Lauren Kalil’s series with the 2025 Tactical Games National Champions continues with a competitor who’s been chasing this goal for five years—and may have accidentally recruited the sport’s most dominant athlete along the way.
Tim Simansky has been grinding toward a Tactical Games national championship since 2020. He got on the podium in Men’s Elite back in 2021, then watched injuries and an increasingly deep field push that goal further away year after year. Torn meniscus. Labrum tear. Another labrum tear in a different spot. Shoulder surgery.
This year, he finally got it. Men’s 40+ National Champion.
But here’s the thing that makes Tim’s story different: while he was figuring out this sport, posting videos of himself doing fitness-and-shooting workouts on his farm, he may have sparked the interest of a certain CrossFit athlete named Jacob Heppner. The same Jacob Heppner who now has four consecutive national championships and is widely considered unbeatable.
Tim created a monster he couldn’t beat. So he aged up to 40+ and won his own division instead.
Lauren’s conversation covered everything from Tim’s wrestling roots to his five years of daily content creation as “WODDOC” in the CrossFit space, his controversial opinions about his own profession, and the online competition he runs that’s becoming the gateway drug for new Tactical Games athletes.
Tim started wrestling at five years old and didn’t stop until he graduated college. By the time he realized he was decent at it and wanted to pursue it seriously, wrestling stopped being seasonal. Folk style during school, freestyle in summer, camps year-round. Just wrestling, all the time.
He wasn’t Olympics-level good. When he graduated, they politely told him his trip was over and asked him to step aside. So he went to chiropractic school, moved to northern New Jersey for his first job, didn’t know anyone, and started coaching youth wrestling as a way to get acclimated to the town. Coached kids from five years old through seventh grade for about five years.
Now he owns a sports rehab practice specializing in active adults and athletes—everyone from Pop Warner kids to Boston-area professional athletes. But he’s quick to clarify that he doesn’t like to call himself a chiropractor.
Why? Because he hates most chiropractors.
His words, not mine. He knows that throws up red flags, but his position is that most of them could do better and they know it. Traditional chiropractic methods, like traditional methods in all therapies, don’t always align with current science. He’s seen too many of the “wackados” who crack people’s necks when their toe hurts. Same education at the start, but wildly different applications.
Good and bad apples in every tree. Tim’s trying to be one of the good ones.
Before Tactical Games, Tim was known in the CrossFit world as WODDOC. He created educational content for the functional fitness community—one video every day for five years straight.
It started because he noticed something while coaching CrossFit from 2007 to 2018. In his classes, people rarely got hurt. But everyone was talking about how CrossFit basically maimed people. What he figured out was that the education level had gotten watered down as the sport expanded so rapidly. Weekend certification courses produced Level 1 coaches who, without additional background in exercise science or biomechanics, were doing the best they could. But a weekend course doesn’t make everything perfect.
So Tim started putting out daily videos to help people continue doing the things they loved without getting injured. He loved CrossFit and everything around it. Wanted others to be able to enjoy it safely.
The plan was one year of daily content. Then he kept going for five.
Eventually, social media wore him down. You get cynical watching what actually trends versus what provides value. Someone squirting pee on shoes gets 8 million views. Educational content that could actually change someone’s life gets crickets. He needed a break.
That’s when he found Tactical Games.
Someone tagged Tim on Instagram suggesting he try this thing called Tactical Games. He doesn’t remember exactly who, but he’d been posting videos of himself doing proto-tactical-games workouts on his dairy farm—throwing a feed bag on his shoulder, running 50 yards, shooting a target, running 50 more yards, shooting again. Farm ninja stuff. Farmman John Wick, as Lauren put it.
Those videos got attention. Specifically, they got Jacob Heppner’s attention.
Tim and Jacob started chirping back and forth on social media. Tim would tag Heppner in his fitness-and-shooting content. They had a few interactions in the beginning, nothing extensive. But Heppner kept saying that when he finished with CrossFit, he was going to do this.
Then he did. And now he has four consecutive national championships.
When Lauren asked if Tim was the reason Heppner found Tactical Games, he was characteristically humble about it: “I don’t want to say I was the sole factor.” But he acknowledged he probably spiked the interest. He brought the monster into the bedroom, as he put it.
Has it hurt watching Heppner dominate a sport Tim can’t beat him in?
Tim’s answer: Heppner deserves everything he gets. The effort, consistency, thought, dedication, devotion—it’s all admirable. Nothing but hats off.
But does he still want to beat him? Of course. Maybe he has to wait until Heppner turns 40 and ages up to the lighter weights. Or maybe Heppner needs to have two more sets of twins. Six kids might slow him down. Two didn’t seem to.
For what it’s worth, Tim did beat Heppner on a couple stages at Nationals this year—the jungle run and the two-gun stage. Not stages with heavy weights, but wins nonetheless. He needs to start sending Heppner memes about it.
Tim got on the Men’s Elite podium at Nationals in 2021. Third place. But it was bittersweet.
Back then, some stages had you shoot pistol first, then rifle. Pretty much everything is rifle-first now, but the programming used to vary. Tim wasn’t paying attention during one stage brief—his wife could relate, he joked—and ran out and shot his first iteration out of sequence. Massive penalty. On a sandbag workout that should have been his wheelhouse, he lost points to the field instead of gaining them.
He went into day three in ninth place. Coming back to third was actually something he was proud of—great final day—but the math in his head kept telling him what could have been.
Then the injuries started. Torn meniscus right after 2021. Not back to national-level shape the following year. Labrum tear. Then another labrum tear in a different spot. Shoulder surgery. One frustration after another.
Meanwhile, the tide was raising all ships. The field depth exploded. He wasn’t just trying to get back to where he was—everyone else was sprinting toward that same finish line. The competition in 2025 would gap the 2020 field by 30 percentage points, easy.
How do you keep chasing a goal for five years while running a business, maintaining a marriage, and recovering from multiple surgeries?
Tim’s take: the busier you get, the easier it is to stay on track. You don’t have time to screw around. He experienced the same thing in collegiate sports—two practices a day, classes, tests, no three-hour gaps to do whatever. Easier to stay focused when every minute is accounted for.
His schedule is full from start to finish. Sometimes he works out at 5 AM. Sometimes at 8 PM, lifting in his yard while the neighbors think he’s crazy. You figure it out.
But he doesn’t think you can build or create desire. You either have it or you don’t. He hates losing at anything—battleship, whatever. Always has. That internal drive isn’t something you manufacture. You make priorities around it or you don’t.
Tactical Games doesn’t let you compete in divisions you don’t qualify for. Tim could only do one regional event this year coming off shoulder surgery, and he did it at 40+ because he wasn’t confident he could handle elite weights at that point.
By Nationals, he probably could have competed at Elite and been fairly successful. But he’d qualified in 40+, so he stayed there.
The surprise: it wasn’t as much easier as he expected. A 100-pound sandbag still sucks. When you’re exhausted, 200 pounds doesn’t feel that different from 250. You’re still in the cave. And the top competitors in 40+ can absolutely hang with elite weights—guys like Clint Gower compete in Elite all season and only move up to Masters for Nationals.
Tim chased Clint the entire weekend. Down six or eight points after day one. Down 12 after day two when Clint gapped him a bit. But Tim knew the stages coming up were in his wheelhouse.
After the two-gun stage on Sunday, he knew it was his to lose. He’d gapped the field. The next workout—Inman But Worse, the sandbag-and-sled stage with penalties—would seal it or make it really hard. As long as he and Clint finished around the same time, the final stage was only worth 50 points. Not enough room for Clint to make up the difference.
When the official scores posted, Tim screenshot them and sent them to his wife. He’d been waiting to make sure nothing would change—arbitrations, score adjustments, something. When it was official, the feeling was awesome.
Then the competitor brain kicked in: maybe he should have done Elite.
He caught himself. He was where he was supposed to be. Did the best he possibly could in his situation. Grateful for the competitors who pushed him, for the welcoming community, for all of it.
But he’s definitely going back to Elite next year. Bounce around with the boys a little bit. Get manhandled. Then come back to 40+ with his tail between his legs where he belongs.
Tim’s biggest learning opportunity from Nationals: wind reading at distance.
He put a lot of work into dynamic shooting this year and was happy with those results. But long-range shooting—which was typically a comfort zone given his hunting background—fell apart. He thinks he made four long-range shots all weekend. The penalties were brutal. 27 burpees over the box. God knows how many extra farmer’s carry trips.
He thought he was doing the right things. He wasn’t. Couldn’t read the wind.
His diagnosis: Northeast ranges tend to run parallel to valleys, so you get a lot of facing wind and downwind. Not as much crosswind. Texas and the Midwest have different patterns. He needs more practice with crosswinds at distance.
The plan isn’t to pick regional events based on weather patterns. It’s to seek out professionals in that space, pick their brains, train with them. A weekend of learning from experts beats trying to figure it out during competition.
On the flip side, Tim was genuinely happy with his dynamic shooting performances.
The jungle run went exactly to plan. He stayed disciplined about picking his stopping points to engage targets, stuck to his game plan regardless of what others did, didn’t run past any targets despite moving as fast as possible. Same story on the two-gun stage—maybe not the same approach as everyone else, but he executed to his ability level.
The rope climb stage was where he felt like he separated himself. One rope climb per round wasn’t hard. Keeping up the cadence for 10 rounds was. The shooting was under duress, the work was under duress, but you had to stay consistent. He watched his watch throughout, hit the paces he wanted, never fell off. Athletically, that was the performance he was most proud of.
Tim runs an online competition called Fitness and Firearms that functions like the CrossFit Open but for the Tactical Games community.
It started because he wanted his friends to do the same workout as him so they could compare scores. He thought maybe 10 or 30 people would participate. First event had 90.
Now it’s become a legitimate entry point for the sport. Three-week events with two workouts released each Thursday, due by Tuesday, videotaped for validation, posted to a leaderboard. Monthly workouts too, with one-of-a-kind t-shirts you can’t buy—only earn.
The value is lowering barriers. People who would never initially come to a Tactical Games event can participate from their home range in a safe, comfortable environment. No travel with firearms. No nerves from competing in front of strangers. No feeling judged.
The crowdsourced judging keeps everyone honest. Tim does his best to validate scores, but things slip through. When everyone checks a few people above and below them on the leaderboard, discrepancies get caught and corrected.
His goals are simple: get people active in a society with decreasing activity levels, and get people more competent with firearms. Less scared. More knowledgeable. These are life skills. Not everyone has to be a competitive shooter, but understanding firearms safety—even just knowing how to properly handle one you find on the side of the road—matters.
More exposure is better. Learning is better.
Tim noted that the 40+ field is already incredibly competitive and only getting deeper. Clint Gower, Nate Drum, Tim himself—all came from Elite. But look at who’s turning 40 in the coming years.
Thor Thornton. Over 40. Jared Halbert. Over 40. Kurt Finelis. Over 40.
When those guys start competing in Masters, the division becomes a bloodbath.
Jacob Heppner? Mid-30s. He’s got time to marinate before he ages up. No gray hairs yet. But eventually, 40+ is going to have elite-level depth. Tim will be there waiting—probably getting manhandled, but having fun.
Tim’s journey reinforces several principles for anyone serious about the sport:
Desire can’t be manufactured. You either have the internal drive or you don’t. If you hate losing at everything, that’s an asset. Build your priorities around it.
Busy schedules force focus. When every minute is accounted for, you can’t waste time. The pressure of a full life can actually make training more consistent, not less.
Competition exposes weaknesses you didn’t know you had. Tim thought his long-range shooting was fine. Nationals told him otherwise. Now he knows exactly what to work on.
The field is always getting deeper. What was competitive five years ago wouldn’t crack the top 20 now. You’re not just improving—you’re trying to improve faster than everyone else who’s also improving.
Age divisions don’t mean easy. The weights might be lighter in 40+, but the competition is still fierce. Many of these athletes could hang at Elite. Moving up doesn’t guarantee a win.
Community building matters. Fitness and Firearms exists because Tim wanted to give back and lower barriers to entry. That kind of investment in growing the sport benefits everyone.
Tim Simansky finally got his championship after five years of grinding, injuries, and watching a monster he may have helped create dominate the elite field. But he’s not done. He’ll be back in Elite next year, testing himself against the best, before returning to defend his 40+ title.
The dream is achieved. He’s still hungry.
Watch the full interview on Lauren Kalil’s YouTube channel, Queen of Hustle. This is part of her series catching up with all the 2025 Tactical Games National Champions. You can follow Lauren on Instagram or visit her website at laurenkalil.com.
