"Your injury doesn't define your future."
Tiina | MVP #26
Tiina is 43, a mother of four, a trained midwife, a mental health professional, and one of the best adaptive CrossFit athletes in the world. She has titanium screws and a titanium plate in her neck. These prevent quadriplegia.
This is her story and it takes a minute to tell properly.
Tiina spent her career as a midwife, working shifts in a hospital until 2015, then running her own practice as a self-employed midwife from 2017. In 2018 she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Treatment ended in autumn 2019. In March 2020, a full spinal scan revealed something that had been there her entire life without anyone knowing: a congenital abnormality. Her first vertebra had fused to the base of her skull. Her spinal canal had narrowed to the point where surgery wasn't a choice, it was the only option. Without it: quadriplegia, complete paralysis of all four limbs. With it: paralysis was still possible, but quality of life could be preserved.
They operated. Vertebrae one through four are now fused. Tiina cannot turn her head, when she needs to look sideways, her whole body turns with her. Movements like wall balls, common in crossfit and hyrox, are difficult for Tiina because she cannot tilt her head to see if the ball hits the wall.
Her injury slows the delivery of signals that the brain sends to her body and leaves her entire left side with no feeling or awareness of its position. This makes movements like squats feel unstable, as she lacks feedback on her left side and cannot sense when her muscles are tired. Think, every squat feels like a pistol squat.
She woke up from surgery and nothing below her nose moved. Recovery took six months. She went home in autumn 2020 with a walker. She started training at home with a weight vest and set a goal: when the vest weighed an extra 40kg, she could go back to her CrossFit gym and join the WODs.
Tiina had been athletic her entire life—ice hockey at national league level, football—a body that knew how to compete. That background shaped her rehabilitation in ways the medical system hadn't fully accounted for. She understood load, recovery, and what it felt like to push.
The first two to three years of rehabilitation brought steady progress, but eventually, medical tests confirmed the injury was permanent and healing had reached its limit. Rather than stopping, she shifted her focus, channeling her competitive drive into mastering her body’s new boundaries, pushing to discover exactly what her body is capable of achieving today.
She had been training at a CrossFit gym since before her surgery, with programming built around her specific limitations from 2021 onwards. Movements that come naturally to most athletes require entirely different solutions for Tiina. Squats and handstand walks are especially challenging because of her coordination difficulties and reduced sensation.
In 2024, the owner of her gym suggested she try the adaptive category in competition. Tiina pushed back. She didn't feel limited enough. She didn't want to accept that the version of herself she had always known was gone. It was a difficult thing to sit with.
She applied for adaptive classification anyway. In 2025 she competed at the CrossFit Games in the adaptive division, neurominor category. She realised then that her strength levels weren't a weakness. She had been competing against herself all along, measuring herself against the athlete she used to be.
After the 2025 Games she learned handstand walks. She learned butterfly pull-ups. The movements keep coming—slowly, differently—but they come.
Her days are structured around what her body needs and what her work demands. She trains in two sessions: one and a half hours in the morning, one hour in the afternoon. She works with young people in mental health services, offering individual sessions with flexible hours that she protects carefully because without them, her training schedule won't work.
Food has to be functional. Fast and nutritious, this is a must for busy days. Tiina's favourite Grit Farm flavour is coconut-chocolate. It fits into the gap between sessions without requiring thought or preparation. That matters when the day is already full.
Adaptive CrossFit is underestimated. Tiina has experienced dismissal, the assumption that adaptive means easier, that the athletes are somehow less. She is direct about this. Adaptive sport at the Games level is comparable to the Paralympics. Many injuries in her category are invisible to the outside world. The compensation these athletes perform—the constant recalibration, the movement solutions built from scratch—is invisible too.
What she wants people to understand is simpler than any technical explanation: your injury doesn't define your future. Whatever the limitation is, it doesn't determine what comes next. Tiina knows this better than most. The consequences of her spinal cord injury—a stiff neck—are with her every day. Yet she competes at the highest level in her sport.
She doesn't wait for certainty. There isn't any.
Tiina competes at the CrossFit Games 2026 in the adaptive neurominor division.
Follow her journey: Instagram
