UWS 2012

”The most important thing in life is to be your self. 
Unless you can be Batman.
Always be Batman.”

CCF Super Heroes

Long time, no see. In lack of any training at all from my part lately, I thought I’d do a little bit of a wrap up from last weekends crazy fun team competition in Durban instead. Here it goes.

The second annual ”United We Stand Games” was pretty much as cool as a competition can get!
Held inside a the huge Gateway Mall in Umhlanga, Durban, with two floors of spectators surrounding the entire competition field during the workouts, it all felt like we were gladiators battling it out on the sandy floors of Colosseum. The vibe was, simply put, pure electric.
Well planned events that ran smoothly throughout the weekend, somewhere around 200 hungry athletes that dropped weights, screamed out frustration, sometimes fell on there backs, or as in Catwoman’s case decided to head butt the pull up bar on her first pull up. We all shared fist bumps and protein shakes a like, while the other teams obviously stared at Cape CrossFit Super Heroe’s costumes with jealousy, and I am pretty sure that each and every single one walked away from the biggest CrossFit event in Africa so far with a huge smile on their face. Ok, ”walked away” may be an exaggeration, as most of us were probably hobbling around on insanely sore muscles, as it should be after these gatherings.

Team CCF Superheroes smiled as well, even though the bitterness of ending up just outside of the podium was quite hard to swallow for a short while. But let’s start from the beginning.

It all started out with one of the coolest events I have done in a CrossFit competition to date: ”Each team will get a Gum pole and have to transport it from the start to finish as fast as possible. However, the teams will not know the finish line until they see it!”
Prepared for the unprepared, real life fitness, call it what you want, I call it fucking awesome!
In total it turned out to be about 3-3.5km of running throughout the sugar cane fields on winding, muddy trails that always seemed to take a detour from where one would expect the finish line to be. We all pushed as hard as we dared without knowing how much further we had to go, and in the end more than one athlete seemed quite exhausted after the approximately 25 minutes of running.

”The Dark Knight should do a what? A ‘Thruster’!? B#tches be crazy..”

When the competition continued in the shopping mall, CCF Super Heroes finally got to sport their uniforms and despite the fear of suffocating in the masks, we had a decent showing and all the guys performed well. Even though Batman, being half blind and completely deaf within the mask, counted the weights wrong for the ”Max thruster”-event, which may or may not have cost us a few kg’s here and there.
For the next event, the final one for the Saturday, the 20 min amrap of Deadlifts, Ballslams, Box Jumps, Kettle Bell Swings & Pull Ups, we once again did well and finished the day in 3rd place in total.

At night we obviously had to follow same procedure as last year and went to a steak house where the biggest meal they had on the menu was 1.5kg of different cuts of meat. Felt like a starter for Batman since he had to share some with Catwoman and Hulkess, but goes without saying that one or two glasses of wine still raised the level of contentness, and he slept like a Batbaby throughout the night.

Next morning, the first event was one where we knew we could do well. Max Double Unders and Over Head Walking Lunges should fit our fairly high level of skill and we did as well as we hoped and stayed in the top three.
Event 5 on the other hand turned out to be a nightmare. Rower that ”broke” after a few hundred meters out of the 3k that needed to be covered, girls that struggled more than expected with the weightlifting complex and then a judge that had no flipping clue how to count to 10, let alone 20, kind of left us a bit frustrated after a fairly poor showing.
Never mind, we already knew that we should sit in contention for the podium as the final 10 teams was allowed to do the sixth event and quickly shook the miscalculated score out of our minds to go in and crush the final!

We actually did ”exercise” between dressing up.

Unfortunately that didn’t happen at all. In an event that was scored in three different parts we finished somewhere around 7, 8, 7 and the 3rd place flew out the window.

As coach of the Team I could however not be anything but super proud. My goal was top 10 with top 5 as a dream finish. Each and everyone outperformed them self and the three teams that beat us where damn strong. Going into the competitive season I can’t wait to get to work with our athletes to take up the fight for the title of the strongest gym in the country. I am positive that if we put everything we got into it, we can really be up there on the top spot if we want to!

The after party at Joe Cool’s, (really?), was also a lot of fun, even though Durban people are pretty lame. Lame only because they apparently don’t drink Corona. Batman had to drown his sorrows with some other shitty beer.
Tons of CrossFitters walking like senior citizens, some even trying to dance in spite of the none working legs, too many tequilas, lies about who can bench press the most, Gungnam style dancing with Japanese tourists, the mandatory girl misunderstands boy argument and boy then obviously sleeping on the floor situation, and everything else that makes a CrossFit Competition After Party everything that a ball at the castle never could be…

Until next time Durban, hope you are as excited about our next rendez-vous as I am!

”Tell me again why I can’t sleep in the bed?”

Namaste!