Start Here: An Introduction to the CrossFit Games
What are the CrossFit Games?

The CrossFit Games are the ultimate test of fitness. It’s a grueling two-day competition in which the world’s fittest athletes compete in a variety of workouts. What are the workouts? Each year they change, and the details of them are not announced until a couple days before the event. This means that all year long, the athletes are training for a competition whose format is almost completely a mystery.
In 2009, the format is still a complete mystery.

The competition will take place from Friday, July 10 through Sunday, July 12, 2009. There will be three different competitions happening that weekend: Individual Men, Individual Women, and the team Affiliate Cup.

The individual competitions are limited to 75 athletes each. The top five finishers from 2008 are automatically entered. Everyone else has to qualify through their Regional Competition. The number of slots allotted to each region is determined by the number of affiliates in that region. Both individual men and women competitions will be held Saturday and Sunday (July 11-12).

The team Affiliate Cup will be held on Friday, July 10th and Sunday July 12th. It will be exculusively team workouts, and open to all teams who register in time (no qualifying required). Affiliate team registration opens on June 1st until June 12th, unless it sells out before then. Teams will be made up of four to six athletes, with four competing at one time.
In 2008, there were four workouts:

Saturday: (workouts performed in any order throughout the day)
5 Deadlift (275lbs men, 185lbs women) / 10 Burpees – 5 Rounds for time
Thrusters (95lbs men, 65lbs women) / Pull-ups – 21, 15, 9 reps for time
750m off trail steep hill run

Sunday:
30 Squat Clean and Jerks (155lbs men, 100lbs women) for time

Every second counted. Overall winner was the athlete with the lowest combined time for all four workouts. Jason Khalipa won the men’s competition and Caity Matter won the women’s. CrossFit Oakland won the Affiliate Cup. To see the final results for 2008, click here. For the 2008 CrossFit Games website, which documented the event thoroughly, click here.
In 2007, the inaugural CrossFit Games, there were three workouts:

Saturday morning: A hopper workout that was literally determined at random (it ended up being row, push jerks and pullups)

Saturday afternoon: A 3K off trail hill run

Sunday: The CrossFit Total

The scoring was based on points per finishing order and the winner had the highest total points. James Fitzgerald won the men’s competition and Jolie Gentry won the women’s. CrossFit Santa Cruz won the Affiliate Cup. For a review of the 2007 Games, read Dave Castro’s CrossFit Journal article Reading Between the Lines.
What is CrossFit?

CrossFit is the principal strength and conditioning program for many police academies and tactical operations teams, military special operations units, champion martial artists, and hundreds of other elite and professional athletes worldwide.

Our program delivers a fitness that is, by design, broad, general, and inclusive. Our specialty is not specializing. Combat, survival, many sports, and life reward this kind of fitness and, on average, punish the specialist.

We define this fitness as increased work capacity across broad time and modal domains. What this means is that you have functional capacity in all different types of movements at a variety of durations of effort. If you are increasing this broad work capacity, you will be competent at both short bursts of activity and extended, longer workouts. No single test can adequately assess these broad capacities. Even our rigorous two-day CrossFit Games can assess but a small portion of anyone’s true capacity.

But, it is our considered opinion that the CrossFit Games are the best test on the planet for true, elite fitness, and that the winners of the CrossFit Games are the World’s Fittest humans.

CrossFit Games

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