Should Sanctionals Use the Open to Qualify Athletes?

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“The four P’s of athletic excellence: patience, poise, and perfect practice.” — Doug Salmon

Fighting Cowdens with the Best Box in Britain

Some background.

In November of 2016, Samantha Kelly got the devastating news that her then eleven-year-old daughter Charlotte had Cowden Syndrome, a rare disorder that causes the body to develop tumor-like growths and with a high probability of further developing certain cancers.

Samantha and Charlotte’s days were filled with doctor’s appointments, surgeries, radioactive iodine treatment, and recovery. One day Samantha saw an ad for a local CrossFit box, Real Fitness, and she decided CrossFit would be a great way to spend quality one-on-one time with her son, James, through this trying time.

“I am far from a natural at it found it really helped me cope with the difficulties we were facing as a family,” Samantha told us. Charlotte loved her time in the box, and with her son, and the community. It gave her an idea.

CrossFit for Cowdens

Cowdens affects an estimated 1 in 250,000 people so Charlotte did the math. That meant around 260 people in the UK, where she lives. She decided to do a workout for each of them in order to raise money in aid of the PTEN Research Foundation, which was founded to find treatments or therapies for PTEN Syndromes. She logs every single workout on her Cure for Cowden’s page. She’s enjoying the process so much that she’s taken it a step further.

Mama gets things done.

She started the Best Box in Britain Throwdown, a charity CrossFit contest that brings the entire box together for one cause over six weeks.

Beginning on January 14th, participating gyms will be emailed a workout every Monday and will have until Friday to complete the WOD. As well as the usual scoring on the WODs there will be bonus points awarded each week for things like the greatest overall age of participants, another week might be widest age range, or most CrossFit beginners having a go at it.

Samantha hopes the friendly competition will bring the community even closer. “We take each day as it comes which you have to with a rare disease but I count myself very lucky to have the community around me,” she told us. “I think without the CrossFit community I would have found it far harder to cope with the past few years. I wouldn’t like to imagine it really.”

GAMES NEWS

The Open Down Under: A New Way to Qualify?

Way back in November, the Down Under CrossFit Championship announced that they were taking a different approach to qualifying athletes for their event.

Rather than conduct an online qualifier similar to the 14 other sanctioned events this season, the team from Down Under instead chose to use the CrossFit Games Open as their qualifier for potential individual and team athletes.

“With so many online qualifiers and the CrossFit Open, all in close proximity. We did not want to add another cog to the athletes busy schedule,” Down Under event director Mick Shaw explained in an email. “We have found the CrossFit Open has been successful is progressing athletes to the next stage for so many years and are confident that this will be achieved again in 2019.”

Through the Open, Down Under staff will guarantee a number of spots to both Australian, and international individuals and teams, so long as they meet a specific performance criteria based on their Open rank and number of affiliates in their country.

This decision is at odds with every other Sanctionals’ announced process for qualifying athletes in 2019.

So should more Sanctionals should hop on-board and follow suit in future seasons?

Continue reading.

Things To…

WATCH: Jared Stevens Faith and Fitness 

In part one of this series, Active Life RX follows CrossFit Games athlete, gym owner, and husband Jared Stevens to see how his faith and CrossFit merge into one as he inspires people to get fit and find their faith.

IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ME.

HEAR: Stop Paying Attention to Body Fat Percentage

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon is a functional medicine physician whose practice aims to restore metabolism, balance hormones and optimize body composition. On this episode of Barbell Shrugged she argues that we should stop paying attention to body fat percentage and instead focus on building muscle.

REBUILD YOUR METABOLISM.

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• OFFICER BENEFIT WOD — On December 22, Police Officer Nikki Morton was assaulted by a wanted subject in downtown Greenville, SC. The assault resulted in Nikki having a broken jaw in multiple places. She underwent surgery on Christmas Eve and is now home recovering but is expected to be out of work for the next ten weeks. This Saturday CrossFit Potentia is hosting a benefit WOD to help her and her family as she
  recovers. 
• OFFICER MEMORIAL WOD — Butchertown CrossFit is hosting a memorial WOD Sunday, January 20th, for Detective Deidre Mengedoht who was killed when an impaired driver struck her vehicle during a traffic stop. She is survived by her nine-year-old son, Preston, who will be the recipient of all donations made during the memorial WOD. 
• COACH AND POLICE OFFICER REMEMBERED — Police Officer Daniel McCartney was killed in the line of duty in January 2018. He also worked as a coach at CrossFit Yelm, where a Hero WOD was made for him. On Tuesday, a firearms training center in Pierce County, WA was renamed after him. 
• ANNIVERSARY BENEFIT — Revolt Fitness in Pensacola, FL is celebrating their first anniversary with a fundraiser to benefit at-risk youth in their community.
• SOBER CROSSFIT — Every Monday night at CrossFit CE, a Chicago chapter of the Phoenix, athletes gather for a sober WOD. Participants must have a minimum of 48 hours sober to participate. 
• SECOND LOCATION — CrossFit RPE in Deerfield, IL just opened a second location in Northbrook, IL with 10,000 square feet of space. (Fun fact: The first time our Managing Editor ever did Murph was as a drop-in at CrossFit RPE. She survived.)

CHALK UP IN 2 MINUTES (a highlight reel around social media of CrossFit pros and average joes)

Dave Lipson and Camille Leblanc-Bazinet tried a couples workout • Teresa Trojanowski did 276 dumbbell snatches in ten minutes • Corinne Tindal
Cook gets a PR when she strings together four pull-ups • Kate Nye hits a 264 pound power clean PR and then a 198 pound power snatch PR •  Ben Alderman deadlifted 500 pounds • LARABAR released their new Peanut Butter and Banana flavor and their new Chocolate Hazelnut Swirl • Happy birthday Dani Elle Speegle. 

…and registration officially opened for the 2019 CrossFit Open yesterday.

CrossFit Trademarks “Sanctionals” — CrossFit HQ filed to trademark “Sanctionals” back in September 28, 2018 and was approved yesterday. 

— According to the application, the mark was filed for: “Entertainment in the nature of competitions in the field of fitness; entertainment in the nature of sports competitions; entertainment services, namely, an ongoing series featuring sports competitions provided through cable television, video-on-demand transmission, and the Internet.”

Oh, and by the Way — Yesterday, we noticed that Dave Castro’s Instagram was turned to private, meaning anyone that wasn’t following him previously will have to request a follow now. We also noticed that it’s been exactly 159 days since Dave Castro has mentioned anyhing about the CrossFit Games. August 5, 2018,
was the last time he mentioned the Games. 

Asia CrossFit Championship — Yesterday the Asia CrossFit Championship announced they were letting the public decide on what their first online qualifier WOD will be. Chipper Christine was the winner. Registered athletes have until Monday, January 28 at 7:59 AM PT to submit their scores. 

— WOD 19.1: “Chipper Christine”

For time:

1,500 meter row

36 Deadlifts (225/155 pounds)

63 Box jump-overs (24/20 inches)

Sports Illustrated Ranks the Most Fit Athletes in Sports — Sports Illustrated just named their own Fittest 50 according to their panel of five experts. The athletes were “selected based on their performances over the last 12 months; demands and risks of their respective sports; durability; training regimens; and other physical criteria including power, speed, strength, agility, endurance, flexibility and more.”​ Mat Fraser came in sixth for men while Tia-Clair Toomey came in third for women. 

“It’s Getting Clearer — The Diet – Cancer Connection Points to Sugar and Carbs,” by Sam Apple, The Los Angeles Times 

In August of 2016, the New England Journal of Medicine published a striking report on cancer and body fat: Thirteen separate cancers can now be linked to being overweight or obese, among them a number of the most common and deadly cancers of all — colon, thyroid, ovarian, uterine, pancreatic and (in postmenopausal women) breast cancer.

Earlier this month, a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention added more detail: Approximately 631,000 Americans were diagnosed with a body fat-related cancer in 2014, accounting for 40% of all cancers diagnosed that year.

Increasingly, it seems not only that we are losing the war on cancer, but that we are losing it to what we eat and drink.

These new findings, while important, only tell us so much. The studies reflect whether someone is overweight upon being diagnosed with cancer, but they don’t show that the excess weight is responsible for the cancer. They are best understood as a warning sign that something about what or how much we eat is intimately linked to cancer. But what?

1/10 – 2/4: Row’d Royalty (Online)

1/11: Redneck Hootenanny (Fruitland, OH)

1/12: Community Workout Tyler Strong (West Lafayette, IN)

1/12: Remembering Cora WOD (Madras, OR) 

1/12: Last Best Pace Throwdown (Missoula, MT)

1/10 – 1/13: Feats of Strength Online Meet (Online)

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1/12: Granite Games Throwdown at New Ulm CrossFit (New Ulm, MN)

1/12: The BrickYard Brawl (South Windsor, CT)

1/12: Hometown Throwdown 4 at CrossFit 534 (Poplarville, MS)

1/12: Granite Games Winter Throwdown (Waite Park, MN)

1/12: Granite Games Throwdown (Snyder, TX) 

1/12: Nikki Morton Benefit WOD (Greeneville, SC)

1/12 – 1/13: Scaled Flames (Amsterdam)

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1/17 – 1/20: Wodapalooza (Miami, FL)

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1/19: Battle For The Axe (Baxter, MN)

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1/19: Battle for the Axe (Baxter, MN)

1/19: Great Lakes Games 2018 (Detroit, MI)

1/19 – 1/20: Chiang Mai Throwdown (Chiang Mai, Thailand)

1/20: Det. Deidre Mengedoht Hero WOD (Louisville, KY)

1/21: Helen for Hounds at CrossFit Pretoria (Pretoria, South Africa)

1/25 – 1/27: Australian CrossFit Championships (Queensland, AUS)

1/25 – 1/27: Judgment Day Hawkes Bay (Napier, NZ)

1/26: The Force Wars 2 (Pembroke Pines, FL)

1/26: Lost River Rumble (Bowling Green, KY)

1/26: The Blizzard Bowl (Little Canada, MN)

1/26: 2019 IceBreather Classic (Springfield, IL)

1/26: ATCF Cancer Crackdown: Revival of The Fittest (Pasco, WA)

1/26: Hung Like Coff at PFC CrossFit (Las Vegas, NV)

1/26: Steel Rail Shootout 2019 (McComb, MS)

1/26: Woid Beast Fitness Challenge (Cham, Germany)

1/26: Brick NY Midtown Throwdown (New York, NY)

1/26: Fifth Annual Cold Steel Classic (Oswego, IL) 

1/26: New Year’s Revolution (Seminole, FL)

1/26: Three Rivers Throwdown (Rome, GA)

1/26 – 1/27: Cougars and Cradle Robbers (Salem, MA)

1/26 – 1/27: Game Day Eau Claire (Eau Claire, WI)

1/26 – 1/27: NorCal Masters (San Rafael, CA)

1/27: Big Dawgs Athlete Development Camp (Letchworth, England)

1/29 – 2/2: Fittest in Cape Town (Cape Town, South Africa)

2/1 – 2/2: Battle of the Brave III (North Kansas City, MO)

2/2: Golden State Games (Stockton, CA)

2/2: Left Coast Classic Competition (Laguna Niguel, CA)

2/2: Golden State Games (Stockton, CA)

2/2: A League of Their Own (San Antonio, TX)

2/3: Coffland Hero WOD (Norwalk, CT) 

2/9: Valentine’s Day Crush (North Hollywood, CA)

2/9: The Garage Games Master of the Masters (Suwanee, GA)

2/9: Cupid’s Roar Partner Competition (Melbourne, Australia)

2/9: 3rd Annual Black Ops Partner Competition (Wheaton, IL)

2/9: Bedrock Heart Breaker (Calgary, AB)

2/9: Battle of the Ages (Jacksonville, FL) 

2/9: Battle for Bae 2019 (San Mateo, CA)

2/9: Battle of the Fittest 6: NYC Throwdown (New York, NY)

2/9 – 2/10: The CrossFit Circus (Des Moines, IA)

2/16: Valentine’s Day Massacre (Kilgore, TX)

2/16: The Garage Games Xs & Ys (Valdosta, GA)

2/16: Couples Clash 2019 (Pensacola, FL)

2/16: Tuff Love (Boulder, CO)

2/16: Valentine’s Day Massacre (Selma, TX)