CFNZ Fitness challenge

What a great day!
CFNZ had a fundraiser for Tamaryn's trip to the CrossFit games. I have no interest in competing, I suck as an athlete and competing brings out a side of my personality I don't want seeing the light of day, so I stuck my hand up to do anything else that was necessary. What that meant was that I spent my day judging/counting and loading between rounds. I figured I could handle it, I knew how tiring it was spotting and loading at powerlifting contests, but I reckoned without the mental component of having to adjudicate form on the workout. At powerlifting meets I only had to worry about getting the right weight on the bar and making sure the lifter was safe, someone else worried about whether the lift was good and no-one had to worry about counting reps, or rather the count was either 1 (a good lift) or 0 (failed). With 40+ competitors we had 6 rounds and 3 workouts. 2 back to back then the third after a 2 hour break.
I was on the go the whole first two workouts, I think I was the only counting judge who was on for every round and I was definitely the only one doing that and loading between rounds. Darren and Tamaryn were head judges and running the event and they loaded the bars, but that didn't involve actually being responsible for counting every single rep and ensuring they were all good. The mental effort involved in that meant I had to concentrate hard the whole time and in the last couple of heats of the second workout I made some mistakes. One funny, one not good, one just plain awful.

1. Apparently while judging Jason from CF Auckland who also came across for the day, I had my butt right in Alex' face.
2. I walked into Amanda's rope when she was doing her double-unders and messed up her rhythm.
3. I apparently made Dave C do 4 rounds of the workout instead of 3. I was sure it was 3, but Dave and Tamaryn thought it was 4.
   In case you can't tell, that was the really bad one. So embarrassing!
   I don't know how I can ever make that up to Dave.

By then I was right on the edge of having my brain shut down and if we hadn't stopped then I think I would have just walked out. I honestly couldn't think at all at that stage.
I'd been on the go flat out for a bit over 3hours, intense concentration, no water, no food and no breaks. Dehydration was definitely an issue and that and not having had a snack were my completely my own fault. So if you read this Darren or Tamaryn, I'm whining and I admit it. It's my blog and I'm entitled to feel sorry for myself on it if I want to. :-) I also admit that the problems were largely due to my not looking after myself.

The lunch time spread probably saved my life. Great barbecued sausages from Avon's butchery, Karen brought along big bowls of the nut and seed mixes her company, Delish foods, sells and they had yoghurt (supplied by someone I can't remember) and fruit. I unashamedly made a pig of myself as Darren, Tamaryn and me were the last to get into it after unloading the bars and stacking them out of the way of the last workout. I then wandered down to the service station next door and bought the big bottle of water I should have had with me from the start. Dumbass.
I should have got Tamaryn one too, she spent the entire break furiously battling with Excel trying to work out the cumulative times to derive the start order for the finals of the last event. Not easy when you have to take into account scaled and unscaled workouts and Excel's quirks with time based calculations. I tried to help, but couldn't remember what the trick was, see earlier bleating about brain fade. I used to do an enormous amount of this when I was munging data capture from monitoring equipment in my laboratory days and I knew it was a matter of entering the minutes and seconds in the right way, but could I remember it? So Tamaryn and I were doing base 60 math to come up with the staggered start times and got it slightly wrong for the women. Emma D. sorted that out for us, she remembered how she did it for water ski racing. Oh the trick is to enter a dummy 0 for the hours and separate the numbers with colons, so 6 minutes 32 seconds becomes 0:6:32. When Emma told me afterwards I remembered it.
The last workout got us rained on a little. I was too busy talking to people who had discovered that we had the women's start times wrong to hear the briefing for the workout and started counting having no idea what the reps were, especially if the person was using jumping pull-ups instead of full. Fortunately I figured it out before I made another screw-up.


So aside from my mewling about having to work hard?

The events were:
Workout 1
10 overhead press anyhow (40kg men/30kg women)
20 KB swings 24/16kg
30 air squats
200m sprint
3 rounds for time with a 10 minute time limit.

Workout 2
10 Deadlifts (100kg men/60?kg women)
25 Double Under
3 Rounds

Workout 3
21-15-9
Burpees
Pullup
400m sand bag carry after each round

I had the same athletes through the first two workouts and a slightly different bunch for the last one. I didn't have Dave C, maybe he complained about me? Don't blame him! :-)
Great people, not a one that didn't want to be told if they weren't doing legal reps. No-one complained when I pulled them up and we even had a few jokes in mid workout.
Emma D. changed her flight back from the states and came straight from the airport to clonk herself on the forehead on the way back down during the presses. You have to move your head out of the way of the bar on the way down as well as the way up Emma! Her reaction, "It worked out well. My head hurt so much I forgot how much my arms were hurting". CrossFitters are strange people. She'll have an interesting story to tell at work on Monday.
Dave C threw me completely when he abandoned double-unders to switch to 3 times the single-unders. It may well have been while I was trying to subtract 3 complete double-unders from 25 and multiply the remainder by 3 through the fog of dehydration and low blood sugar that I missed that round. It makes a darn good excuse anyway.
Several people struggled with DUs with legs tired from the previous workout. There were some quite dismayed faces as people got themselves tied up in the rope.
The traffic coming in and out of the driveway was much heavier than I've seen it before. Everyone took the cars in true CrossFit style as just another condition of the workout.
Both Blair (finals of the last workout) and Jo G (all rounds) are going to monster these sorts of workouts when they get their pull-ups sorted out. Both are strong and only lack a fluid kip to bring them up.
I don't know her name, but the lady who manned the laptop, entered the results and managed the results sheets is my saviour. Many times I'd do a last minute sprint to her to get the sheet for the next round after loading the bars and she'd always have it ready and know who I was judging. Twice I think she came looking for me with my judging sheet when the loading took a bit longer.

Tamaryn was a machine. She kept things moving all the way through, organised the loading and stations, bullied people into the right places and as I said, spent her break battling her way through getting the staggered start sorted out. She and Darren have very different approaches to things, but both of their contributions are equally important. I hope they keep that balance going for a long time to come.

My real regret is that I didn't get to hop about with a video camera. The event deserved to be captured and the athletes have their performance recorded. Oh and having seen the bottlenecks that the spreadsheets became that I didn't help with that earlier. I couldn't think how the formulas worked at the time, but given a bit of a head-start I could have structured the the worksheets for them to make everything easier.

So a few things to digest for the next time something like this comes along.