12 Labours CrossFit Columbia leads the team competition after Day 1.
The Mid Atlantic made quite the first impression.
In the newly-restructured regional format, one of the biggest questions was which teams would benefit from the setup, which combines the Mid Atlantic and South East Regions and sends the top five teams to the CrossFit Games.
Mid Atlantic left little question after Friday’s two team events, claiming four of the top five spots. After taking four of the first five spots in Event 1, including first place by the overall leader, 12 Labours CrossFit Columbia, the South East was left to battle for just one spot.
Friday’s excitement-filled Day 1 was the first step in each team’s road to the Games, and transition times and fractions of a second were magnified on the leaderboard. 12 Labours holds a 5-point lead and just 10 points separate the third- and fifth-place teams.
Team Event 1
A team is only as strong as its weakest link and Event 1 proved that. Partner deadlifts, which made their regionals debut in 2012, added a new twist this season in that pairs had to be mixed gender and raise the unevenly weighted 410-lb. bars 45 times, in various rep schemes.
It got even more strategic in the synchronized chest-to-bar pull-up portion, which flustered teams and required constant communication among the pairs as males often kept their heads turned to try to stay on the same page as their partners. For 12 Labours CrossFit Columbia, the plan was simple: breathe and stay steady. It paid off, as a late surge watched them cruise to first place in 15:45, the only team to finish under 16 minutes.
“We didn’t want to butterfly (pull-ups) at all; we just wanted to do kipping and keep it to small sets,” said Brad Weiss, who teamed with Christa Giordano to take the lead on the 21-15-9 portion, keeping their deadlifts steady and their pull-ups in small sets.
“We just stayed really small, hoping we weren’t going to have to rest a lot, and just tried to keep moving, knowing that at some point we would out pace people. … It got to the point where the team in second gave us such a lead all we had to do was keep moving to stay ahead.”
12 Labours CrossFit Columbia, which competed in 2014 as CrossFit Syndicate, is considered one of the top teams in the Atlantic Regional. Four of their six teammates competed in the team competition at the Games last year where they took ninth overall. They entered this weekend as the second-ranked team from the Mid Atlantic Region in the 2015 Open.
They finished Event 1 nearly 45 seconds in front of second-place RAW Training, which saw its final pair pull ahead of several teams on the rig and sprint to a second-place finish in 16:27, a second ahead of CrossFit Spartanburg.
All 10 teams in Heat 3 used the butterfly pull-up technique for the first 45 reps and had their first pair cross the finish line in under 6 minutes, including CrossFit Bound. CrossFit Bound took an early lead but couldn’t hold on in the second 27-18 leg and struggled with getting no-repped on the pull-up bars and finished in sixth place.
Thirteen teams did not finish in the 20-minute time cap, including CrossFit Rising Orange. As one of just two teams that didn’t finish in the final heat, Rising Orange was no-repped four times on the last chest-to-bar pull-up and had to settle for 17th place.
While most of the top times came out of the final heat, CrossFit Mobile Midtown took a commanding lead in Heat 2 and won in 17:22, which was good enough for fifth place.
Team Event 1 Results
1. 12 Labours CrossFit Columbia (15:45)
2. RAW Training (16:27)
3. CrossFit Spartanburg (16:28)
4. Competitive EDGE Wilmington (16:38)
5. CrossFit Mobile Midtown (17:22)
Team Event 2
Rising Orange knew how bad it needed a win. After the setback of hitting the time cap in Event 1, Rising Orange’s women delivered on Event 2, finishing the 175 55-lb. snatches and 25 rope climbs first, and not letting up on the 115 75-lb. thrusters until they jubilantly crossed the finish line in 20:00.
“We knew going into that one we had to do our best,” said Ryan Boswell, who watched as his teammates took to the final thrusters with CrossFit Terminus nipping at their heels. “We had practiced that one before and we knew our time would be comparable to one of the top times. Today we went out there and executed our plan. Luckily it turned out good for us.”
Rising Orange kept a steady pace while Terminus slowed and allowed Competitive EDGE Wilmington to take second in 20:12.
“We are good at rope climbs, but we are also big girls, so we knew we had to be aggressive but conservative enough to save some juice in the tank for thrusters,” Amanda Welliver said of Wilmington’s strategy. “Once we got to thrusters it was all about speed.”
Wilmington’s women decided to go with bigger sets to cut down transition time, committing to 10 reps each until Jordan Adcock finished things up with 15 broken.
The transitions in between thrusters were critical for teams as Rising Orange saved time by having all women walking the bar forward with the bar racked on their shoulders and starting the next set of thrusters immediately.
While Event 1 saw almost half the field fail to finish under the time cap, Event 2’s time cap was more forgiving with 27 of the 30 teams finishing including all 10 teams in Heat 3. Once again, an early heat made some noise and this time it was CrossFit RDU.
CrossFit Unmatched had their women start the thrusters at 16:38 and maintained a lead of at least five reps over Crossfit RDU up until around rep 60.
“We knew that we could catch CrossFit Unmatched because of the volume of work that we trained with, this was in our wheelhouse. We knew if we were within 5 or 10 reps at the beginning of the thrusters that we could catch them,” said Meredith Buckner, whose team rallied to win the heat—and take seventh in the event—with a time of 21:08.
She continued: “The first workout didn’t work out like we had planned, but that’s a big comeback for us both with the workout and mentally. It puts us at a good place to start tomorrow.”
Team Event 2 Results
1. Rising Orange (20:00)
2. Competitive EDGE Wilmington (20:12)
3. CrossFit Terminus (20:36.5)
4. 12 Labours CrossFit Columbia (20:36.6)
5. The CrossFit Squad (20:46)
Overall Standings
1. 12 Labours CrossFit Columbia (185 points)
2. Competitive EDGE Wilmington (180 points)
3. CrossFit Terminus (163 points)
4. RAW Training (160 points)
5. Rising Orange (153 points)
6. The CrossFit Squad (149 points)
7. CrossFit Bound (144 points)
8. Peak 360 CrossFit (140 points)
9. CrossFit Mobile Midtown (137 points)
10. CrossFit Spartanburg (131 points)
The regionals are now following Games-style scoring, in which the most points wins. You can learn more about the new scoring system here.
