Pursue Your Strength: Claire Thomas

Note: This year marks a decade since REP hired our first employee. It’s time to tell our story in a different way than we ever have before -- the real reason we’ve dedicated our lives to bringing high-quality, innovative gym equipment to the world.  

Our purpose is to empower people to improve and own their lives.  

We created Pursue Your Strength to share real stories about how strength training can change the world, one life at a time. Because when you start to feel strong on the outside, it changes you on the inside, too. That opens more options in life. In that, strength is a type of freedom. That's why we do what we do. 

We do this for you. 

Now here are your stories. 

Claire Thomas stood frozen, her eyes latched onto the stranger in front of her. The stranger’s eyes stared back in lifeless brown, empty and hollow like the hope had been carved out of them. Below the two dark holes hung a body, its wasted, limp limbs draped shapelessly on visible bones.   

This girl needed help.  

Claire reached out a hand. The girl reached back. Claire stepped forward. The girl met her. They shared a breath. They shared a tear. The emaciated woman in the mirror had become a stranger. But with a trembling inhale, Claire steadied her stare and promised she’d find herself again.  

Sometimes life shifts lazily over months or even years, and one day you look back and realize how much you've evolved. But for Claire, everything changed in that one instant. Not on the outside; that would take years. But behind those eyes: an epiphany, a spark. One that would only grow bigger until it was enough to warm millions of people around the world.  

But first, the recovery. The pursuit of her strength. The choice to keep pursuing it, every day.   

Rock Bottom 

Claire Thomas grew up in a small town outside of Portland. She played competitive soccer, basketball, and track and eventually went to the University of Oregon as a heptathlete, where she competed in seven different events in the jumps, throws, sprints, and hurdles categories.  

“Sports were my life. I thought they defined me as a person,” she says. “They helped shape me into the woman that I am today."  

But the pressure to win and perform at a high level, while simultaneously looking a certain way, led Claire down a painful path. She remembers people grabbing her muscular arms and commenting on how masculine she looked. A coach told her in front of her co-ed team she needed to lose 10 pounds. She felt judged, unfeminine, too big, too much. The very thing that had always been her passion – her sports – was now her enemy.    

If only she could be smaller. Then maybe she would feel good enough. 

She began restricting her food intake, throwing it up almost every day, until she was too weak mentally and physically to go on. Her eating disorder eventually overtook her love for competing, and she made the difficult decision to quit her college team. 

Claire was devastated and hopeless. And completely lost. She had built her identity around being an athlete. Who was she without that?   

So she left it all. Desperate to figure out who she was without a team and calendar of competitions, she fled as far away as possible and enrolled as an exchange student in Australia.  

“I was more lost than I had ever been. I didn't know who I was, and nobody knew who I was in Australia either,” she says. Which also meant nobody noticed she was losing weight, depressed, and locked in her dorm room alone.  

Until that day she caught her reflection in the mirror. It felt like an out-of-body experience, like she was looking at someone else – someone pleading for help.  

“That was the moment I knew I was going to be okay. All the struggles, all the hardships, all the failures, everything I’d gone through was leading me to that point. That breaking point. That rock bottom,” Claire says. “I knew I went through all that to have the perspective and experience to be able to not only help myself -- that stranger, that girl in the mirror -- but also help other people.” 

Only she didn’t know that last part yet. She’d stumble upon that by accident.  

New Purpose 

Suddenly, Claire had a new purpose in life beyond winning races. Her new goal was to win that girl in the mirror back.  

She pulled on her workout clothes, laced up her shoes, and walked that frail girl to the gym. She walked the girl past the treadmill and cardio equipment, and instead, she put her hands on a cold, heavy barbell. She picked it up. It wasn’t much, but when she picked up that weight, she says she was picking herself back up, too.  

"It wasn't about the strength in my muscles. It was about the strength in my mind that I was rebuilding," she says.  

Rep after rep, weight after weight, Claire's physical and mental strength started to return. This time around, she wasn’t motivated by winning or pleasing a coach or looking a certain way. 

“I was doing it for myself and my happiness and my confidence. I wanted to be strong for me,” she says. “I think that is winning. When we show up and push ourselves. For ourselves. That’s when we truly win. And if we continue to do that over and over again, that’s when we change our lives.”  

Overcoming physical challenges in the gym proved to Claire she could overcome other challenges outside of the gym. The ones in her mind. She returned to Oregon, and on a bold whim, she decided to share her progress.  

Sharing Strength 

Claire’s first Instagram post in 2017 was a mirror pic. Simple from the outside, but for Claire, it was a courageous move to reclaim her body – and her muscles that were returning. Claire was still a college student with plans to get a corporate job someday, and her following was small and private, but a woman from her high school commented and asked about her workout plan.  

Claire decided to pour everything into that woman. Claire shared her workouts and nutrition advice, at first in private messages, but soon, she began posting the info on her page in case it could help others, too. And it did. More and more people reached out, so she made her page public. That one girl’s question started a ripple.  

Without intending to, Claire was building a community. Her new passion for fitness and helping others led her to become a personal trainer, launch her online coaching business, CPT Fit Co., and grow a following of over a million people. 

But ultimately, she says, this massive movement came down to supporting the childhood classmate who needed guidance.  

“I’ve never cared about the numbers. To me, it goes back to helping just one person,” she says. “And sometimes, that one person is you.”  

Rediscovering Strength 

Something unexpected happens when you dedicate your life to helping others: They end up helping you. 

Claire’s highlight reel shows an ever-smiling blond woman with chiseled abs, a sprinter van, and colorful outdoor adventures. But despite her growing success, major life changes and depression were gaining on her, and she found herself back at rock bottom.  

Just like a decade before, the things she had built her life upon were crumbling. She found herself once again looking in the mirror – alone, shattered, wondering if she could go on.  

She could. She had to. She thought about the community that surrounded her and what she might tell one of her clients if they were in her shoes.  

She’d discovered her strength. She could rediscover it again. Claire knew she had the strength to save herself – because she had done it before. Only this time, she was more than one million strong.  

She picked up that cold, heavy barbell. And she also picked up her journal and began writing: 

If I could have a conversation with my 18- to 20-year-old self, I’d tell her how strong she is. I’d wipe away all her doubts because she is capable of more than she could ever imagine. I’d tell her that she is not defined by her body; she is defined by her heart. I’d tell her that everything is going to be okay.  

The lost girl I once was needed the woman I am today. 

Now, when Claire looks in the mirror, she sees a woman who is strong, capable, and resilient. The pursuit of strength isn’t something that happens all at once and sticks forever, she says. It is a constant choice, a daily pursuit. A choice to look in the mirror and relentlessly love that person looking back, regardless of her insecurities and challenges.  

“I still struggle, and I always will,” Claire says. “But I know that person looking back now. I know who she is. I know what she's capable of. I know she's strong. I know that's really me.” 

Read more inspiring strength stories here.