handed that, on tape, by the people who love her. That's a rough thing to watch. She didn't get defensive about it and she didn't spiral about it. She just went and did something.

Start with a No Sweat Intro. It's a conversation, not a workout — we'll talk about where you are and what you're after.

This story was developed through written responses submitted by the member and shaped with the help of AI writing tools. The facts, quotes, and experiences are Karuna's own — AI helped organize and present them in a format worthy of the story she's lived.