California Adventures

This might be a really long post, mostly because so much awesomeness happened in the last few days, it's hard to contain it all! We flew down to LA Thursday night with a group of 9 crossfitters from our gym. The purpose of the trip was to attend the Crossfit Games which is like the World Cup of Crossfit. There are teams and individuals that qualify from all over the world to compete in the games, so we were watching the best of the best. We got in pretty late Thursday night and made it to a house we had all rented together and crashed so we could be up bright and early.

Part of our group at the airport ready to go!

In the car on the way to the first day!

Friday morning we were off to watch the games! I'm sure a lot of this won't make sense to most of you, but here's a schedule of all of the events the individual athletes and teams had to complete...it's intense:

There are several events each day to watch. When we first got there we actually ran into the individual women on a run which was part of the 'burden run' workout that consisted of running 2.1 miles, flipping a giant piece of metal shaped like an 'I' down a field, then carrying a 70lb log on their shoulder for 600m into the stadium where they had to pull a heavy sled down the field. Each workout seems somewhat doable (although I could never do the weights they were doing) but when you think about doing 3 of those a day for 3 days straight, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to move at all, so it becomes all the more impressive to watch these athletes rock one after another. One cool part about this first workout we watched is that during the first running part, you could actually get pretty close to the athletes, so I snapped a few good pictures of the top competitors. These people are Crossfit celebrities!

The teams with their log worm and the sled.

Rich Froning in the 2.1 mile run (he went on to win the whole thing!)

Watching the men run by in the 2.1 mile run

The woman who won the whole thing pulling the sled down the field!

The next event for the individuals was a zig zag sprint. This was really run to watch because it was pure running. Most people who can pull heavy sleds and throw giant logs over their shoulders aren't good at running, which is why Crossfit is so awesome. It is such a variety of events that you can't just be good at one thing.

Each day they also announced the final event of the day around midday. That means the athletes don't even know what they their competition is until hours before they have to complete it, so there is no way to specifically prepare for the events. The final event for Friday involved rope climbs and thrusters. I just recently mastered the rope climbing, so of course for these elite athletes, they had to make it a little harder...legless rope climbs. Holy cow, these people had to climb up a rope using only their arms...10 times...with a lot of thrusters in-between. That is ridiculous.

My crossfit ladies! Love them!

These ladies competing are so awesome. Straight up that rope using just their arms!

It's so inspiring watching these athletes! In between events we were also able to walk around the stadium grounds where all kinds of vendors were set up with great fitness and health paraphernalia. I love being around such a fitness minded crowd!

I think I'll end this post here and write other posts for the other 2 days of Crossfit games...plus a post for our Disneyland day!!