KAELEY WYNSMA: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU CHOOSE TO LEVEL UP.

Last week’s post about women in OCR sparked a lot of debate—and it’s clear this is a conversation that hits a nerve.

A lot of that debate centered on The Midwest OCR and the difficulty of its obstacles, especially from the perspective of women. One obstacle in particular, When Pegs Fly, stopped plenty of people in their tracks. Women and men alike. Strong athletes and experienced racers. It didn’t care who you were or what you’d done before.

That’s why Kaeley Wynsma came to mind. Her story starts at the 2023 Highlander Assault—the race where I first saw her.

Kaeley is a coach and athlete with Transform Fitness Studio in Jenison, Michigan. She came into OCR with an impressive background: fast, fit, extraordinarily strong. She looks the part, she plays the part, she is the part.

But being a great athlete doesn’t automatically make you great at every obstacle. And it certainly doesn’t guarantee an easy path to the front of the pack when you start racing local brands.

That’s the part that makes our sport great and, ironically, what has possibly hurt it over the years when athletes want more “structured” and “fair” competitions. 

There truly is a significant distinction between an athlete, and OCR athlete and a “brand” OCR athlete.

Kaeley is an OCR Athlete, and I’ve seen enough proof to know.

At the 2023 Highlander Assault, Kaeley was well ahead and in control of the elite division. I hadn’t seen her before, and I’ll be honest: I was concerned.

My FLATliners women were tough. I had three of them in that same division, and they were used to competing for podiums because of the work they put in on obstacles. They knew what our training looked like: lots of grip work, creative and challenging rig orientations, and obstacles that asked for more than raw strength. Our OCR simulations, especially OCR LEGION, were designed to test people in ways they didn’t always encounter at races.

They could get outrun. It happened. But they seldom got out-obstacled.

At that race, there was one particularly difficult rig: the low rig. It was nothing my athletes hadn’t seen before. Honestly, they were used to seeing similar rigs five or more times in a Saturday class. Kaeley, meanwhile, was absolutely crushing the course. She arrived at that rig at least a minute before any of my girls.

I always tried to position myself at what I thought was the most crucial obstacle. So there I was, waiting at the rig, knowing the first woman to reach it wouldn’t be wearing the same jersey I was.

Nothing personal. I was coaching a team. I was focused on my athletes and on how they could overcome a very talented competitor. I wasn’t rooting for Kaeley. I was rooting for my girls. That’s what coaching a team means.

Kaeley reached the rig. I watched closely. If she cleared it easily, I figured, that was probably it. There wasn’t anything of consequence left on the course that seemed likely to stop her.

She came off the rig.

I could tell right away she hadn’t seen anything like it before. She tried again. Then again.

Kaeley seemed frustrated, but more importantly, she remained determined.

The obstacle was doing what it was built to do. It took someone who was faster, stronger, and every bit as athletic as anyone behind her—and stopped her in her tracks.

This is the part where I would generally start to hear complaints between attempts from an accomplished athlete. The part where someone starts listing what they’ve accomplished at Spartan, Savage, or Ninja, and making it clear that if they’re struggling with this one obstacle, it must be “stupid.”

Kaeley did none of that. I didn’t have to hear about how she was a competitive gymnast or a collegiate runner. She just kept trying.

I was already becoming quite impressed—and quite convinced we had an actual obstacle racer, not just a superior athlete, on our hands.

Obstacle racers understand that obstacles don’t care about your résumé. They don’t care how strong you are in the gym, how fast you ran the last mile, or how impressive your background is. Eventually, your hands have to get on the obstacle, and you have to figure out what to do with your body.

Then my girls started coming through. One after another, they moved across that rig like it was nothing.

Kaeley noticed they were wearing the same jersey as the guy standing beside the obstacle. She looked at me and said, “I’ve never seen anything like this before. Do you all train this stuff together or something?”

I told her yes, and then went back to coaching my team.

It was hard not to coach Kaeley on that rig. Coaching athletes through obstacles had always come naturally to me. But I’d learned that coaching athletes who weren’t on my team hadn’t led to them representing us on the podium—our best marketing—or to those athletes finding their way to the gym.

As competition got fiercer in those later years of our gym, we saw athletes take advice, use it to succeed, and then get told by competitors not to give any credit to the person who helped them. Those competitors seldom gave up their own race schedules to be on the course for their athletes.

HartFit needed the work we put in to lead back to the gym if we were going to keep the doors open. So eventually, I stopped giving away free coaching at races.

That wasn’t personal, either. I didn’t dislike Kaeley—in fact, quite the contrary. Had I not pulled back from recruiting outside athletes to represent our team, in favor of a more authentic approach that represented strictly the athletes who were part of our gym, Kaeley surely would have been asked if she wanted a jersey after that race. I just knew what I had to do for my team.

And I knew what I’d just seen at the 2023 Highlander Assault. If Kaeley improved her obstacle ability, she was going to be an absolute menace.

Here was the choice: blame the obstacle, decide it was stupid, or recognize that it had exposed something she needed to work on. She could have said she was too strong to have trouble with a rig like that. She could have blamed her gender. She could have decided the race wasn’t designed for her because one obstacle was giving her trouble.

She didn’t.

She saw a skill she needed to develop and became dedicated to improving it. She didn’t act like her athletic background entitled her to a first-place finish. She worked on the thing that was holding her back.

That’s what leveling up looks like.

And Kaeley’s dedication to versatility hasn’t stopped at obstacles. She’s continued to take on different kinds of races, earning podiums at Savage and Spartan events and competing at Rally in the Valley. She’s shown that she’s willing to test herself across the sport, keep developing, and take on whatever challenge is in front of her.

Last week, people were debating whether When Pegs Fly and numerous other obstacles at The Midwest OCR were too difficult, especially for women. When Pegs Fly in particular is a hard obstacle. It was supposed to be hard. It stopped a lot of people, and Kaeley’s story is a reminder that struggling with an obstacle doesn’t have to be the end of the story. It can be the part that shows you what comes next.

At the 2023 Highlander Assault, I saw Kaeley encounter an obstacle that was new to her. Since then, she’s gone back to work, and over the last three years she’s become exactly the threat we all suspected she could be.

I believe that culmination was obvious at The Midwest OCR in 2026.

That race was at least three times as difficult as the 2023 Highlander Assault—so much so that it generated an entire debate about whether the obstacles were “fair” to women.

Yet there was Kaeley, standing proudly on the first-place elite women’s podium, ahead of some of the very impressive women who finished ahead of her in 2023. And, perhaps even better, she now does wear the same uniform as those very women, Katie Bridge and Erin Meyers as they all represent team USAOCR.

I have a lot of respect for what she’s become as an athlete, and I can’t think of anyone better to drive this point home. Being fast, fit, strong, and impressive matters. But when an obstacle exposes a weakness, you still have to decide what to do with that information.

Kaeley chose to improve. She put in the work. And now she’s the one standing at the front of the field.

That’s the kind of story OCR should be telling. And since the greater OCR media seems oblivious to anything not named Spartan, Tough Mudder, or Savage, someone’s got to say it.