12/11/2008

The "McFlurry" WOD & Other News

It seems strange to see something so good come out of something so terrible. This picture is of Miguel "McFlurry" Flores, a legendary Crossfitter that could attain scores the rest of us didn't even think were humanly possible yet. This link will take you right to the Crossfit Main page where McFlurry's image is up in celebration of his life

"Go see how the community is honoring another of its fallen"
I have rarely been as overwhelmed as I was experiencing the quality of character that the Crossfit community has among its members. I am proud to see people around the world honoring someone in a most unique way...through a huge amount of personal suffering. Crossfit has definitely made its mark in how we remember our people, and I am proud to be able to participate in whatever small way I can.

I have been thinking about bringing Miguel here for you all to see, and after talking to David Sailor and listening to how Crossfitters really see the Hero workouts and what these sessions of pure suck-fest mean to them, I realized I should have only gone forward with it sooner. From now on I will bring anything like this from inside the community to our site immediately. I apologize to "McFlurry" for the delay, but I will make it up...probably by puking during the workout. The workout dedicated to Miguel is described below and it looks like a pretty serious challenge, anyone that wants to participate let me know as soon as possible. We can do this here in the garage-"cave" gym, or somewhere else if there is a better option offered. I will let everyone know what kind of response we get asap, but in the meantime check out what this dude was capable of by following that link and reading what people had to say. Amazing.

"McFlurry"
Complete the following for time or at your own pace
-400m Run
-21 Power Cleans (185 lbs or 135lbs)
-21 Dumbbell Thrusters (50 lbs or 35 lbs)
-21 Pull-ups
-400m Run
-15 Power Cleans
-15 Dumbbell Thrusters
-15 Pull-ups
-400m Run
-9 Power Cleans
-9 Dumbbell Thrusters
-9 Pull-ups
-400m Run

Soccer Team Training:
Last night was my first time working with the girls soccer team, and it was a blast. I was nervous as hell to be honest heading in there but after I realized they weren't going to kill me I felt a lot better and got right down to helping teach. That was probably one of the first times I have ever been in a real coaching position and it was a pretty good feeling. I guess you could compare it to training people because in the end the reward always seems to be the student overcoming, adapting, or acquiring some new skill.
Coach Sailor used a format for training a lot like the one I am most comfortable using with the fight team, obviously scaled for a much different purpose. It entailed a dynamic warm-up game with a medicine ball to get things moving, and then moved through however many portions of different training he had planned. To be honest, a lot of those girls could have smoke checked most of the dudes that have been training around here, and if you did some homework on the Crossfit main site you would realize this always tends to be the norm. Kids are basically fearless little ninja slayers (way more deadly than just plain ninjas), and the soccer team was no exception last night as they ripped their way through the Crossfit workout named "Annie", and then continued laughing or complaining their way through a push-up test (one girl made the cut to the level 2 standard of fitness ability by the way).
They definitely reminded me of my little sister a bit because I spent awhile talking to feet instead of faces as the team attempted to learn handstand walking.

By the way, our garage gym now has an official set of rings for training...oh yes...they are that bad ass. I was in there forever last night flirting with frostbite trying to figure out how to do the front and back levers, inverted hangs, dips, pull-ups, and anything else that made me look like I was having a mid-air seizure. David was responsible for this amazing gift (I think gift but you can all go ahead and start bitching about how sore you are if you want, I won't heed any of it anyway). We are very lucky to have people like him around who go so far out of their way to make sure we can keep moving this thing forward. I will try to always have them with me so anyone that wants to formally challenge a spot on the skill board feel free. The girls soccer team is flying out for a tournament this weekend so even though they aren't reading this I still hope they wreck everyone in their way.
Good luck, ladies.

I wanted to briefly update everyone on some of the changes that will be occurring soon. There are a few other blogs I have been creating that all start with TheSavageSociety but will be dedicated only a single purpose. One is The Savage Society Library where I will post all the resources we have available and who to contact for each item. Another page is nothing but 100% leader boards. I wanted to make all of this stuff look cool so I have been playing around with backgrounds and stuff so that the leader boards will look like every one's name has been chiselled in stone.

By now everyone should be familiar with the layout on the right hand side bar. I tried to organize the links a bit for ease of reference and I also changed the way the links are connected to their sources. They should load much faster now and pop up in PDF format for you to download if you so desire. This is especially true for the Crossfit Journal Articles and you can definitely count on me putting up every single free one they have available as we go. The Crossfit Journal has been amazing at opening doors to whole new realms of learning for me and I can only hope someone else is able to experience the same thing.

The other journal I subscribe to online is called The Performance Menu published by Catalyst Athletics, which is also linked on the right hand column in the affiliates section. The programs that those guys follow (and the core of training going on over at the Burgener site) puts great emphasis on the Olympic style lifts. These are not the only things they do, and most of the time any type of workout structured around a single discipline like that has been designed to work synergistically with the main Crossfit page. They plan to bombard your body and mind from a completely different, or sometimes parallel way when compared to the main site.

Expect to hear a lot more about these people because explosive movements that tax the body as much as the Olympic lifts (especially in Catalyst Athletics' Max Effort Black Box program) will develop an overwhelming capability for fitness in you, specifically an overwhelming ability to produce so much blinding force so fast, and hopefully for so long that no one will be able to confront you and survive. The same type of detail and idea governs what Crossfit Endurance does for those types of physical abilities. I keep finding more and more affiliates that have taken the original Crossfit paradigm and mutated it, and now
instead of accepting Crossfit as a method of gaining general fitness and ability, it has become a way for professionals to become Experts in all realms of physical and mental preparedness. We still don't give a shit about the "specialist" either, he can rot in his single repetition life... but I think we are far from accepting mediocrity and average levels of proficiency in what we do.
There will be more to come on this topic soon, I am still doing a lot of reading and searching to find the right sources for you. I am going to get this post out now, time for some training around here.

In a few hours I will post up the fight training for tonight and some basic information about metabolic pathways (something that has been requested a few times already, and I want to provide the clarification desire). Hope you are all training hard and reaping the benefits.

(Note: I would have no problem posting all kinds of WOD's each day for different people to try, I just need to know who is using them and I will expect to see the scores so I can at least make sure there is some form of understanding and safety involved. Post in the comments, its the best way to make us grow.)

John is home in 14 days... good number for him

6 comments:

BP said...

Good stuff man!
Seems like things are really coming together. Congrats!

Sailorcrew said...

Hey Sam,

You did a great job last night coaching the soccer team. They took to you quickly and you provided some great information to them.

Feel free to use that pic of Dana with the mask on, it's currently the home screen on my phone and I smile every time I look at it.

Regarding the hero's, they paid the ultimate price, what suffering I do during the workout is simply my best way of honoring them.

We are off to Graceland! David.

BamBam said...

did I hear a little ringy-dingy.

My friend Vince showed me the seacret to the iron cross. If your lucky I'll teach you. (Hint: start by buying a pack of Kools)

BamBam said...

I'm probably going to regret telling you this but I just went down to the gym here at work and we have a nice Concept 2 rower. So I guess my lunch breaks are fair gaim for some rowwing/crossfit/bleed-from-the-a$$ routines.

(i discized "s" as the "$" sign if you were confused)

BamBam said...

that should hve been "game" not "gaim" im not that dumb.

BamBam said...

Hey Samy (davis) do you know if Jonny B (good) is going to jump into this crossfit stuff when he gets back? Maybe we could make a work out in calibration of him passing the test. I was thinking something like: We name it after his dog Brady then try to see if us savage humans can compete to the level of a savage beast. It could be a 100yard run followed by jumping back and forth over a box 20 times or so then a 50yard wheel barrel race to the finish. We could train Brady and record his time then see how close we get.