The Streak Continues

July 19, 2014

Lisa Zane

 “It’s a long year of training to keep us goin’ back.”

“It’s a long year of training to keep us goin’ back.”

Few affiliate teams can say they’ve been to the CrossFit Games five out of the six years of team competition.

CrossFit Taranis can.

Appearing every year since 2010, Team Taranis, from Victoria, Canada, will soon be competing in its fifth consecutive CrossFit Games.

“It feels great,” said Andrew Roodbol, who has been on the team since their first year at the Games. “It’s a long year of training to keep us goin’ back.”

Regionals

Taranis won five of eight events at the Canada West Regional, enough to secure second place. The CrossFit Fraser Valley Centaurs inched ahead in the final Leaderboard standings by a mere point.

Before the event, Taranis was confident about the gymnastics elements.

“We’re very balanced, and all of our athletes can pretty much do everything at regionals, so we felt very confident going in,” said Reed MacKenzie, the team’s coach and owner of CrossFit Taranis. “As a coach, I really try to impress upon my athletes how important it is to be able to do strict gymnastics movements—in my gym, if there’s less than 50 handstand push-ups in a workout, prescribed is strict.”

The team said its performance in the first two events—the descending muscle-up/clean and jerk ladder and the 1-rep-max hang squat snatch—gave the team members confidence that carried them through the rest of the competition.

“We worked a lot on strength and power over the last year,” MacKenzie said. “Everybody felt really good, confident and happy about the work they put in over the offseason.”

The Team

The veteran team of Andrew Roodbol, Angie Hay, Paul Lance, Jackie Snell, Robyn Horner and Steve Howell focused on individual development over the past year. Though each followed MacKenzie’s programming, the athletes didn’t begin training as a team until after the Open.

“At the Open . . . we start fielding our team back up, looking at people’s performances, how their training is going, who’s healthy, and then we kind of have an idea of who our Team Taranis is,” MacKenzie said.

Taranis also fielded a second team, CFT Thunder, which finished 16th at regionals.

“(We) never discount anyone,” MacKenzie added. “Everybody has a shot.”

This year, Taranis’ team in Carson, California, will have a combined 12 years of Games experience. It is one of the most seasoned in the field.

Hay, 38, will be making her fifth trip to the Games. She competed with Team Taranis in 2010, then qualified for the Games as an individual in 2011 and 2012 before switching back to team competition in 2013.

“Team is way more fun!” Hay said. “I’m really lucky that I have this great group to go to the Games with.”

Balancing motherhood, coaching at Taranis, a nursing recertification and training, Hay simply said, “It’s just a juggle.”

“Everyone’s got busy lives, no matter what they’re doing,” she continued. “My kids are No. 1, and then I just prioritize off that. I have to take it week by week. When I was training as an individual, it was all consuming. I’m able to have a better balance in my life by being on the team.”

Anchoring the squad with Hay is Roodbol, a 28-year-old former soccer player who is also a nurse. Roodbol will also be competing at the Games for the fifth time.

Horner, 26, is a registered massage therapist. Taranis’ smallest athlete at 5-foot-3 and 135 lb., Horner will be competing on the team for her third year.

Snell, 27, is an assistant athletic director at a private school. She will make her second trip to the Games.

Lance, 26, is also competing on the team for the second time. The full-time heavy-duty transport mechanic with BC Transit was a committed follower of SEALFIT on his own before he walked through the doors of CrossFit Taranis.

Joining the five veterans is 28-year-old Howell. With a background in martial arts, Howell coaches at Taranis and has competed as an individual in previous years. In 2012, he missed qualifying for the Games by one spot, finishing third at the Canada West Regional. In 2011, he finished fourth, on the tails of Lucas Parker, Jeremy Meredith and Tyson Takasaki. This year, he finished eighth at regionals, joined Team Taranis, and will be making his first trip to Carson as a competitor.

“I’ve been very close to making the Games as an individual in years past—it’s a great honor to be able to compete on Team Taranis (this year) with such a great crew of athletes and friends,” Howell said.

Although Taranis has a deep roster and strong work ethic, the real strength of the team lies largely in its intangibles: communication, teamwork and camaraderie.

“They’re all good friends. They love to be around each other. They love to train with each other,” MacKenzie said. “They trust each other implicitly, and they know what each is capable of.”

“I wouldn’t say we are the strongest or the fastest team out there, but we are willing to die for each other,” Horner added. “I don’t think that’s something you can train for.”

MacKenzie compares the depth of this year’s team to the 2011 Taranis squad that placed third at the Games. That team included Takasaki, who has qualified as an individual from CrossFit 204 the past two years.

California Bound

After finishing Event 8 at regionals, the team went into planning mode. Team members said they felt competing on the first weekend of regionals gave them extra time to train. Last year, the Canada West Regional took place on the last weekend of the competition schedule.

“Going really early in the regionals, we’ve been training for the Games for a lot more weeks than we did last year because we were so late,” Snell said. “I feel like we’re fitter now than we’ve ever been.”

That training has meant a lot more volume.

“Every team member does their own individual training as well as a minimum of three to four team sessions a week,” Lance said. “We focus a lot on honing different skills as well as making our teamwork as smooth as possible.”

With each team session lasting between 90 minutes and two hours, the athletes typically complete a skill portion first, followed by a partner or team workout. Each session finishes with general conditioning.

“(The last part) is all about pain tolerances and getting their heart and lungs just pumping so they don’t get tired,” MacKenzie said. “At the CrossFit Games, we can’t control what they give us for weights, we can’t control what they give us for skill work and technique, but what we can control is that no matter what we’re doing, we don’t get tired, so that’s the focus.”

While Taranis has added the occasional beach workout on Victoria’s sandy shores, MacKenzie said it mostly has been sticking to “conventional CrossFit” to be as fit as possible.

Finishing 26th at the Games in 2010, third in 2011, 36th in 2012 and 25th in 2013, Taranis hopes for a top-10 spot this year.

“Realistically, top 10, but we always want to be on the podium as much as everybody else does,” MacKenzie said. “You don’t go to this competition not thinking, ‘Win.’”

With just a few days before they test the work they’ve put in, Team Taranis is excited to be California-bound.

“In one sense, you feel like, ‘Oh my goodness! I still haven’t swam enough, ran enough, lifted enough, done enough gymnastics!’ But this is CrossFit, so you always feel like that,” Hay said. “But at the same time, it’s like, ‘Giddy up! Let’s go!’”

“Everybody’s just very, very grateful that we have the opportunity to go back again,” MacKenzie added. “It gets harder and harder ever year, so there’s a lot of appreciation and a lot of respect from our team for the other athletes in our region and around the world.”