Lessons Learned From The Games

This past CrossFit Games was my first year as what I would call a lead coach with the responsibilities of getting a couple athletes through the Games and putting them in a position to excel. I had previously coached athletes underneath Outlaw but had never been the lead guy before. It’s a different ball game to be the one immediately having to adjust for surprise workouts, or the guy in charge of necessary fueling, or the guy that all the athletes looked to for direction on strategy. Definitely a different but awesome and huge learning experience for me. I learned three big lessons the hard way last week that likely influenced our athletes performance. These are lessons that I had to learn through mistakes but rest assured these mistakes will never happen again. Here the three things I think every CrossFit Games level coach should know when preparing for the week of the Games.
1 – Nothing goes according to plan. Don’t expect the timing to be exact and don’t expect your athletes to have sufficient time to warm up or prepare for workouts. Prepare just in case you do have ample time and opportunity to fuel and warm-up and mentally prepare for workout but be flexible in that plan to allow for chaos. With the added pressure and timeline of ESPN, this year’s Games was extremely stressful both for the volunteers and the coaches. We had a timeline to meet regardless of athlete preparation or readiness. It was a hard adjustment for me as I had plans in my head and goals that I wanted each of our athletes to reach before they stepped on the field and 80% of the time those plans just were not possible. When my planned timeline flew off course I was not mentally prepared to adjust. A long time ago when I was working in youth ministry one of my good friends gave me a gift that sits on my desk still today. It was a dog chew toy figurine of the cartoon character Gumby. It was supposed to be a reminder to always be flexible. Ironically my lack of flexibility last week impacted our athlete’s performance. Lesson number one learned. Always be flexible.
2- Make plans and prepare specifically for athlete nutrition. Part of me assumed that athletes would have the time and capability to properly fuel and recover from workouts in preparation for the next one. That was a wrong assumption and lack of planning on my part in this area severely hurt our athletes on Saturday. Anybody halfway aware of the body knows the body needs specific types of fuel for specific types of workouts. If our athletes are given ample amount of time and ample rest periods between workouts this is an easy task to accomplish. However, as I mentioned in point 1, this was just not the case. Halfway through the Saturday workouts both Jeff and Emily had not eaten a meal since breakfast and had depleted every possible source of fuel in their body. It reflected in their ability to push the gas pedal doing workouts. It wasn’t until 3:00 on Saturday that I realized something had to be done. Sunday was a different ballgame. There are specific ways to get good fats and restore glycogen stores in your athletes quickly. The usage of digestive enzymes as well as coconut oil and almond butter squeeze packets matched with sweet potato purée and electrolyte enhanced juices make all the difference in athlete performance when they don’t have the time to eat and process actual food. Unfortunately it took our athletes crashing middle of the way through the hardest day before I realized something had to be done. It did not help that CrossFit decided to cut the food service out of the budget for the athletes this year so there was little to no food available for them in the athlete area. I expected specific timing and resources to be available to them. When nutritional necessities were not available it took some adjustment to prepare them for that. That adjustment period took away from some of our athletes ability to perform. Lesson learned: there are multiple ways to fuel athletes, prepare for them all.
3- Create roles for each coach to fulfill. Mike and I were both trying to do everything. Neither one of us had assigned or specific tasks to complete. We were both trying to accomplish every task for every athlete at the same time. Not only was this conflicting in our ability to do this task well but it wasn’t necessary for both of us to do all of those task. Having multiple coaches means each coach can fulfill different roles. Determining and assigning those roles prior to the start of competition helps alleviate much of the pressure and unnecessary work for each coach and gives the athlete better quality coaching. The lesson learned for me is to give both Mike and I specific tasks and roles to fill each day so that we are not concerned with completing tasks that are not necessary for the preparation of the athletes.
These lessons were instrumental in helping me see the bigger picture for proper coaching of the Games. It is extremely helpful to learn these lessons this year but if there’s one piece of advice I can give to any of you reading this. Learn from my mistakes. Those three lessons may have cost our athletes a couple spots on the leaderboard and had I known these things prior, there’s no telling what the results could’ve been. These lessons also give me a huge amount of desire to be back at the Games and do it over again just to see what the difference is. Next year…