100 in 100: Sam Kaplan-Day 19

Sam Kaplan walked into Prototype as a high school athlete, home from his freshman fall of college, figuring he had it handled. He was wrong — gloriously, exhaustingly wrong. He scaled the workout dramatically, left wrecked, and never stopped coming back.

It was the winter of 2020. COVID had shut the campus gym, and the fall semester had drifted into something that, in Sam's own words, "did not feel like me." He wanted a change. Over Thanksgiving break in 2020, his dad, Jeff, brought him into a class at Prototype — and Sam was immediately humbled. He left wrecked, and hooked. More than five years and 561 check-ins later, he still hasn't stopped.

What he was actually looking for back then, he says, was more than fitness: "I was seeking something that not only made me feel healthier but helped me feel more confident in myself internally." He found it in the early mornings. Sam is a 6 AM and 7 AM guy — that pre-dawn rhythm has been the backbone of his training for half a decade. And he found it in a room where, as a teenager, he was often the youngest person there by twenty years. He didn't just train alongside that community. He grew up inside it.

Strength Built in Public

Here is what five and a half years of showing up actually produced. Sam has logged 155 personal records — not a vanity number, but a real, measurable arc across every major lift. And the remarkable part isn't that he peaked early and coasted. It's the opposite: 2025 was the single biggest, strongest training year of his life, with career PRs in five different lifts in one twelve-month stretch. Most members peak and plateau. Sam kept climbing.

His signature lift is the deadlift — a 340 lb pull set in 2025, up 135 lb from where he started. His bench reached 235 lb, his front squat 225 lb, his back squat 245 lb. But ask Sam what he can do now that he couldn't before, and he doesn't lead with the big numbers. He lists the things that once felt impossible: a 30-inch box jump, a bar muscle-up, chest-to-bar kipping pull-ups, handstand push-ups, double-unders, Olympic lifting from scratch. And then the quieter one — learning to pace himself instead of sprinting into every workout and assuming he'd never get tired.

Sam competing during the 2026 Prototype Open — still showing up Rx, still chasing it.

That last number matters more than any single bar. Sam has done Murph seven straight Memorial Days — and he does it in the weight vest. "Never in my life would I have thought I would have been able to do that," he says. The honest read on the clock: he cut roughly six minutes off his vested Murph between 2024 and 2025 and held it in 2026. The raw times bounce around because the workout changed when he added the vest, but the apples-to-apples trend points one direction: up.

The Bridge Between Athlete and Leader

Somewhere in those years, Sam stopped being just a name on the 6 AM sign-in sheet. The turning point came after a class. Coach Jon walked up and asked if he'd ever thought about coaching. "What do you mean?!" was Sam's first reaction. Jon meant coaching CrossFit, right here — he told Sam he did all the movements really well and would be great at it. Sam had never once pictured it. "I never thought I would see myself coaching CrossFit," he says. But he didn't turn back. He started researching how to get certified that same day.

He shadowed classes through the summer, took the in-person course in Boston in August — which he calls eye-opening, a room full of people who loved the same thing he did — and started coaching that September. This past winter he led Open workouts for the first time, something he had to mentally and physically prepare for. Looking back, he calls it a huge accomplishment. He didn't stop competing to do any of it: he's still setting PRs, still showing up Rx, still training like an athlete while learning to lead the room.

Coach Sam — September 2, 2025. The day the shirt made it official.

The people who got him there matter to him, and he names them. Samantha ran the fundamentals class that gave him the confidence to start at all — "without her help and commitment, I wouldn't have had the ability to start CrossFit classes." And Jon, who coached most of the classes Sam came up through, who understood his strengths and weaknesses, and who saw a coach in him before he saw it in himself. "I wouldn't have made nearly as much progress without Jon."

It tracks with where the rest of Sam's life is headed. He's wrapping up an MBA at Bryant University, where he worked as a graduate assistant in athletic administration — and he talks about leadership the same way he talks about coaching: wanting to be respected and build real relationships, to treat people the way he'd want to be treated, to lead with perspective and emotional intelligence. The gym, it turns out, was the first place he practiced all of it.

Here's what we love about Sam's story: he was a 24-year-old who found his people in a room where the average member is in their forties — and he didn't just fit in, he grew up in it. If you've ever wondered whether this community is something real, whether the people you train next to actually shape who you become, Sam is the proof. He walked in looking for a workout. He found a place that helped him become a leader.