NorCal Masters Wrap-Up

Four tired CFOers after two days of competition:  Steve P, Mini, Leka, and Lance

The NorCal Masters is a wrap, and what a blast it was!  It was a well-run event, with lots of rock solid workouts--nothing fancy, just a good test of fitness.  It was also a long weekend of competition.  All four of us were glad to be done on Sunday!

Here's a quick summary of the competition for each CFOer.

Steve P

Steve couldn't be stopped.  He was like a runaway freight train.  I don't even know where to begin since his performance was so dominant this weekend.  He competed in 9 events.  His worst finish was 3rd place.  His place in each of the 9 events was distributed as follows:  five 1st-place finishes, two 2nd-place finishes, and two 3rd-place finishes.  Wow!

Although he didn't win the second workout, which was split into two parts, I think that was his best performance.  It combined max-weight snatches and cleans with high-rep burpees and toes-to-bar.  He finished second in the snatch/clean portion and second in the burpee/toes-to-bar portion.  No one else was nearly that well-balanced (e.g., the guy who had the biggest snatches and cleans had the lowest number of burpees and toes-to-bar, and the guy who had the most burpees and toes-to-bar had the second-lowest total for snatches and cleans).

To say this was strong work by Steve is an understatement!

Leka

Leka was super nervous about competing leading up to the NorCal Masters, but it turns out it was all for naught.  She ended up finishing in 6th place overall, which is her best finish in a CF competition yet!

Her best performance was on the brutal Sunday morning chipper workout, which involved rowing, bear crawls, thrusters, box jumps, deadlifts, wall balls, and ring dips.  It was nasty.  She took 5th place on this workout, winning her heat in runaway fashion and executing a perfect game plan.  She never stopped and she never panicked.  She just got out to a lead and kept it.

And a bonus for Leka:  She was able to get Ann G, Aisha, and Beth to commit to competing next year.  So now it's out there in the public and these four women are committed for next year!

Lance

Unbeknownst to most of you, Lance has been fighting with a bad ankle and heel for the last few months, even though in most cases you'd never know it.  As such, a lot of the events that came up, particularly those that involved running or jumping, were rough.  He toughed it out until the very end, though, until he finally had to succumb in the last workout.  It was a shuttle sprint and wheelbarrow carry that ended with 100 double-unders.  As he was motoring through the final few double-unders (one of the movements that's normally in his wheelhouse), he heard a popping noise in his heel (which turned out to be damage to some soft tissue, but thankfully not to any tendons or joints) and wisely chose to stop.

Lance's best performance was in the second workout, and in particular the max-weight snatches and cleans.  He finished in 3rd place, and probably could've won the event if I hadn't been so conservative in suggesting what weights to use for snatches and cleans (that one's on me).  Just goes to show that pushing your squat up to 425 pounds can have some great carryover.  Strong work, Lance!

Mini

I ended up finishing in 2nd place overall.  It was a good start to the CF Games pre-season for me (the regular season gets started with the CF Games Open).  I gotta hand it to Scott Dorrity, who finished in 1st place.  He was just better (bigger, stronger, better-conditioned, and equally as skilled) than me in just about everything.  I was briefly in first place (over the course of the first three events on Saturday) but he was just too good over the course of the entire competition.  I definitely have some work to do to get better.

My best finish in any single event was 1st place in the weighted pull-up/farmers-walk couplet (max weighted pull-up with a 3-minute time cap followed by max 10m farmers walks with 70-lb kettlebells for 1 minute).  

But my favorite and proudest moment was taking two second-place finishes in a workout (split into two separate events) involving 150m shuttle sprints, kettlebell swings, and pull-ups.  Nobody else had better combined finishes in that workout than I did.  I attribute it to all the CFO crowd support there.

It was so great competing with Steve, Leka, and Lance.  Hopefully more of you will join us next year!  And a big thank-you to all of you who came out and supported us...it didn't go unnoticed!