Get to Know the Brutes - Adrian Conway

Adrian is originally from a small town in Pennsylvania called Mill Creek.  Adrian grew up with a split family since he was three years old which means he grew up having two families. One family was in the town of Mill Creek in central Pennsylvania and the other side of his family was a military based family in the Air Force. His stepdad and mom were stationed all throughout the country.Adrian would alternate years between both families spending the opposite summer and Christmas with the opposite family allowing him to live in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona, and California in his youth.In a tragic car accident, Adrian lost his dad when he was in 10th grade and ended up spending the rest of his high school years in Phoenix, Arizona.  This experience taught him to be comfortable in his own skin and also how to truly judge one’s character because he was constantly meeting a lot of new people.His athletic career began in the first grade with soccer and basketball. Adrian also dabbled in a little bit of karate.  He practiced with his dad a lot and soon learned that if you practice something, and then compete against someone who's not really practicing, you’ll see a really big difference in performance levels.This drove him to secretly knock out sets of push ups in his room in order to get the upper hand on the other neighborhood kids.Growing up, he became a huge fan of Emmitt Smith, Barry Sanders, Bo Jackson and was inspired to run the football one day, and score touchdowns like them. The physicality of football also ultimately drove him to choose football as his main sport in the 9^th grade.After a successful high school career in football, Adrian received a scholarship to play running back at Weber State.Being the first one to go to college in his family meant a lot to him. He wanted to take full advantage of the college experience and make the best out of himself.  He would hear his parents complain about their work, so he wanted better for himself. He wanted to set his own destiny.Through his athletic career in college and arena football, he knew he wanted to work with athletes and pursue that path in life. He then obtained his degree in Human Performance at Weber State University.During his second year of Arena Football in Utah, Adrian stumbled upon CrossFit through one of his mentors, Joel Hatch.  This led him to further pursue CrossFit for his personal training in football and began implementing aspects of John Welbourn’s CrossFit Football approach.After football, in March 2011 Adrian participated in his first open at Wasatch CrossFit and placed second in his region only to be defeated by the legendary Chris Spealler which was quite remarkable considering he didn’t have access to a gym where he could drop weights or practice butterfly pull-ups.He then competed at regionals in his first live competition but didn't have the skills or experience and took 6^th that year.At the end of 2011 he noticed he needed to train with the enemy to become better and started training with Mike Cazayoux and Tommy Hackenbruck which eventually led to the formation of a team called “Hack’s Pack” that went on to win the CrossFit Games Affiliate Cup in 2012 and 2013.During his two and a half years there, he got really fit, but more importantly he got to learn what it was like to win and how to become a leader.From there, Adrian would go on to train as an individual for the next few years and get 21^st at the CrossFit Games in 2015 as an individual and then we went back in 2017 with the Wasatch Brutes as a new team and were able to secure another CrossFit Games Affiliate Cup Title against CrossFit Mayhem.During this time, Adrian joined Brute Strength as the Head Coach of the Games Prep, Compete and Masters programs because he felt that Brute had a pathway to truly change the sport of fitness and did so through a collaboration of the best minds in functional fitness as a team.If you’d like to connect with Adrian, click here to schedule a free 30 min call to discuss your fitness goals, wildest dreams, and aspirations or what you had for breakfast. (Ok, maybe not that last one.)