CF Endurace @ 9:30
Meet at Aden Way and McClaren
or
CF Open WOD #2 @ 11:00 AM
@ CFES
Great turn out at 209 yesterday. 209 really went all out to out on a great bash. They had a DJ bumpin, catered food, and a keg. The vibe in the gym was awesome, and the WOD was terrible. Great job to all competitors and big thanks to 209 for an awesome Saturday.
WOD 2 Analysis:
This WOD came down to 2 elements with a controversial but insignificant x-factor. The WOD was a test of conditioning and muscle endurance. It was really an interval WOD where you put in a max sprint effort on 15 box jumps, and recovered somewhat cardiovascularly during deadlifts and push ups. The deadlift was just heavy enough that you couldn't recover while doing the 9 reps, but it was light enough that it didn't really slow anyone down. The push up thingr-ma-bobber with came mostly down to upper-body strength, but also had an element of gaming the movement standard. After deads and push ups, back to the gassing box jumps again for the true output test.
If you had a lack of upperbody strength, but the skill of gaming the movement you probably did slightly better than you'd have done with a stricter movement, but not much. Chances are if you weren't that good at push ups, you were probably just as slow at the other two movements.
The sequence to the right shows a clip from the WOD demo on CF.com, see WOD Demo with Paige Nutt - video [wmv] [mov]
Now I will admit that it's pretty mean of me to frame by frame this, but CF is showing us a top athlete doing a demo of the WOD. There was much discussion on this topic and I didn't try to pick the worst rep I could find, I just picked one that Tony said clearly "Good" to. It was also obvious watching the video in real time, that the movement was not exactly being performed as described in the standards video. None the less we were shown a legit version of the WOD by CF, sending the strong message that this form was acceptable. I interpret this video to send the message, this form is ok, and if it looked any worse than that… No Rep!
Now you can be upset about this or maybe your actually happy because you feel that you lucked out on this, but gaming and human error are part of the sport just as they are in every sport. There is nothing deviant about performing the movement as shown in the sequence. The truth is, doing the movement more perfectly than shown was actually much faster than gaming it for those who were strongest. So the stronger competitors still came out on top of the push up game.
The point here is that if you are upset about the movement standard, get over it, and also if you want to win, the play the game. We get what we get in CrossFit and that's the real fun of it. 4 more weeks to go, can't wait to see what they do to us next. Ooo Raw!
