Kiwi Harriet Roberts teaches CrossFit to kids by day, crushes workouts at night
- The New Zealand native, who grew up in Singapore, now teaches CrossFit to teenagers at a private school in Sydney
When it comes to jobs within the world of CrossFit, Kiwi Harriet Roberts might have the coolest one of all.
Roberts, who is leading the women’s division after the first day of the Pandaland CrossFit Challenge in Chengdu, China, teaches CrossFit to high school kids in Australia where she lives.
CrossFit is available as an elective for the students at the private school in a Sydney suburb alongside mainstay sports such as rugby, cricket and football. Roberts said she knows full well she has landed a dream job.
“I’m very, very lucky,” said the 28-year-old who spent a fair chunk of her childhood living in Singapore. “I feel like a lot of people don’t have a lot of stability in teaching CrossFit classes. So it’s given me that stability and [the school] is pretty good if I need to travel and obviously understanding when it is for CrossFit.”
Roberts first tried CrossFit in 2011 in Australia and surprisingly, things didn’t go well out of the gate. Although she has a background in competitive swimming and gymnastics, she had trouble doing thrusters on an empty bar which prompted the coach to give her a wooden stick out of pity which turned out to be a defeating moment.
