the Zone team in Okotoks on Day 1
Hello all,
I'm back from the Canadian CrossFit Regional Championship. It was an epic challenge of both my physical and mental strength and a weekend I will remember forever. I faced some very tough workouts, made many new friends, and shared triumphs and tragedies with the Zone crew and the other competitors. While happy that I gave 100% effort and finished strongly, I'm not satisfied with the result and know that I can perform at a higher level. I placed 34th in the end out of about 55 athletes (only 52 made it through to the end), an improvement over my finish at the BC's and ahead of some very legit Crossfitters. I'll write a more in-depth review soon with pics of the competition, there are many stories to share :)
Thanks everyone for your support leading up to and during the championship - I appreciate it immensely and it is through the strength of that support that I am able to achieve great things.
Here's a blog that I wrote for our crossfitzone.ca website about the importance of seconds, reps, and pounds in daily crossfit workouts and in the context of competition.
Enjoy,
Cam
Every second, every repetition, and every pound, counts!
“Every second counts” is a familiar saying in CrossFit since so many of our workouts revolve around achieving a best time. Some workouts are scored by weight achieved or repetitions performed, so one could say that every second, pound, and repetition count. They count because our workouts are competition – CrossFit is the sport of fitness and your score for the day reflects your ability to display your fitness through performing work recorded by time, weight, or repetitions.
Your score is compared to the last time you did a given workout, to the performance of your peers on that day, and against our online and in-gym top 5 times. Humans are by nature competitive and will strive to improve with the motivation of beating one’s best or the best of others. Many improvements you see in your times will come in the form of seconds rather than minutes and the more you progress, the more this becomes the case. With our online and in-gym leaderboards a few seconds, reps, or pounds are all that separate 1st from 5th and from 5th to 10th.
Time is lost easily – it accumulates all too readily with extra breaks between repetitions or exercises or when you hit the wall after going too hard at the start. Pounds are often elusive in that for some exercises, a 5 pound improvement may take a few months or more to gain. Repetitions are earned by hard effort towards the end of workouts when body and mind revolt against picking up static barbells.
The recent Canadian Crossfit Regional championship provides a good example of the power of reps, time, and weight in deciding the success of a competitor. With athletes from across Canada having to qualify to attend the competition, the quality of the competitors was assured and the variance in ability quite narrow. The fact that athletes were competing towards a spot at the Crossfit Games added to the push for points and placings, further drawing fine lines between competitors.
Here are a few examples of how much seconds and weight mattered over the past weekend.
In the women’s competition of 46 athletes,
• In the final event (Tire flip - clean and jerk – run workout) 10 seconds was enough to go from 7th to 4th and 11 seconds would have taken a competitor from 33rd to 28th. In a workout of 14 minutes duration, this is the difference of running slightly faster or performing two reps quicker.
• In the double under-burpee event, 20 seconds separated 18th place from 11th place and 1 second was the difference between 1st and 2nd.
• In the snatch event, a 5 pound increase (from 95 to 100lb) would have taken a competitor from tied for 20th (with 12 other athletes) to tied for 15th.
In the men’s competition of 52 athletes,
• A 10lb increase in the snatch weight (from 155 to 165lb) represented the difference between being tied for 30th and tied for 20th spot.
• In the wallball-pullup event, 5 consecutive competitors had times separated by just ONE second (13:12, 13:13, 13:14, 13:15, 13:16 – representing the difference between 33rd and 37th place). At the top, the difference between 9th place and 5th place was only 9 seconds.
• In the double under-burpee event, the difference between 5th and 20th place was a mere 23 seconds.
Keeping in mind that every placing in each event was worth an equivalent amount of points (i.e. 33rd place = 33 points), each second and pound possessed huge value to the competitors. Many final placings for athletes were determined by a spread of 3 or fewer points, so 1 second here or there and an extra 5 pounds could have represented the difference between a chance to compete at the Crossfit Games and going back home to plan for next year.
Effort is a part of our training plan – it’s a given factor by nature of the way we train. Rewarding that effort comes in the form of improvements over time in one’s performance as measured by the metrics of the workout. Seconds count. Repetitions count. Weight counts.
Experience with different types of workouts and efficiency of technique help you secure precious points towards your score. Effective pacing and strategy can help you improve your score by governing effort and directing it in the most energy-efficient manner. Solid technique at the start of the workout minimizes unnecessary energy expenditure and holding it through the WOD maximizes your potential for adding important reps under the duress of fatigue.
Keep in mind these points in your next workout as you try to achieve your best performance. Celebrate the winning of seconds, reps, and weight, no matter how small the improvements... because as you now know, they ALL count!
