Resilience

The Sweat RX Pro Division was built up and headlined to be no joke. With a $15,000 cash purse on the line and 8 female athletes, with 10 male athletes, they knew that every workout counted. Thus the two workouts completed today were exactly that. No joke.
The first WOD was a bracket-style prowler push tournament. The athletes had to push a prowler that had 340/220 added to it down approximately 50 feet on the high bars. Then they had to switch sides and push the same sled back 50 feet on the low bars. I have done ZERO training with a prowler but knew what pushing a tackling dummy from high school football was like. This sled on the carpet of the Toronto Convention Center was murder. ESPECIALLY right before event 2.

Charles Leduc took the men’s event and an up and coming favorite of mine, JoEllyn McAtee took first for the men. However, the final placing wasn’t what grabbed my attention the most. What grabbed my attention the most was the resilience of these athletes. I have NEVER in my life heard such whining and crying about how their legs felt. After each heat, every athlete made sure to comment on how there was no way event 2 was going well for them. The lactate buildup and the muscle fatigue, they assured me, was going to take 30% off their numbers for event 2.

Event 2 was the following:
Find a max of the complex: 1 Clean + 5 Front Squats + 1 Jerk
If you miss one part of the complex you are allowed to move on but only complete the parts of the complex prior to that which you missed. i.e. if I miss the 4th front squat I can only continue to do cleans. The athletes, who were minutes prior complaining about their legs, showed up in a big way. Some of the highlights included Ingrid Kantola hitting a 200lb clean, Natalie miraculously jerking 170, Hoggan hitting a PR 320 clean then front squatting it 5x, and my personal favorite Paul Tremblay jerking 320, front squatting 335 for 5 reps, and cleaning 355 for the win. The resilience of these athletes was impeccable to me. For many of them, they were forced to complete 4 prowler sprints then immediately try to clean something heavy.
If their performance alone is not a testament to their resilience and threshold training then nothing is. I am very impressed with this group of athletes. And today we open up with 300 burpees for time BUT every 7 minutes complete 1 min ME snatches. Minute 7 the weight is (185/110), minute 14 is (205/125) and minute 21 is (225/140). I am most interested to see who the prowler in particular affects their capability tomorrow. As much as I think it should. Clearly the resilience of these athletes helps conquer feats that seem impossible.
nJason Hoggan 330 Clean attempt
Yes I will be putting that in coach’s eye.
Here’s his PR Clean the FS x 5 reps
On a sidenote, walking out last night we saw where the real fitness is going to take place…
Surprise WOD?