"Tabata Something Else"
Complete 32 intervals of 20 seconds of work followed by ten seconds
of rest where the first 8 intervals are pull-ups, the second 8 are
push-ups, the third 8 intervals are sit-ups, and finally, the last 8
intervals are squats. There is no rest between exercises. SCORING: Sum the lowest-rep interval for each exercise for total points.
I've personally been looking forward to featuring Jon Gilson since we started this little "best of CrossFit" articles project. Jon has already picked his favourite, but it's hard for me to do the same. He's an amazing writer. His articles can be found at: Again Faster .
We used half of his famous essay, "Don't Quit," on the backs of our shirts from the Catalyst Games (yours is on the way, Jon.) Jon sold us our awesome scoreboard clock through the Again Faster Store. Today, we feature "The Lion's Ovation," which was posted right after CrossFit Games 2009. Jon was there.
The Lion's Ovation
Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 12:00PM by Jon Gilson
There is no wooden platform. Only rolled rubber, stretched over a
concrete pad and coated with the thin, obnoxious dust of the Aromas
desert.
Luminaries with red and white lights are replaced by blue-clad Judges, some qualified, some not, all with hands held high.
The
contenders eschew the singlet fashion of the sport; their wooden-soled
shoes the only vestige of traditional Olympic weightlifting garb.
Dead silence is a joke, drowned out by a fierce, screaming crowd and the hate music rocketing from the speakers.
The California sun slow cooks the barbells, each resting against a
log marked with a number that has no bearing on the task at hand.
Ten
minutes. A stack of plates. Power snatch or squat snatch, split or not.
Rip it up smoothly, press it out ugly, it doesn’t matter. Just get it
over your head. Max load wins.
“Go!” slams out of the P.A., and
the barbells flash. There are beautiful lifts, and ugly lifts,
competitors digging, catching loads that should succumb to gravity,
standing to the lion’s ovation, the roar of myriad spectators who know
the feeling but not the arena.
They sense revolution. There is no polite clapping. This is gladiatorial fervor, surging crowd thumbs down, kill it now.
There
is no need to visit the scorers’ table. The athletes witness the
competition in real time, those who would have them slashed from the
Games with superior lifts pooling sweat at their feet and crying
triumph with each successful lift.
This is not a USA
Weightlifting event. It is the future. Hundreds of eyes fixed on a
stadium littered with lifters, not one paying attention to protocol or
deferentially waiting their turn to lift, none worried if they’ll
follow themselves on the next lift—it’s guaranteed that they will.
There
are no games to play, no strategy, no energy saved for lifts two and
three. They lift until they fail, and then they lift again.
The
traditional throng, baited breath in a fluorescent-washed gymnasium, is
replaced with the vanguard of training, hundreds of valkyries sucking
dirt and spitting fire, CrossFitters
who recognize that work done is work done. They know that fitness is
not measured in an instant but a series of instants, an endless thread
of pain and resolve, held together with the glue of pride and the
threat of failure.
It isn’t just spectator friendly. It’s an
orgy of entertainment, created by a single rule: Stand It Up. Dumped
barbells carom back toward the lifters, thrown unto the duplicitous
curbs at their feet, giving a feeling of impending catastrophe and
snap-focusing the risk of athletic pursuit.
There are those
who would witness such a spectacle and bellow foul. This, they would
say, is not weightlifting. This is an abomination.
They would
be right, and for every wrong reason. We are no longer playing the same
game, and just as you cannot call out baseball for cricket or black for
white, you cannot call this a mangled weightlifting meet.
Instead,
it is an evolution, a different creature, borne of the need to adapt.
Until now, weightlifting was dying, its punctured lungs aspirating and
collapsing. With a single hour on a sunburned farm, it now stands
ready, the province of Red Bull sponsorships and worshipful ten-year
olds, where the best aren’t strong once an hour, but a dozen times in
ten minutes, their fitness defined not in one sphere but in many.
There
will be a fight, but it will not last long. First, the purists will
laugh at the rules and the form, declaring that we couldn’t possibly
succeed with such a preposterous format. As the loads increase, they’ll
start with the ‘dangerous’, and as the crowds swell to fill the Rose
Bowl, they’ll seek sanction and injunction.
In the end, the
resistance won’t matter, because superiority survives on its own merit,
because this is the future, wood and spandex be damned.