Every Wednesday night these kids come and work on agility, body awareness, core strength and even the beginnings of barbell lifting. These guys literally can run for days so Will put them through grueling workouts, which after watching their game this past weekend its paid off.

This past Saturday was one of the final games determining the seating for State Championships in March. Our team already had a spot but today’s game had first place on the line… While I may personally not like to have a lead going into competitions, I can definitely understand the pride of being in first place in the state.

Early in the first half the other team scored a goal and in general dominated the field. Things were not looking good and did I mention we were short two of our starting players due to an injury and some technicalities during a previous game… tensions were tight to say the least. As the players came back on the field in the second half something clicked and with one player short they were able to score three goals and shut the other team down for the entire half!

It was a very exciting game watching these youngsters demonstrate their athleticism and determination to overcome what was starting to feel like an unbeatable team. It was more then obvious that during the final minutes of the second half when legs and minds were tired, they had what it took to bring home the win! Congratulations young men and we will see you Wednesday for more training and a lesson on the importance of sportsmanship.

CrossFit Headquarters will release the workouts one week at a time with the first one being announced February 22nd. Like last year, Fury will host “Sectional Saturdays” in which we will all do the week’s workout on Saturday as a gym with some food and beverages after to celebrate putting in some hard work. However, this year we are changing things up a bit. Fury will host four out of the five Saturdays because CrossFit Scottsdale has invited us to compete in their Friday Night Lights Event for the first Open workout on Friday, February 24th. We will host the next four workouts commencing with our own end of the Open Fanale on Saturday March 24th with the Arizona Affiliate Community Participating.

We are encouraging all of our CrossFitters to register for the Open and participate in all of the Sectional Saturday workouts regardless of whether you are trying to compete for the Games themselves. The more participation by our members will make for a more exciting competitive atmosphere and truly inspires our Games athletes to work extra hard to get to the Games and represent Fury and all it’s badass members!

Registration for the Open is $20 through CrossFit, Friday Night Lights will be held at CrossFit Scottsdale and registration for this event begins today as well. Costs is $25 and there will be three divisions of competition: Master, RX’d and Scales. For our members we are asking for $10 a week because as always there will be food and festivities in addition to the workouts. It’s an exciting time here at Fury and for the CrossFit community and we hope all of our members will join us in the fight to find the Fittest on Earth!

These next few weeks, months and years are going to be very exciting times for this new partnership! Expect many reports and posts coming from ringside as Jocelyn and her sister take on the world…

When you first walk into the gym and see the white board, whose name do you look for? Whose scores do you search for and try to beat? You see that score and know that you need to beat it, if only by one second or 1 kilo. We all have a few people we try to keep track of. Sometimes you have a great day and beat them, sometimes you just can’t quite eek out that last rep fast enough.

But what happens when the wheels fall off and you miss horribly. It can be frustrating to not put up the performance you had hoped for. Crossfit is a highly competitive environment and it is easy to get caught up in the heat of battle and become too disappointed in any given workout. When we do this, however, we lose sight of who we are really competing with: ourselves.

Competition is an awesome thing and it drives to levels we would not be capable of on our own. I know that having seeing the person next to me still on the bar makes me want stay on even longer. But you also need to realize that you cannot control how well the person next to you does. Maybe they had extra Wheaties bacon that day, maybe the workout suits their strengths better, or maybe they just had more focus that day. Regardless, how well your competition does should not dictate how you feel about your performance.

Ask yourself, did I push as hard as I could have? Could I have rested less or maybe put on 2 more kilos? Is there any way you could have improved your own results? If you get a 2 minute PR on Fran, enjoy the victory. Don’t get down on yourself because someone else got a 2:30 PR and just barely beat you.

On any given workout, and on any given lift, your main goal should be to improve on your last attempt. We are all striving to get faster, stronger, more agile and more powerful. This comes through hard work, hours of practice and hundreds of repetitions. We try to attack our weaknesses and solidify our strengths. Basing your sense of success for a day at the gym on the performance of others is a poor judge of your progress towards your goals.

But if you want to see progress, then you need to keep track of past results. That is what Beyondthewhiteboard.com is for. Not only can you see what the next day’s workout is, you can see how you did the last time it came up. That way you can track your own progress and see the amazing changes you achieve while training at Fury.

So, go ahead, chase that time set by your nemesis. Set your bar high and settle for nothing less than 100% effort. But whether you beat them or not, judge your success based on your own accomplishments and progress.

Grit by definition is “sustained perserverance and passion for long-term goals”. It entails working “strenuously toward challenges and maintaining effort and interest despite failure, adversity and plateaus”. If you have ever watched Will, Josh or Marcus do a workout or attempt a lift they embody the meaning of grit. Will has the innate kinda grit that comes from being a competitive athlete his whole life and always wanting to be and do better. Josh has the deep kinda grit that your born with and just cultivates as he grows more passionate about something and Marcus has the simple grit-the dig down and get-her-done kind you need to get through a wod or to get that extra kilo or two in a snatch.

Unlike Will, Josh and Marcus-not everyone has “grit” but it doesn’t mean you can’t cultivate it or simply “get some” as Will would say. You can cultivate grit-I think everyone has it in them but like my paleo challenger-you have to want it first. To get some grit we need to focus on four things: goals, passion, visualization and optimism. Let’s use my paleo challenger as an example. First, she needs to pinpoint a long term, specific goal that she is willing to work hard to obtain despite the obstacles that might come up. For my paleo challenger, she wants to be able to do a pull up. Now, how is she going to achieve that? She is going to train, come in 10 minutes early and practice her kip or come to an extra Detention class and have a trainer work with her but is that all it takes? No, training can only get you so far-my challenger needs some passion.

Passion is what gets you out of bed in the morning or drives you to the gym when you are tired or feeling sick. You need to truly care about your goal in order to develop it. Next, my challenger has to be able to actually visualize obtaining that goal. She needs to be able to see herself getting that pull up in her own mind and the imagine the feelings that come with that success. Picturing yourself getting that pull up or standing on the podium of a CrossFit competition, makes the end goal feel real, attainable and gratifying. I guarantee Will sees himself on the podium before every competition-he tell himself he is going to make every lift before he attempts it-Will truly visualizes every rep, round, wod and competition.

Lastly, my challenger needs to have optimism-you can’t attain anything unless you have the right “nothing is going to stop me, no matter what gets in my way” attitude. And what is the biggest obstacle in learning a pull up-torn hands! So to my challenger, my favorite quote is “pain is temporary, victory is forever”. Even when you hands are bloody and they hurt like hell-perserve through the pain, focus on the end result and know you can do it and then you will have some grit!

In remembrance of the 2011 Tucson Shooting, Michael Moseley and all of CrossFit Now, CrossFit Purgatory and many more put on an event of support, competition, and camaraderie. The event started in the crisp, pre-dawn hours with a 5k run along a scenic bike route.

Once the final athlete finished the run they were gathered in reverse order for a clean and press ladder with barbells for men ranging from 115lbs to 205lbs in 10lb increments. The women’s bars ranged from 65lbs to 100lbs in 5lb increments. In total four women completed the entire ladder while only three men finished.

Once back at the gym with mesquite in the air and food in our bellies the athletes were briefed on the following workout which somewhat resembled a fight gone bad. The athletes would have two minutes on the rower for max calories, followed by ninety seconds of burpee box jumps, and finished with sixty seconds of shoulder to overhead and a sixty second rest. It all was repeated for a total of three rounds.

Once all the athletes finished we took a small break to tally scores and let the kids show off their CrossFit prowess. After a moment of silence and an attempt at a stand up routine, the final workout was announced and only the top 16 men and 8 women were advancing. To wrap things up the athletes had an 8 min Ladder of Chest to Bar Pull-ups and Hang Squat Cleans at 155lbs for men and 105lbs for women.

With emotions running high all day, the final heats left everything they had on the ladder and with out a doubt the athletes found a new level of strength and the spectators new inspiration. When the dust settled Amanda DeRosa from Now took 1st, Deana took 2nd and Aly Linehan from Purgatory took 3rd. On the mens side Will, Josh and Marcus took 1st, 2nd and 3rd respectively. Once again we are proud of everyone who supported and or competed and a big thanks is owed all who organized the event!

With all the music in the gym you may or may not be surprised to know that I rarely listen to music in the car, instead its NPR all the way! I remember Carren and I were headed down to Mike’s new gym when the program we were listening to was interrupted with a news report of an assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at a Safeway in Tucson, only a few streets from where we were headed. We were stunned to say the least and when we arrived to Mike’s grand opening roughly half of the attendees were called into work and “on-scene.”

What was originally an event for celebration has now turned to an event of remembrance. This Saturday Michael Moseley is hosting the Remember Tucson Fundraiser to benefit AZ Homicide Survivors. Fury is headed down this Saturday to support and participate in this event. We hope if you are free you can head down and cheer on our athletes as they test themselves. Here is a video of a workout Mike and I did at the end of the day a year ago and while I’m not saying you will see this again I simply felt like sharing it…

As of now the gym will be closed this Saturday but we will let you know if anything changes.

Now with that being said, I have short term goals of snatching 60kg and getting a 80kg clean and jerk. I consider these short term because I am not far from them now. My long term goals are to see myself get 10 consecutive muscle ups (a goal from 2011 I never reached), 10 consecutive strict hand stand push ups and 18 rounds of Nate but I’m pretty far from all of these and I had to ask myself why? Do I train hard? Check, atleast I think so. Do I push myself beyond my limits? check, atleast I think so? Do I truly have the desire and strength to accomplish these? check, again I like to think so. So what is missing?

Well, my diet! I openly admit that I have been a paleo cheater for the last 6-12 mon…, hell since going Plaeo. We preach that you can workout and train as hard as you want but it’s not going to get you that far unless you eat right. Yeah, I might have preached it but not necessarily lived it…I ate pretty much whatever I wanted and drank like a fish whenever I felt like it. A true example of “do what I say, not as I do”. And, as 2011 wound down and I looked over the last year and my goals, my biggest disappointment was my fake paleo lifestyle and how much it had cost me? I may have reached 1 or 2 goals but I’ve been cheating myself that last goal and any new goals I had made by eating and drinking Paleo when I felt like it. So my main goal, both short and long term, is to go Paleo and stay Paleo. I am going to go strict Paleo starting with my “Paleo New Year” Challenge starting Sunday, January 8th.

I invite anyone looking to set a short term goal of trying the Paleo diet or someone, like myself, trying to stick to the Paleo diet for good, to join me for this 8 week adventure of learning what to eat, why we eat it and how its going to make each one of us reach all of our goals and then some this year. Many of you have expressed interest in the next challenge so email me by 5pm on Friday, January 5th if you are up to this challenge. I will take 10 “fresh meat” (aka new) Paleo challengers and 10 “frozen vegetable” (aka past) Paleo Challengers and see which group fairs better. Let the fun begin as I will be the first “frozen vegetable”!

First off I’d like you to set some olympic lifting goals. If you are not yet lifting, maybe simply getting there is a goal. For those of you who know your clean and jerk, list a combined total in kgs. Personally I am shooting for 250kg which is the same as my 2011 goal but I hope to have this by the Games this year.

Secondly tell us how fast you’d like to run a mile in. I like this distance because if you can run a sub 5 min mile, odds are you can run a 400 in under minute any day of the week and your 5k is quite competitive.

Finally the workouts “Nate” or “Mary” are great indicators of bodyweight competency, work capacity, and general “CrossFit-ness.” I’d bet if you can log 20 rds or more of these workouts, your “Fran” “Diane” or “Helen” are pretty good too, but not necessarily the other way around. If Completing these workouts as Rx’D is not possible we can sub in other goals.

Feel free to post any goals you feel are important, please simply consider the above three in your decisions. We look forward to sharing our fittest year yet with you.