Our team’s 2014 CrossFit Games season is over, and we did not make our goal of placing in the top 30 teams in the Southeast and moving on to Regionals. And that’s OK. I don’t say that because I don’t care about winning, or I don’t care about goals, or I don’t take training seriously. I say that because we did everything possible to enable our success. The fact that we didn’t succeed isn’t a reflection on us or our efforts. It’s a reflection on the level of competition that the CrossFit Open has reached in 2014. We trained hard for a year, sometimes 2-3 hours a day. We took the Open workouts seriously. We repeated the Open workouts 2-3 times to get our best scores. In short, we gave 100%. When I look at the result, I don’t see a group of people who failed. I see a group of people who did their best and found out their best wasn’t quite good enough. And that’s OK. Because we can make our best better. All that takes is time…and more training.
The 2015 season starts now. But calm down. We’re not doing any thrusters or burpees next week. We are all beaten down from the mental and physical stress of the Open. So I’ve put together a training plan for next week that is a little unusual. It’s designed to give us a break from the demands of training while preserving what we all enjoy so much about training, camaraderie and achievement. The week of training below is absolutely not designed to improve your fitness. It’s designed to maximize fun across broad time and modal domains. Don’t worry, the serious training is coming–but not next week. Next week we recharge.
Nate Gray was gracious enough to do the lion’s share of our team programming from late August until the end of the Open. We spent a lot of late nights pouring over exactly what percentages to assign and exactly how many box jumps or muscle ups were not enough or too much. This season was my toughest training year ever, and my performance in the Open was my best ever. I’m forever grateful for his help. Thanks, Nate.
For the 2015 season I’m going to change things up quite a bit. We learned a lot of lessons from last season. I’ve also picked up ideas from Julie Foucher’s 2012 training log and the way other proven teams like Hack’s Pack, CrossFit New England, and NC Lab structure their training. Next season will still be periodized on a seasonal macrocycle composed of several mesocycles. If you’re not a geek, that just means we are going to change our style of training every few weeks, with the ultimate goal of maximizing our performance in the Open. But in general, you are going to see a little less “lift weights, do some skill work, hit a metcon” and more unique combinations of strength, conditioning, and skill work integrated together. I am also going to integrate more of our work into regular class sessions. I write the program for both, so why not do it when it makes sense? More often you will be able to knock out part of the day’s work by attending a regular class. This will make training even more fun and probably more time efficient. There will still be a good bit of “doing your own thing” but you’ll have the option for a class environment more often than in the past.
I’m also delivering the programming in a new format–what you see below. You can click on the link to view, save, or print the week’s training in Google Docs. You can also view it natively within this post. This means no more email lists or messing with PDFs. Each week will get a new post, and they’ll all be archived at crossfitimpulse.com/team. The entire world can see our training if they wish. Maybe they’ll jump in and join us. You can also get to the training by clicking the “Team” button on our main page.
So cheers to a new season of possibilities. I hope each and every one of you will join me for the ride. Despite my best Open performance ever, the most valuable thing I gained this season was the experience of training with all of you. I sometimes become so focused on tangible goals that I forget to enjoy the process. But if I step back for a moment I find myself in the best shape of my life, with a great place to train, where I really enjoy the people I get to train with each day. Given the choice, I’ll take that over a weekend at Regionals.
-Jeff
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