Oakland’s Best CrossFit Gym is nestled within Great Western Power Company. CrossFit v16 members enjoy full access to GWPC and make up a wonderful community of athletes. Recently Sydney Mulkey competed in her first CrossFit comp and shared her experience with the Touchstone Climbing and Fitness blog.
By Sydney Mulkey
Many might shy away from the horrifying prospect of sweating with strangers all day on a holiday typically reserved for ingesting alcohol and not wearing pants, but eight members of Crossfit V16, located oh so conveniently in the back of the Great Western Power Company, opted to do just that this Halloween.
With a 6:00am Saturday wake up call, a batch of handmade breakfast burritos (plus a bottle of Fireball hidden in a cooler), and we were on our way to Union City to compete at Crossfit One World’s Fall Brawl. CrossFit V16 was represented by three scaled female teams, one scaled men’s team, and our fearless leader, Coach Harold Lueders.
In the spirit of Halloween, we went with the laziest team costume possible and dressed as a rainbow, complete with a leprechaun coach. For the next nine hours, we chipped away at three WODs and one floater WOD, along with dozens of other Crossfit affiliate members from across the Bay Area.
If you’ve never been to a Crossfit competition, I’ll do my best to break it down for you. You pay some gym your hard earned money to put your body through mental and physical torture for upwards of 6 hours on a given day. You compete with people whose biceps look like they were chiseled from concrete and could press your car above their heads… maybe that part is just me but I found it terrifying to think I would be compared to most of the competitors there.
After each workout, you feel like you’ve been run over by a mid-sized sedan, and then an hour later you have to go and do it again, three times in a row! When it’s all over, you feel a combination of fear, gratitude, and sheer joy that you’ve completed something that you may have never thought you could do.
The Fall Brawl workouts consisted of the following. WOD 1: work up to the heaviest weight you can manage to toss above your head (1 RM) clean complex; power clean, hang squat clean, split jerk. WOD 2: 21-15-9 for time, overhead squats at varying and increasing weights, plus lateral bar burpees. WOD 4: a chipper with a 15 minute time cap, beginning with a run around the block holding a weighted plate, followed by 100 wall balls, 100 pull ups, and 100 deadlifts at varying weights. Plus a floater WOD: fastest time to row 100 calories, then amount of calories rowed in the remaining time limit of 8 minutes.
After a few missed power cleans and split jerks, some painful overhead squats, and hundreds (yes, literally) of pull ups and wall balls, we were ready to take our places on the podium of “not last place” fame. The female teams placed 8th, 12th, and 13th out of 15, and the men placed 8th out of 19. A few fellow V16 athletes came to watch and cheer on the competitors (with donuts!), and though we got our booties whipped, all had an excellent time.
If that isn’t a shining testimonial of our CrossFit v16 program at GWPC, we don’t know what is. Donuts people. Donuts. If you’re interested in checking out our CrossFit program in Oakland, join us for an on-ramp class!
