"We are a close group of athletes and usually train together in regular classes on a daily basis."
Sitting 16th in Canada East, CrossFit Kinetics has put forward a team of new CrossFitters. Though rookies to CrossFit competition, their continual focus on training for the Open has them well placed; they’ve been reaching higher, daily, for the past year.
The team scores in the Open are consistently good, thanks to the help of some outstanding individual performances. But the team will be comprised solely of first-time competitors.
In 2009, seven friends, training in globo gyms, wanted to start up a CrossFit gym dedicated to CrossFit programming. CrossFit Kinetics was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Three of the founding members are still there, and share the programming responsibilities. Jim Hardy, Patricia Conrad and Sarah Thomas alternate programming workouts on a monthly basis. They want to offer a wide variety of styles, to address the wide variety of members' needs and weaknesses.
The focus has seemed to work for this Halifax box. Kinetics boasts a diverse member base, but still managed to enter a top 20 team, now headed to Regionals.
Even though the flavor of gym programming changes each month, they continually focuses on the annual Open competition. “Our athletes generally begin working on their goats immediately after the previous year's competition,” Conrad says. “If any new standards are introduced, we immediately take them back to our box and incorporate them into our workouts.”
CrossFit Kinetics in focused on making that higher standard the regular one.
All of the athletes are encouraged to test how the year’s programming has fared. “We encourage all of our members to step outside their comfort zone and what better way to do that than participating in the Open?” Conrad says.
Because the regular programming is geared toward competition, Kinetics doesn’t have Open specific training – they do it all the time. “We are a close group of athletes and usually train together in regular classes on a daily basis,” she says.
In other words, the Open is a community affair.
Open Workout 12.1 was a good indication of how the team would do for the competition overall – the team averaged 100-110 burpees, with a few athletes hitting well over. On 12.2, the women of the group stepped up; everyone made it past 60 reps, and the top female made it to 90 reps. The top male managed 77 reps.
Kinetics jumped in the rankings after 12.2, finishing 11th in Canada East. The same type of distribution happened after 12.3 – the women averaged 8 rounds, with the men averaging 7.
For 12.4, the women on the team were happy with the 9-foot target for the wall balls, one of their weaker movements. They knew what to expect; Karen appears regularly at Kinetics. “For the double-unders, more of our male athletes struggled with this one,” Conrad admits. “Luckily, we have a lot of female athletes at Kinetics who can do muscle-ups and this helped us gain or jump a few spots up the Leaderboard.”
When 12.5 was announced, there was some surprise at CrossFit Kinetics. “We were all expecting chest-to-bar pull-ups, but I don’t think anyone expected to be repeating the final workout from last year," she says.
It made the veterans determined to beat old scores, and it put a lot of pressure on them. It seems to have worked.
After the effort of the Open, CrossFit Kinetics is sending a team of rookies to Regionals. Stewart Riggs, Jake MacKenna, Liam Fraser, Tiffany Dicks, Megan MacIssac and Maya Lourenco Levin will make up the team. And without a great deal of competitive experience, they will attempt to prove that a constant focus on competition works.
