Winter World Health Club Games

I participated in the World Health Club Games this Saturday on the "Penthouse Bay Club" team. It was super fun! It was great to meet new people. There's so many crossfitters out there in the world!

There were 4 events plus a surprise gauntlet. The 3 events were amrap bench press at 60% body weight for girls and 100% bw for guys. The next event was you have 2 minutes to do IRM deadlift. Another event is the kettlebell clean cycle that I did last week. Then there was some sprinting thing. I didn't really pay attention to it because as a below-4-footer, I did not anticipate doing well at that event. Each team member must participate in an event individually then you participate in the gauntlet as a team.

I did the 60% bw amrap bench press in one minute at 65# and got 15 reps.

The Gauntlet:
The team must complete all 3 cycles of the gauntlet as fast as possible, and the first team to finish wins.

Cycle 1:

As a team you must complete 200 kettlebell swings (girls at 12kg and guys at 20kg). As one team member is doing the KB swings, another team member must either hold a 95# bar overhead (for guys) or hold a 95# bar at the top of a deadlift position (for girls). Then you cycle through all 4 team members, always in the same order.

The KB swings were an easy weight, but after the swings, it made your grip fatigued for the 95# bar hold which was harder than I was expecting. Some guys struggled with the overhead. The more experienced guys did a good job of keeping their shoulder blades together and the weight over their thoracic spine and didn't struggle with stability here.

Cycle 2:

As a team you have to row 2000 m and while one team member is rowing, the other must hold a 95# bar in the front rack position. Then the 2 waiting, will cycle through the same way.

Our strategy here was to keep the rows short, and basically do a full out sprint for as long as you can maintain that intensity. Our team each did 30 seconds or a 1:45 minute sprint since none of us had an issue with the 95# front rack hold. I noticed people on other teams would lean back to hold the bar and I think this would be more fatiguing than keeping a strong tall posture.

Cycle 3:

As a team you must complete 200 bar facing burpees. You must fully extend at the top and clap at the top.

Our team was very powerful at this event. Our theory was to do 10 or less each really fast since you have 3 people worth of rest time. We saw one of the best teams get really gassed after this event that used our same strategy so we were ready for it to suck. Each person had really fast transitions - at the top clapping, jumping over the bar, and doing a 180 to face the bar all at the same time.

The result:

In the end we lost the gauntlet by 13 seconds to the best team and I think our total time as 18 minutes something.

We placed 3rd out of about 10 World Health Club Teams. So YAY!