Smith-Smith Smash Part One!

Last weekend I got to spend a few days with a few of my favorite people in the whole wide world! I flew out bright and early Friday morning for Charleston, SC and met up with the party animals at an awesome hotel right on Folly Beach. My good friend Evelyn is getting married in two weeks, so this was her bachelorette party weekend!! It ended up being a group of 4 of my best friends from college, and 3 of Evelyn's awesome friends/family. It was such a great group and we had a blast! 

After a quick drink at the hotel beach bar and a few drinks in the hotel room, we headed out for a night of delicious seafood and some serious white girl dancing!

When we got home, apparently the lovely bride to be decided it would be a brilliant idea to jump in the hotel pool fully clothed. It looked like a good time, so we all followed suit and jumped in! As could be expected, the hotel security came out and asked us to get out. We played stupid and apologized, then to our surprise, he asked us if we were actual guests of the hotel and what our room number was. When we gave it to him, he said he'd let us stay in if we kept the noise down!

Friday night was a great start to the weekend of celebrations!!

Saturday morning started with lunch on the beach and a few hours of beach time.

After our beaching it was time to go out on the town! Evelyn's cousin had made us reservations at a great place in Charleston so we started our night there, and did a night out in the big (not so big) city of Charleston. 

After a delicious dinner we found our way to a strange rooftop bar. It was definitely trying to be super swanky, and it was a little, but there was a super strange convergence of people there. One side had a wide range of much older people, then there were the people that looked like they were on a first date at a hot spot...and then there were the bachelorette parties...about 6 of them! This prompted Eduardo and Walton to corral them all into a bachelorette dance off!

After the bridal war, we all spent the rest of the night partying it up and boogying on the dance floor!

So that was really hard to narrow down photos for this blog, and I have a couple hundred more too! Did I mention that I really like to take photos! We had such an amazing 2 nights of fun the South Carolina, and I love all of these people so much! 

Sunday everyone headed their separate ways. The best part of ended this trip though is that we'll all be seeing each other again in just 2 weeks! That is so awesome and I can't wait to see them all again for round 2 of the Smith-Smith Smash (Evelyn's last name is Smith and her soon to be husband's last name is Smith...no relation, so they awesomely don't have to worry about any name changing after this wedding!)

My flight wasn't till a little later, so I hung out with Liz and Laura who were driving back to ATL. We walked the pier and had lunch in Charleston before they dropped me off at the airport and headed home too! Did I mention that I absolutely adore all these people!!

And then we went to Disneyland!

We had an awesome time with all our buddies at the Crossfit Games, but most of the people headed out on Monday to fly back to Seattle. Ryan and I and our friends Scott and Katie stuck around for an extra day to hit up Disneyland! As you recall a couple months ago, we had gone to DisneyWorld where I was able to get a great military discount on a 4 day park hopper ticket. We only went to DisneyWorld for 2 days, so I still had 2 days left on our tickets. After a little internet research I discovered that although it is not advertised, you can exchange DisneyWorld tickets for Disneyland tickets (but not the other way around), so that meant we already had tickets for Disneyland, so why not go while we were there?!?

We got up Monday morning and everyone got in a quick workout. Ryan went with a few of the other people to a local Crossfit Gym which I went for a run to the beach...I felt like I need to at least see the beach which we were right by it!

After we cleaned up and said farewells to everyone heading to the airport, we were off to Disneyland! Although I've been to DisneyWorld quite a few times, I had never been to Disneyland, so I was super excited to check it out!

It was a long exhausting day of fun, but so worth it for those of us adults who still like to be kids and are fascinated by pretty lights and colors and rides and everything Disney!

Note to any other adults going to Disneyland...it is a really tight fit to shove 4 adults in a teacup...I don't remember there being such a small amount of leg space! Ooops!

The Rest of The Games

So Saturday the fun continued, and was even more exciting because we were celebrating Katie's birthday that day too!! We got there just in time to watch another workout that had some running in it. This time it was up and over a huge hill, and the end of each running part came right in front of us in the stands, so we got some good close up views. Of course there was more than just running...there were overhead squats between each run...those are perhaps my least favorite movement ever! 

The next individuals event was a skills challenge with clean and jerks. That's lifting a heavy weight up to your chest then throwing it over your head. These people were throwing weights over their head that I can't even dead lift...amazing.

This woman has 235lbs over her head...holy cow!

After that event, we got to do our own workout! Since it was Katie's birthday, it was her birthday workout, and since she turned 33, we did 2 rounds of 33 burpees, 33 lunges, 33 push-ups and 33 squats. It was a pretty quick workout, less than 15 min, but holy cow I could barely move afterwards and was crazy sore from it! That's another great thing about crossfit is that you can do it anywhere with no equipment and still get a killer workout!

squats

the birthday girl!

Our awesome group, post workout!

After our workout, we headed back into the stadium to watch the next event which was another surprise one that was announced only hours before. It was also a pretty fast one which is almost tougher because everyone is fast so to place high in it you have to go balls to the wall and rock it. While we were watching people workout...we were also having lots of fun in the stands ;)

Saturday night finished off with a big house/dance party with pizza and ice cream cake for the birthday girl!

Ok, final day...Sunday! There were only two events for men/women/teams for the final day of the games. The crazy thing about the first event was that it involved jumping over a wall, which obviously was more difficult for anyone who was short! They even had the same wall height for both men and women, so the little 5' girls had to jump over the same wall as a 6'6" man! At first this made me a little nervous for them, but of course each and every one of them flew over it with ease...super impressive!

Again, the final work out of the games was kept a secret until hours before it started. It ended up being a 2 part fast workout with a time limit on each. It involved a lot of heavy weights and hand stand walks! Some of the people could walk the full distance on their hands without falling once! Amazing!

Rich Fronning ended up winning the whole thing, and can do unbroken hand stand walks.

Shortly after the final event, the winners were announced. A couple of the winners I was most impressed with was the 3rd place female who is a mom to a toddler and also a full time teacher. That means she only has about an hour a day to work out. A lot of the other competitors work out full time, or work as firefighters were they can work out on the job or something. It's so cool to see that people can have full time jobs and still be able to achieve this level of fitness! The winner for the men was Rich Fronning (who is in a lot of my pics). This is the third year in a row that he has won this whole thing. When we started watching on Friday (there were 2 events that we missed on Wednesday as well)  he was ranked 16th...as we watched over the weekend, he moved up and up in the ranks until he clenched first place! I didn't know this at the time, but he is only 26, which means he started winning these things at age 24...that was definitely not something that was on my radar as a 24 year old! The second place guy has also won the games before...and it was extra cool, because we got to meet him the night before and I snapped a picture of him with Scott and Katie!

Jason Kalipa with Scott and Katie!

Jason Kalipa winning second place...if you look just to the right of his water bottle holding arm...that's me in the teal tank top clapping my hands!

I probably could keep talking about how awesome the Games were, but i'm sure everyone is sick of hearing about them! We had an awesome time with great friends and I for one was super inspired by all the amazing athletes we got to see and I can't wait to go back again next year!

Clearly we had too big of a group for this wall and ended up having to layer people a little bit, but I love all these Crossfitters!