Testing your fitness is part of the fun. July 23rd 2022, we had three teams enter into the Newbury CrossFit Summer Throwdown.
The competition was for teams of four, two guys, two girls, to complete 4 workouts starting first thing in the morning, and finishing in the afternoon.
Anyone who’s done a competition knows how hard it is to compete over four workouts. You need to mentally prep, hydrate, stretch, warm-up and cool down for each one. It’s really tough to do well.
Three teams who came down gave it everything they had. It was super impressive. The three teams consisted of:
Team T-Jam – Rich Johnson, Ben Marley, Helena Thomas, and Laura Addison.
Team Rough and Ready – Dave Rough, Rich Griffiths, Manon Lartet, and Katie Webb.
Team Rehab Facility – Macca Relf, Josh Gray, Ana Davenport, Grace Greenshields.
These three teams absolutely smashed the workouts. Putting in seriously good efforts across all four events.
T-Jam, posted an excellent effort in the front squat, rowing, run and sprint event, narrowly completing the fifth round with a sprint finish – this was their event win across the board. Team Rough and Ready, hammered out some excellent thrusters at 40/50kg over the event and posted a high ranked finish. Rehab facility came second. So on the engine work, our teams all performed really well.
The weightlifting event saw personal bests from nearly all athletes. Having to complete a 5 rep hang snatch for the RX division, or a 5 rep hang clean for the intermediates. This wasn’t a strength for our athletes in comparison to some seriously strong guys and gals from other teams (more heavy lifting coming up in the programming I think!)
The workouts were hard. The final workout for Rough and Ready included heavy overhead dumbbell lunges, squats, handstand push-ups and burpees. Few teams finished it, but they got further than most posting a respectable 3rd finish. All members demonstrating excellent form on the handstand push-ups, and the squats. The lunges punished the shoulders, if you lacked the overhead mobility to keep those elbows locked. Simply put, it was brutal.
The airbike, and D-ball event saw most athletes unable to walk correctly after it, as it hit the legs like no other. This is where I saw Rehab Facility excel. Grace and Macca went all out on the bikes and posted an outstanding 121 calories in the time cap which was a good 10 cals beyond any of the nearest teams in their heat. Clearly their hour long max cal air bike training every week has paid off for this event.
The most impressive aspect of all this was the support for one another and camaraderie felt by all the team members. The support given by some members making the journey up to Newbury, was much needed. CrossFit events involve a lot of running around, extra food, looking after, water, and the emotional support is absolutely necessary during the later stages of the day when your body feels tired and you’re suffering.
Huge thanks to Stacey Smith, Coni Stockman, Alisha Renwick, Dan Gunby, Georgia Punter, Hannah Marley and the kids, Henry Marley, George Marley, and Henry Cunningham, for coming to support the teams. It was quite difficult to support all the teams at once as their events were often running simultaneously, so this was particularly important when in the weightlifting event all the teams were surrounding Rehab Facility to hit their lifts and they did exceptionally well with their weights.
Overall the day shot by. Everyone had a great time, and with Rehab Facility taking the intermediate category win, topped it off and showed that all their hard work has paid off. It was great to see everyone working so well, and having such a good time doing it, we’ll definitely be organising more teams for similar events in the future.
The overall standings were:
RX – Rough and Ready 8th out of 16
Intermediate – Rehab Facility 1st out of 22, T-Jam 6th.
The RX category was extremely competitive. Despite their best efforts, the other teams just got ahead. The team that won were completely dominant, in that they won every event bar one.
The venue was excellent. Newbury Rugby club was a great choice of facility, and ground for the athletes and the spectators. The catering was top notch and to be able to have a beer straight after the workout was even better. The weather held thankfully, meaning that as a gym owner I didn’t feel for the guys with all the kit being put outside (how they would have done this with it raining I don’t know). Either way thank you so much to T-Jam for starting this off and encouraging everyone to come along and join in the events and thank you to CrossFit Newbury for taking the risk and putting on an exceptional event from organising all the judges, all the kit, all the logistics, all the prizes, and the catering and venue. I really hope you guys do it again next year. We will definitely be there!