Hunter McIntyre was undoubtedly the most controversial figure in CrossFit in the 2019 season. Which says a lot, given that the same year the CrossFit Games changed their format, invited over 100 National Champions to compete, and re-introduced cuts to the competitive field.
What caused this controversy was his accepting the first ever wildcard invitation to the CrossFit Games, allowing him to compete against the best athletes in the world without going through the traditional qualifying process.
The wildcard was meant as a way to test top athletes from other sports against the “Fittest on Earth” and whether or not Hunter really got a chance to test his fitness that year will always be contended, as his competition finished after two events.
Hunter strongly hinted at the fact he’d be back and back stronger, but circumstance would ultimately pull him away from the Games. Now, “The Sheriff” has got even heftier goals on the horizon.
Beginnings
Hunter’s athletic pursuits began at college while he was in probation. It’s not a topic he shies away from; he never really understood the value of getting As at school or of scoring goals during PE. He became a “bad boy” and delved into all the things your parents tell you to stay away from.
“I didn’t actually ever put a workout in or lifted a pound of weight in my entire life until I was 19 years old,” he said.
He only did because he came to be confined to a lonely gym while everyone else trained in a different room. “NCAA rules,” he explained. It sucked. But Hunter started to move weight around and – at least this is how he tells it – went from a boy to a man.
“I got huge,” he said. “Overnight everything changed; in the way girls looked at me, in the way athletes looked at me. Everything changed as soon as I started to focus on my physicality.”
Hunter created a formula: he realised he could out-train everybody, and if he could out-train them, he could out-think them and ultimately out-perform them.
He dropped out of college in 2010. His grandfather, who competed in the World Masters Athletics, was the first to encourage him to be an athlete, but back then it was hard to find an avenue outside of basketball, football, or the Olympics.
Yet Hunter decided to focus on his training and try to figure things out. He started modelling and worked as a Personal Trainer, testing the water everywhere.
“I needed to learn about what the human body could do so I could figure out what I wanted to do,” he said.
The champion
It was a drunken invite to a Spartan race that introduced him to the sport over a decade ago. “I was all over the place,” Hunter recalled. “All my friends were still modelling, but I didn’t give a shit about taking pictures anymore.” They’d go to castings and he’s stay at the gym, training harder than all of them.
He ran the Spartan race and finished 6th. He thought: “interesting”, and went back home, having no clue what to do with his life next. He realised he needed to make a decision that would change it for the better and in his ponderings he kept coming back to that Spartan race.
There were ads on Facebook, people all over the country posting pictures, and Hunter began his research. Hobie Call was the Spartan World Champion at the time, and he set his mind to beating him.
You might think of Hunter as arrogant, he purposefully comes across that way sometimes, but he is also wickedly smart.
He signed up for another Spartan and raced against Hobie, leading the race for 13 miles until he lost his shoe to the mud with less than two miles to go. He didn’t win that race (“by like 30 seconds”), but everybody on the scene noticed and for Hunter, things clicked: this was what the human body was designed for.
“I could never go to the Olympics for running, I could never go to the Olympics for strength, and then all of a sudden you combine the two, I seem to be the best guy everywhere we went, so it was good,” Hunter said.
Stepping up
Competitive CrossFit wouldn’t come into his plate until a few years later. He took part in his first CrossFit Open in 2011 but as with any sport, training to be a professional is entirely different to participating.
With his focus set on Obstacle Course Racing, CrossFit was something Hunter did on the side up to around 2017, when both worlds started to merge together through Tough Mudder X. CrossFit Games athletes would go to the World Championships, some would drop out, and the others, Hunter “whopped the shit out of all of them.”
Even more came the following year, and Hunter “whooped the shit out of all of them again.” Not in a “look at me, you suck” kind of way, he made sure to explain, but this was a competition and when you compete there’s always a winner.
Yet despite his winning these and other OCR-type events, there would always be a smudge on his record as he continued to get this ‘smug attitude’ from the CrossFit athletes; like he wasn’t the real deal because this wasn’t CrossFit.
Maybe what he enjoys the most is a challenge, maybe it’s proving people wrong. Whatever his reason, he decided he would make the CrossFit Games.
Hunt for the wildcard
It was all a half-built idea until he found out about the CrossFit Games wildcard clause while competing at Wodapalooza from renowned endurance coach Chris Hinshaw. The idea turned into an action plan. Hunter contacted everyone he knew, started a petition called Get Hunter to the Games (“which pissed a lot of people off”), and introduced himself to, learnt from, and trained with top athletes in the sport.
The most informal “application” granted him a spot, he passed a drugs test, and was set to compete at the highest level in the sport of CrossFit.
“I had no clue I was going to the Games until maybe four or five weeks beforehand,” he said.
Passion
To get to the CrossFit Games, Hunter did everything in his power to be as ready as he could. He’s no stranger to hard training, and he focused his full energy on improving his CrossFit skills.
But was a different lifestyle. Hunter lives in the mountains; runs around them, bikes up and down them, swims in the ocean. He’s always been adventurous, but to make the CrossFit Games he spent almost a year indoors.
“I love CrossFit, I appreciate CrossFit, but it was like putting a square into a round hole type-thing,” he said. He decided to reset his head and go back into racing for a while.
That’s when he found a better fit for him: HYROX. All of a sudden, he beat the World Champion, then he beat the World Record. Then the pandemic hit and cancelled all events.
Delivering
By the time the CrossFit Games came back to normal in 2021 everything had changed. After the 2019 season, Hunter was on the fence of committing of whether or not to do CrossFit at a high level and then, all of a sudden, there was no opportunity to do that. There wasn’t a decision to be made anymore.
During the height of the pandemic, he set to make the most out of the situation he was in and the tools he had, and set the World Record for Murph, one of CrossFit’s most popular workouts. “You play with the cards that you’re dealt rather than try to bitch and moan about what you have,” he said.
Now, he plans to set a new World Record, this time in the marathon. He is training to become the fastest person above 200 pounds to run 42.2km (the fastest Clydesdale marathon), targeting a race time of under 2 hours and 30 minutes.
“If I’m going to keep on doing this, I’m going to do really crazy shit,” Hunter said. “I want to do it all and see if I can set world records across the board, so I’m going to go extreme.
“If my body breaks, I’ll let it break. But if it succeeds, then it will be one of the greatest seasons in athletic history.”
image sources
- hunter-mcintyre-interview: HYROX/Sportograf
