trainermerle's blog

This Saturday at 8:30 am at Crossfit Relentless we will be holding another skills session. In this half hour session we will be working on the Power Snatch. This session is open to all Crossfit USA and Crossfit Relentless group members.

Also,with today's high heat please be sure you hydrate well throughout the day,during and after your WOD. And all I will say is today's WOD includes running and wallball!! Can you say "bucket of suck"!!!.....3...2..1....giddy up!!!!!!!

This Memorial Day  CrossFit USA will be closed. However, there will  be one 8 am class at CrossFit Relentless that everyone is welcome to come to. I would love to see 50 or 100 of you hitting this wod at the same time. So if you want to work off the sins of the barbecue show up at CFR for an 8 am wod !

As you all know we qualified to take our team to the 2010 CrossFit Games. I would like to see our community pull together and help raise some money for our team to go. We will have a donation jar at both CrossFit USA and CrossFit Relentless. We will also be doing a couple of fundraisers to help raise money for our athletes. Please do whatever you can to help defray the travel expenses for our team and thank you in advance!

Jen hitting todays wod as Rx'd

gym dog...aka Ben!

CrossFit USA has made the cut and is heading to the 2010 Crossfit Games ! Our team showed some gritty determination to earn our spot for the affiliate challenge. The last wod was a stadium wod with 4 athletes cycling through  30 kettle bell swings, 30 box jumps,30 burpees and 30 deadlifts. Once all four stations were completed by the whole team they each got to take a turn pushing a weighted prowler up and down the the track. The kicker to this whole wod was that one team member had to wear a 20 lb vest for the entire wod. The man who stepped upped and took one for the team was Gerry. Gerry was also crucial in the second wod by pulling an incredible time on the 4 k row. Then, while completely exhausted, managed to squeeze off a few burpees to help the team move into 5th place. I can honestly tell you that I never been so profoundly impressed with a group of people during an athletic event. The grit,determination and heart that all our athletes demonstrated leaves me in awe. Congratulations to  Brendon,Janeil,Becky,Gerry,Danny, Seth and Annie for a job extremely well done. Thank you all for what you have done for CrossFit USA!

Glenn and I arrived around 11:30 am to get ourselves a primo camping spot and get the lay of the land. Not long after I sat in the judges meeting to go over movement standards for the masters and affiliate team wods. No major surprises there as we were all pretty familiar with the standards.The parking lot quickly became a tent city as teams and individuals arrived for the day. There some spirited competition from the masters division (50 years old and up) before the first affiliate heat began. I judged the first few heats of masters and then we set about getting our team ready. As most of you know our team pretty much fell apart earlier this week when one of our female competitors had a death in the family and it left us in doubt as to whether or not we could even compete with only one female athlete. On our ride up to Albany we were busy emailing and calling our only possible solution to the crisis. We asked our only individual female athlete to also compete on our team to help keep us in the running. She agreed but wasn't sure she could even get to us on time. While this was going on Becky( one of our other female athletes) had to actually bribe her boss into letting her out early in an attempt to get her to the first wod on time,she was 5 minutes too late to help. So with 5 minutes to go before the first affiliate wod Annie Majoca stepped in and saved the day. She literally didn't even know all the team members on our team! They 4 athletes had never even trained together. We faced 30 affiliate teams of which there were at least 3 teams that had athletes who would have qualified to go as individual athletes. With all this going on  the females had to snatch a weight close to their girls previous 1 rep max's before today. Brendan Marolda, Dan Schreiner, Janeil Stehr and Annie Majoca performed absolutely fantastic. The boys banged out the snatch reps fast and the girls really stepped up and did the same. Without the strength of our girls we would have been sunk. We placed 9th overall and we feel real good going into tomorrows wod. As of today I think we are within striking distance to go to the 2010 CrossFit games as an affiliate team. Outstanding work gang!