"I thought, 'You know what? This is going to be my challenge to myself,'" Brenton recalled.
Though Wanda Brenton’s ears rang with the sound of drums and screams during Event 6 at the Latin America Regional, the only sensation she noticed was a feeling like flames licking her forearms.
Sixteen minutes into the merciless 450-rep chipper of rowing, box jump overs, deadlifts, ring dips and wall-ball shots, Brenton picked up her red and gray medicine ball for the return trip through the chipper, leading her heat.
“My triceps and shoulders were cooked,” Brenton recounted.
With 58 seconds left on the clock, Brenton commanded the arena’s attention, repping out 25 deadlifts before the buzzer sounded. The region’s only woman to advance beyond the chipper’s second set of wall-ball shots, she took home her third event win of the weekend.
One event later, she took the podium.
“It feels really good,” she said, after the shock had worn off.
After competing with team CrossFit Cayman at the 2010 CrossFit Games and with CrossFit 7 Mile in the 2012 and 2013 Reebok CrossFit Games, the 39-year-old mother and affiliate owner bested athletes more than 10 years her junior in the individual competition of the 2014 Latin America Regional.
Never finishing outside of the top 10 in any event, Brenton took home three first- and two second-place finishes over the weekend, earning the single qualifying spot with 23 points after seven events.
It wasn’t the first time she made an impression.
After taking first place in Latin America in the 2013 Open, many wondered if she would be the first to unseat two-year regional victor Tarasa Barnett. Brenton, too, wondered if she was up for the task.
“I sort of played with the idea last year, and I let the team know I was thinking about (going individual),” Brenton said. “But at that time I didn’t really feel like I was ready to take it on, so we decided last year would be my last year as a team (competitor).”
When she won the Open in the Latin America Region for the second consecutive year, she knew it was time to make the switch to the individual competition.
“I thought, ‘You know what? This is going to be my challenge to myself,’” Brenton recalled. “It’s not like I felt any more physically ready, but I felt mentally ready to take on the challenge, and see how far I could go with it.”
The choice to go solo meant giving up the comfortable routine she’d known for years. She asked James FitzGerald to do her programming, which led to a shift from one workout per day to multiple sessions in solitude.
“It was hard all season, because I did all of my workouts by myself,” Brenton said. “The only gains I could see were PRs in my lifting … there were definitely times where I questioned whether I was really getting better.”
As she refined her skills, her confidence increased. Less than two weeks before the Latin America Regional, she taught herself to forget her feet and kip up the rope for the legless ascents of the fifth event.
“Each time, my kip got better,” she said. “I don’t come from a gymnastics background, but that’s CrossFit.”
Her efforts would be rewarded with a first-place finish in that event. But before the applause and the accolades poured in, Brenton had to overcome self-doubt as she took the floor for the first time without her teammates at her side.
“I knew being the type of athlete that I am, I just needed to stay calm,” she said. “If I let the jitters and all those things take over, I knew I wouldn’t put in a good performance.”
Staying calm meant playing it safe on events where risk trumped reward, like the 1-rep-max hang squat snatch of Event 1. Though she tied Anita Pravatti for second place with 140 lb., Brenton opened with 105 lb. on the bar.
“The snatch is so technical, what if I missed the first one?” Brenton said. “I played it very safe; I picked a number to open with that I knew I could do blindfolded and in my sleep. I knew I needed to hit the first one and build my confidence from there.”
With each event, Brenton’s nerves faded. As she lined up backstage in the Chimkowe Event Center, listening to the muffled cries of cheering fans, she drew strength from her experience competing at the CrossFit Games with her former team.
“The one thing I kept in the back of my mind was that even when you are on a team, you still have to do your part as an individual; there still comes a time when it’s up to you to do your work,” she said. “I tried to be comfortable with the fact that I’d been in that position before, it wasn’t my first time to compete.”
By the end of the second day, Brenton had climbed to first place. Though 9 points stood between Brenton and Yazmin Arroyo Loaiza after the sixth event, she never took the top podium spot for granted—even after she’d won it.
“There was so much room for people to sneak in,” she said. “When Event 7 was over, I had no idea … I thought, ‘Uh oh, I could have blown it on this workout.’”
Though her eighth-place finish in the final event shrunk the gap between her and Loaiza to just 2 points, it was still good enough to send Brenton to Carson, California.
“The great takeaway for me is that it showed me I need to work on a lot of things,” she said. “I’m not as well rounded as I should be.”
To become more well rounded, Brenton will focus on increasing her strength and refining her gymnastics skills—especially the handstand walk—between now and her individual CrossFit Games debut in July. But the top priority is staying healthy.
“I’m probably one of the older athletes trying to do this as an individual, so my overall health and well-being need to be spot-on, 100 percent,” she said. “Otherwise I’m not gonna get the most out of my training.”
That training looks like two hours per day, five days per week. Morning sessions are for building her engine with 400-m repeats on land or in the water, while the afternoons are for skill and strength work. As the big show nears, she’ll also test some strongman-style training, like sandbag runs and yolk walks.
“I’m trying to go in as prepared as I can be, to get touches on anything and everything that can be thrown at us,” she said. “Just to be able to hang in there and hold my own would be a good goal; to go in and not bomb anything. If I could just hang in there and stay in the loop, it’d be really cool for sure.”
As Brenton stood atop the podium, bearing the number “01” on her chest and the flag of the Cayman Islands in her hands, she felt proud to be a part of the Latin America Region.
“Seeing the growth (of the Latin America Region) is definitely very cool,” she said. “I remember looking at the stands (in 2010) and there was one small set of bleachers. To see it now, it’s just incredible. It’s cool to say that I was part of the very beginning.”
