Raising The Bar On Throw Downs. Taranis Winter Challenge

The Taranis Winter Challenge started four years ago, before ‘throw downs’ became a hot trend in CrossFit. Four years later and it’s consistently raising the bar for competitions in Western Canada in organization, execution, and ingenuity. It draws in several Reebok CrossFit Games athletes, including Angie Pye, Jeremy Meredith, and the Hybrid Athletics Team. Every year the organizers of the Winter Challenge come up with an exciting twist on testing the competitors’ (24 teams and 78 individuals) work capacity and adaptability, and this year was no different.

The first event on Friday night immediately forced the competitors to start thinking by using a strong man style 100/60lb short bar with a nice fat (2 3/8”) handle that the athletes had to suitcase deadlift. They weren’t allowed to touch these new bars before they got onto the competition floor, so all they could do was watch the competitors before them try different techniques and hope they could figure it out quickly. Some athletes immediately found their groove and finished the workout well under the time cap, while others (including some of the top dogs) barely managed to finish a single round.

Day two of competition included various time domains, weights, and exercises in order to seed the athletes for their final day on Sunday. Across the three events that day, we saw buddy carries for teams; sprints and burpees for individuals; an overhead squat and snatch ladder, and double WOD with 5-min max press and 15-min AMRAP to finish off the individuals while the teams tackled a chipper that determined their position and qualification for Sunday’s round robyn tournament.

Sunday morning the competitors came into the box to see five 3-foot wide lanes of scaffolding with pull-up bars at either end. Five athletes at a time tackled the 3-min cap chipper and two moved on while teams went head-to-head. The athletes completed eight different movements of increasing difficulty (both in skill and in weight) as the rounds progressed.

The 2012 Games team Fraser Valley Centaurs split to make two teams for the challenge and managed to take both 1st and 3rd place on the podium, with Xplore CrossFit coming in at 2nd.The individual men ended with two RealXtreme Athletes, Connor Nelson of Seattle and Mark Cassibo of Hybrid Athletics Langley, coming to the final movement at the same time–a 225lb clean and jerk–andboth missed their first attempt. Mark managed to beat Connor to his second attempt and completed the lift to take 1st place overall. Lori Kline took 1st, beating 2010 Games competitor Alicia Connors in the scaffold’s challenging narrow bar muscle-ups.

Once again the Taranis Winter Challenge has raised the bar for throw downs and whet the appetites of all the competitors for the 2013 Open.

TARANIS WINTER CHALLENGE RESULTS

Full Standings

Teams:
1. The Centaurs
2. Xplore CrossFit
3. Team Hybrid
4. The Alpacas

Men:
1. Mark Cassibo
2. Connor Nelson
3. Terrence Limbert
4. Mike McCorkell

Women:
1. Lori Kline
2. Alicia Connors
3. Jacquie Block-Glass
4. Jackie Snell

Photography caraghcamera.com