Lebanon woman, 62, defies expectations with CrossFit Games finals appearance

When Christa Winslow placed her online submission for the semifinal stage of the 2025 age-group Crossfit Games, her goal was to place 33rd and improve from last year.

Instead, she placed 19th, making it to the finals.

Winslow traveled by plane to Columbus, Ohio, to compete against 20 other women and top CrossFit participants aged 60 to 65 on Aug. 21-24. Each woman in the international competition (with over 13,000 CrossFit gyms worldwide) had competitive results in the semifinal, submitted as a video and verified by CrossFit professionals.

“It’s an event you do in your gym; there’s assigned workouts and you submit your score online,” Winslow explained. “Hundreds of thousands of people do it in different age groups, and if you do well in that — in my age group, if you’re in the top 200 — you go to the semifinals. If you’re in the top 20 in the semifinals, which are another set of online events that you have to videotape, you go to the games.

“There’s a three-week process where judges judge your videos, so I had to wait three weeks for the judging population of CrossFit to review all of my videos. It shows you what a great gym this is, I was the only woman in the top 20 who had no ‘needs review.'”

A marathoner and triathloner in her 30s, 62-year-old Winslow began to learn CrossFit around 10 years ago due to a recommendation from a family friend.

Her goal was never to be the best or make the Games, she said, but to maintain her fitness as she got older, Winslow explained last week at CrossFit Acernus in Lebanon.

“Someone said, ‘Now you can cross this off your bucket list,’ and I said, ‘This was never on my bucket list,'” said Winslow. “It’s just, year to year, I just improved, and there’s not a lot of 60-year-olds doing this, so I think the longevity of a person keeping fit makes it easier to make it to the Games than, say, if you’re 35. There’s a lot more people competing at the age of 35 than 62.”

Last year, she placed 42nd in the semifinals after making top 200 in the open. She said her goal this year was to make 33rd in the semifinals.

“This year, I said to my husband, ‘I wanna be 33rd, let’s get to the 30s,'” she said. “So as I’m looking through the leaderboard online, scanning the leaderboard in the 50s, in the 40s, in the 30s, and I wasn’t there. And I said, ‘Son of a gun, I made the games,’ and found my name at 19.”

By making the top 21, Winslow became eligible for the in-person event in Columbus, Ohio. Over four days, participants took part in eight events that tested their strength and endurance.

Winslow saw early success with a fifth-place finish in the running event, which she attributed to her marathoning background. However, she lagged behind in other legs of the competition, ultimately not being eligible for the eighth event (which only the top 15 competed in).

“That is because of my experience in my younger days of being a pretty elite runner and triathlete, so that’s a comfortable workout,” said Winslow. “I have a good engine, a really good engine. But then we had to do barbell work, and the double unders, and the basalt bike. So it was a combination of different movements depending on the event.”

The CrossFit Age-Group Games leaderboard shows her as ranked 20th of the 21 contestants in the finals.

She described the competition as challenging both mentally and physically, noting that in one portion, she suffered a penalty due to improper foot placement which set her back several positions in that event’s ranking. Winslow said the competition hall was also not what she was used to, especially with AC cooling.

She said that she felt good after workouts, but the lead-up to each event was nerve-wracking, especially knowing that she needed to maintain proper form.

“I will say it was a rollercoaster of emotions,” she said of the competition. “It was like a euphoria when you finished a workout, but then the nerves were really out of control before a workout. It wasn’t just over after one event, you had eight events, so you’re up and down because you have to get prepped again for the next event.”

Preparation in the weeks leading up to the competition was also challenging, Winslow said. With a torn meniscus from a few years ago, she knew that overtraining could backfire.

“When you’re older, the recovery is not as good as when you’re younger, and there’s little aches and pains,” she said. “I just wanted to make it and say, ‘I’m a Games athlete.'”

Winslow said she was overwhelmed to find that around 15 members of her community at CrossFit Acernus traveled by car to Ohio to cheer her on from the sidelines. One of them even live-streamed her performance so family and friends could follow along at home.

“That almost makes you want to cry sometimes because you’re so grateful for that support,” she said.

Over the years training at Acernus, Winslow says she’s formed a close bond with others at the gym. In addition to classes held throughout the week and slots for open workouts, participants also organize get-togethers outside of the gym for celebrations.

“There is a camaraderie built when you sweat together and work hard together and share the pain of a crazy workout,” said Winslow. “Friendships are built, and I think that’s probably because you see the same people every day.”

She also spoke kindly of the women she met at the competition, including a woman from Australia and a retired policewoman from Canada.

Since getting back from Ohio, Winslow has been trying to take it easy; though, she said, she’s still been pushing herself harder than she should. However, she has been training on lower weights to give herself a chance to heal from her challenging time at the Age-Group Games.

She plans to continue placing entries in the open, but says she doesn’t know whether she’ll ever make it to the finals again, as the qualifying activities change from year to year.

“I’m gonna do the open, but I will say, a lot depends on the workout and what your strengths and weaknesses are, so I can’t say I’ll ever make it again,” said Winslow. “That’s why I wanted to really enjoy as much as I could, because it may never happen again. And you don’t know what your body’s gonna do, especially as you age.”