Individuals face four diverse tests on third day of competition.
Carson, California—For top athletes, workouts like Fran and Grace are balls-to-the-wall burners with needles quivering at the red line for about 2 minutes. No pacing, no strategy, no thinking. Just stomp the pedal to the floor and let Pukie sort things out when the reps are done.
On the other side are longer events that make athletes break their sets, pace themselves and chug through a large volume of difficult work.
And, of course, there’s room for a lot of fitness in between.
The individual events of Day 3 featured a broad test of fitness, from 30-second bursts of power in the Clean Speed Ladder to the Muscle-up Biathlon, an event that saw some athletes on the wrong side of an 18-minute time cap.
All in all, a nice little day of CrossFit.
Gaming the Games
If you couldn’t do all reps unbroken, the muscle-up biathlon was all about strategy and pacing.
Sheila Barden had a plan for Heat 1: break up every set of muscle-ups only once. She accomplished that goal for the first round, with sets of 12 and 6. Things went off the rails in Round 2, and sets of 9, 3 and 3 added a penalty lap to her plan, which cost her about 1:07.
Athletes quickly found they needed to take the run as it came to allow their arms to rest.
“I did pace the run—a nice, easy pace so I didn’t have to stare at the rings. I knew that would mess with me mentally. I knew I just needed to go,” Barden said.
Despite the extra running, Barden finished fourth overall with 16:58.75.
Camille Leblanc-Bazinet planned for breaks in the first and second rounds but wanted to bang off 12 muscle-ups to close out the event—and she almost did it. She went 11 and 7, 9 and 6, and 11 and 1.
Many competitors fell victim to costly no reps, and the Canadian had two back-to-back in her set of 9 in Round 2. In fact, after the event Leblanc-Bazinet advised the first heat of male competitors to watch their lockout to please the judges.
An overzealous crowd actually and perhaps unfairly booed Julie Foucher’s judge in Round 3. Foucher said she had 5 or 6 reps taken away at lockout.
Foucher was able to stay ahead of Leblanc-Bazinet early, but extra penalty laps cost her. The med student thought she might be able gain time on the runs but decided instead to settle into a steady pace and fight on the rings.
“I knew I wanted to run a little faster because typically running is better for me… . By the second run I knew walking up the stairs was faster,” Foucher said.
She added: “It was all about the muscle-ups.”
Foucher was left running a penalty lap when time was called, and the crowed booed loudly again. She finished 13th.
“Oh, there was no gaining of ground on the run,” said Leblanc-Bazinet, who actually walked a small portion of the hill after she came off the stairs. She might have been right: She finished second in 16:09.26. Tiffany Hendrickson was far and away the class of the field, posting 15:08.27.
Penalty laps and strategy were not a factor for several men, including Cody Anderson, who went unbroken on all sets to put up 10:43.46. The time stood up as the best of the day and was more than 30 seconds better than that of second-place Ben Smith.
And Then, and Then and Then …
If the first event of the day involved strategy and pacing, the second did not. The Sprint Carry was straight-up grunt work. Pick up something heavy and run 100 yards three times. The event took the top male Nate Schrader 2:22.16, and Lauren Brooks did it in 2:47.75.
"It wasn't an all-out sprint, but it was one speed, and the guys who didn't slow down did well," said Hackenbruck, who finished second. He said the event played to his strengths, and he’s always done well in blue-collar Games battles involving stake drives, sandbag carries and “the weird shit,” as Matt Chan commented after Hackenbruck won the Sandbag Move in 2010.
If the Sprint Carry was relatively brief, the Clean Speed Ladder was over in an instant. With five bars in front of them, competitors gripped and ripped, demonstrating five bursts of power, often in less than 30 or 40 seconds. In the unknown and unknowable tradition of the Games, the event had been announced late in the afternoon, leaving athletes almost no time to prepare for it and the Push Pull that followed.
Elisabeth Akinwale finished first in the ladder, one of several athletes who was able to stand up with 225. Perhaps most noteworthy of all, Kara Webb and Leblanc-Bazinet also landed 225, pushing them about 100 points ahead of third-place Annie Thorisdottir in the overall standings.
The men’s competition was won by Neal Maddox*, but Mathew Fraser was the bigger story. The former Olympic lifter out of the North East finished third in the event to wrest first place overall from Noah Ohlsen.
In the final event, strict handstand push-ups—from a deficit no less—and sled pulls rounded out a day full of variety. Michele Letendre and Josh Bridges took home $3,000 for winning the event, and after 10 tests, including five today, the fittest are starting to separate themselves from the pack—as they should. The diverse events are doing exactly what they’re meant to do.
Chyno Cho said some of the less-traditional challenges "revealed a hole in my training.”
She finished sixth on the first event of the day but 32nd, 26th and 27th on those that followed. She was also forced to deal with events announced shortly before athletes had to tackle them.
"You got an hour, figure it out, or you got two days, figure it out. It's a completely different animal when you can't sit on it and figure it out," she said, comparing the surprises of the Games the regional events that are announced ahead of time.
Anderson was impressed by the creativity of the events of the day.
"Today they're testing stuff you wouldn't normally do. ... It's a great test of fitness," he said.
Going into the final day of competition, Rich Froning is once again atop the men’s standings after a shaky start to the competition. He’s chased by Mathew Fraser and Josh Bridges. Leblanc-Bazinet, Webb and 2011 and 2012 Games champ Annie Thorisdottir hold podium positions for the women.
Froning isn’t used to quite so much adversity.
"It's been a crappy weekend," he said after the final event of the day.
He added: "That things that usually go my way haven't gone my way."
The champ said he feels “blessed” to be back in top spot, though he knows he’s under-performed in some events. He’ll be changing his strategy going into the final day.
"Instead of watching everybody else, I need to take more chances."
Regardless of position, all competitors will head to sleep tonight wondering, “What’s coming tomorrow?”
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*Correction—Updated to correct Clean Speed Ladder winner from Jeff Evans to Neal Maddox.
