"You need to go to the ER right now."

That's what the doctor told Jason Khalipa, whose daughter Ava had been experiencing periodic health issues. They're the words no father wants to hear, words that signaled an irrevocable shift in the 31-year-old CrossFit athlete's life as he learned that his daughter had acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a cancer that attacks the bone marrow of children.

But Khalipa didn't crumble under pressure. He didn't yield to hopelessness. Instead, he wrote the disease into his family's story; he made it part of his company's foundation; he used it to change the way he sees the world.

"I know that we can help a lot of families," he said. "The bigger [the business] grows, the more people we can affect. Money's not everything in life, but it does allow you to help a lot of people if it's used the right way. I've never been more motivated than I am right now."

For the 2008 CrossFit Games champion, business and family aren't separate endeavors; they're inextricably tied together. And in the face of a disease that takes life away, Khalipa -- with his wife, children, employees, and all those they're seeking to help -- is working to give people as much life as they can get.

The Decisive Day

The worst day of Jason Khalipa's life -- January 20, 2016 -- actually began the day before.

The 4-year-old Ava had three ear infections in a row. She was falling asleep at school. She often complained that her legs hurt. And she had a hard time walking.

Her pediatrician wasn't overly concerned at first, blaming her soreness and fatigue on "growing pains." But then Ava started getting bruises on her legs that wouldn't go away.

"That was the kicker," Khalipa told FloElite over the phone. "We knew something wasn't right and went in for blood work that same day."

After spending the afternoon at the hospital, the Khalipas had just gotten back to their house in Los Gatos, California, when the doctor called and told them he'd seen "irregularities" in Ava's blood work. Then, the life-altering words.

"You need to go to the ER right now."

They put their dinner in the fridge, jumped in the car, and headed for the Stanford Hospital. After spending six agonizing hours in the waiting room, they were finally given a diagnosis: acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

In the hospital hallway before seeing his daughter, Khalipa broke down in tears. At that moment, his wife Ashley issued a game-day speech that would have made any coach proud.

"You can cry out here," she said. "But when you go in there to see Ava, you need to be all smiles."

Khalipa remembers the moment proudly.

"My wife is a badass, obviously," he said.

In the morning, Ava was moved to Stanford's Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, where doctors put her to sleep while they took samples of her bone marrow and treated her spine with chemotherapy.

Over the course of the next 2 1/2 years, Ava would be expected to undergo the treatment 26 more times.

A Grounded Mental Approach

A life-threatening illness to a child is almost too much for a father to bear, but Khalipa bases his mental resolve on one simple idea: focusing on what he can and can't control.

He can't control Ava's leukemia, but he can control how he responds to it. He can't control how Ava's body responds to treatment, but he can control the types of food she eats, the doctors she sees, and -- with the help of his wife -- he can control his smile.

Khalipa traces the mental approach back to a pivotal year in 2008, when he found himself in the midst of three huge, potentially life-consuming endeavors. That year, he became engaged to his wife, he won the CrossFit Games, and his athletic career was burgeoning, and he also founded his company, NC Fit.

He needed to choose a direction; he needed to achieve balance. So he employed the approach he calls the "AMRAP mentality," the first step of which is selecting a focus in life. Khalipa's aren't too difficult to ascertain: family, business, and training.

"I was trying to figure out, 'How am I going to balance all of this?'" Khalipa remembered of 2008. "'I've got a family. I've got a business, and I really want to win the CrossFit Games.' I thought to myself, 'I'm never more productive than when I'm in the middle of an AMRAP. What if I treated everything in my life like that?'"

Guided by this philosophy, Khalipa effectively retired from competing in the CrossFit Games the night he found out that Ava had leukemia. He also sent an email to all of his employees essentially asking them to steer clear while he devoted his attention to Ava's recovery.

"If I wrote it today, I'd say the same thing," he said. "Not once as I wrote that email did I ever doubt that the team was going to be able to carry on without me. That's a good feeling to have."

But when Khalipa shifted focus to his daughter, the business didn't sink. Instead, he had followed a previous mentor's advice and had surrounded himself with people who would not only keep the company afloat while he attended to his family but also people who would help it thrive.

"At an early age, I found mentors who taught me a lot," Khalipa said. "When I was 15, I started working at Milpitas Health and Fitness and learned from some guys who worked really hard and didn't try and bullshit their way. They just grinded. They were straight-up entrepreneurs. Being around those kinds of people raises the bar."

He was also inspired by the hardworking ethos displayed by his father, his grandparents, and Ashley's father, all of whom had moved to the United States from Iran in search of better lives.

"My grandma and grandpa came over here with nothing," Khalipa said. "My grandparents were involved in oil in Iran and were doing well, and then all of a sudden, during the [Iranian] Revolution, they left with nothing. They started a dry cleaning business here from the ground up. I remember going to my grandparents' business as a kid and seeing my 60-year-old grandma busting her ass steaming shirts, and my grandpa working the cash register. It left a lasting impression."

Soon after discovering CrossFit in 2006, Khalipa became convinced that the emerging sport -- which offered service and community as opposed to the fancy equipment, and nothing else, of commercial gyms -- was his future.

Khalipa was so confident in CrossFit's ability to transform physiques and lives that he opened his own box in 2008, a decision he'd made well before he won that year's Games. Numbers best tell the story of his company's humble beginnings and rapid growth. Khalipa's first gym started with a mere $5,000 budget, only had a six-month lease, and encompassed a cozy 1,200-square-foot space. Today, NC Fit has six commercial locations in California and 17 corporate sites around the world.

Tying The Threads Together

As dire as Ava's diagnosis initially sounded, Khalipa is quick to remind people that she was actually quite fortunate.

"Every time we've been up against a door and there's a better way and a not-as-good way to go, we've gone the better way," he said.

The type of leukemia Ava has is very treatable, with a survival rate close to 100 percent. That's not to say she hasn't had any setbacks. The first came 2 1/2 weeks after the diagnosis was made. The doctors had finally discharged her from the hospital, but she was barely home a full day before she developed a fever and neutropenia, an abnormally low count of a particular type of white blood cell, and she was forced to return.

"If her blood pressure doesn't go up in the next three minutes," the doctor at the hospital told the Khalipas, "I'm calling in a rapid response team and 20 or 30 people will be here within a minute."

Years later, Khalipa's memory is pretty sharp.

"Three minutes later -- boom -- a rapid response team comes in and they just go crazy," he said. "It was so beautiful and so frightening at the same time. It was such an expression of the AMRAP mentality. It was a level of professionalism and teamwork and intensity I'd never witnessed before and never want to witness again. The conversations weren't like, 'Hey, can you hand me a scalpel?' They were more like, 'I need this now.'"

The team hit the room like a hurricane and left just as quickly, leaving the Khalipas a little dumbfounded. But despite the brevity of the situation, both Khalipa and his wife noticed a tonal shift in the conversation of the medics -- from intensely serious to somewhat lighter.

"Those are the kinds of things we relied on," Khalipa said. "Finding the positive in a situation and holding on to that, not focusing on the negative so much."

Khalipa is a big believer in the power of positive thinking. When he shared the news of Ava's illness on social media the day after she was diagnosed, he expressed a need for "prayers and positive thoughts."

He was overwhelmed by the response.

"Everywhere I go, the first thing anybody asks me is, 'How's your daughter?' he said. "I've been pretty open about sharing, and I think people have picked up on that, and they admire the fact that we've tried to take this negative and turn it into a positive. You're doing something right if that many people care about what you're doing."

Using their platform and their story, the Khalipas have devoted countless hours to raising money and awareness to help fight pediatric cancer. They host Ava's Blood Drive every September, and have pledged to donate the proceeds from their Box to Business seminars as well as any money made from Jason's forthcoming book "AMRAP Mentality," to the cause.

Ashley also created Ava's Kitchen to raise awareness of the role nutrition plays in fighting pediatric cancer. At a fundraiser last year, she raised $205,000 in a single night. All the money went to Breakaway Adventures, an organization she and Jason formed that, in conjunction with the Jessie Rees Foundation, allows families with limited resources to take terminally ill children on special trips.

The idea came directly from the Khalipas' own experiences. To introduce a little joy to Ava's life during her recovery, her parents have taken her on multiple trips to Disneyland, the Ritz Carlton, and New York City. They even used their connection with the actor Max Greenfield to arrange for Ava to meet the celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, the star of one of her favorite television shows "MasterChef Junior."

"That was something that Ava will remember forever," Khalipa said. "Why can't we do that for more people? When a kid is going to pass away, there's nothing more important to the family than creating memories, and I think a great way to make memories is by giving them the opportunity to go to a baseball game, eat a nice dinner, or stay in a nice hotel.

"Those are the kinds of things my wife and I are passionate about (and) offering people, because we've been able to do that with our daughter. The idea is to create memories because at the end of the day when your child is gone that's all you're gonna have."

Khalipa's Mission

After the scare that saw the rapid response team get involved, Ava had to stay in the hospital for two more weeks, but she's been on an upward trajectory ever since. She continues to get mild chemotherapy treatments at home every day and extensive ones at the hospital every month or so, but, 20 months into her recovery, she's passed all the critical benchmarks.

The steady uptick in Ava's health has allowed her father to re-tweak the delicate family-work-fitness balance he tries to maintain. While he has no plans to compete in the CrossFit Games again, he recently took up Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He's also resumed traveling internationally for business, something he quit doing for a long time after Ava was diagnosed.

The next significant milestone for Ava comes in March, when she gets the port through which she receives intravenous chemotherapy removed. She'll still have to go back to the hospital once a month for another year, but for all intents and purposes she'll be in the clear.

In the meantime, Khalipa has embraced his current mission as if it were his favorite WOD: He wants to raise as much money and awareness for pediatric cancer as he can, and he thinks the best way to do that is to further expand his growing fitness empire.

By Storms Reback