Thoughts from the plane....

Here we go... Day 1 on our adventures in California at the 2011 CrossFit Games.

We are flying somewhere over the Oregon right now. I see beautiful coast line and a patchwork quilt of various growth/logging stages of ever green trees below me. I figure now would be a great chance to get a bit of a blog rolling along since I bought this little ipad I'm working on for the ease of just that, keeping the peeps at home up to date and with the latest Taranis happenings.

I'm incredibly excited for the weekend. I'm also a bit of a nervous wreck. I'm not an athlete stepping on the WOD floor. There is no pressure on me to preform in a physical capacity at all. In fact, unless I go to great lengths to make it happen, I probably won't get a WOD in for the next 6 days. So what are the nerves about? Well, I do have the honour of being the Team coach. My job to this point has been to schedule WOD times that work best for the athletes, have some t-shirts printed and with input and guidance from PeeBs and Prime I had to create "crushing" WODs to test the Team with. The goal was to help them glue as a group, learn more about each other as athletes and to throw at them a few random unexpected situations. I'm very thankful we made a pool WOD happen this past Friday! With the announcements from Games HQ that all the individual athletes would be performing a 25m swim proficiency test, it's natural to wonder if the team will have to do the same. I feel good knowing that everybody hit the pool and felt the suck fest that swimming can be. We also did a beach WOD one overcast Sunday afternoon a few weeks back. The tide was much higher than anticipated and the WOD layout and space had to change last minute. I was so happy to see that despite not really knowing what the next task was, they all adapted, moved and battled thru the WOD in the exact manner I have come to expect from this crew... With focus, determination and effort never less than 110% from anyone. I simply love watching these guys and gals WOD.

What about DCon and LuLu you might be asking?!? Have no fear about those two fierce women. They were also at the beach and pool, in fact, I believe both hit the pool on several occasions. Rest assured they WOD in the sand or in the water the same way they do when you see them in the box. Hard. Fast. Relentless.

So back to my nerves... What is to stress about now? Besides giving my opinion on WOD strategy, slapping hats and sunscreen on their heads and keep them hydrated, what can I do at this point? The fact that the people stepping out on to the WOD floor are more than a Team I spend time with, they are my friends, my family, my tribe. My heart soars for them in their victories and breaks for them in their defeats. We face these ups and down in the box weekly. Now it's time to put all the training to the test and as a person on the sidelines, while my physical out put pales in comparison, my emotional investment is out there with every athlete, every WOD. In the interest of some emotional filtering, I'm going to wrap this little blog up. I promise to to my best to maintain the information flow from inside the battle field here. Keep checking the games site for WOD updates and cheer as loud as you can, every little bit of energy helps!!
Sully