July 2008

Thank you all who stuck around tonight for our banner unveiling and celebration of the team! Stay tuned for the fall Throwdown program and Bay Area Affiliate competitions hosted at CFO!

More tomfoolery from the CFO Games meeting

We're going to be covering a lot of territory over the next few days regarding CF Games training, in particular the schedule of our upcoming CFO Throwdowns.

Because this kind of stuff tends to take on a life of its own, we're resurrecting the CFO Throwdown Blog. I've already done the first post, which covers the schedule for the CFO (internal) throwdowns over the next year.

We've added a link to the lefthand side of the blog, right under our CFO Best Performances of the Day section, named 2009 CF Games Training, which will take you to our CFO Throwdown Blog.

And for those of you who don't know anything about the CF Games or CFO Throwdowns, don't worry. I'm sure there will be at least one more post devoted to the topic before it's all said and done.

Let the 2009 CF Games training begin!

Olympic Weightlifting Seminar

Saturday & Sunday October 18-19
10:00am - 5:00pm

CrossFit NorCal
Chico, CA

The Olympic lifts develop unparalleled explosiveness for athletes of all types, but because of their relatively great technical complexity, they are often performed incorrectly, limiting their effectiveness, or even avoided entirely.

Spend two days learning complete progressions for the snatch and clean & jerk, and dramatically improve your own lifting technique.

Registration includes a 102-page excerpt from the book Olympic Weightlifting: A Complete Guide for Athletes & Coaches by Greg Everett

Requirements & Expectations
No previous experience with the Olympic lifts is required, but attendees should be reasonably experienced with basic strength lifts such as the squat and deadlift. This seminar will be hands-on for its duration.

Featuring
Greg Everett, CSCS, USA Weightlifting Coach
Aimee Anaya, National Champion Weightlifter

Register Online:
http://www.cathletics.com/zen/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=5&products_id=144

A scrumptious slab of flank steak

Lance has given us the Fuel2Go menu for this Monday, July 28:

Natural grilled flank steak chili verde, with white hominy, kidney beans and oregano

(Sounds delicious!)

Going forward, we'd like everyone to place their order for food on Lance's Fuel2Go Blog. To that end, we've place a link on the lefthand side of the page named "Zone Meals To Go," which will take you directly to Lance's blog. The link is just below the "2009 CF Games Training" link.

All orders must be posted to his blog no later than 5pm on Sunday 7/27.

Now for a little inspiration...

Post to comments your meal ideas for Lance. This dude can seriously cook and on top of that, he has a keen understanding of the Zone. So fire away, and don't be surprised if your suggestions show up as one of the Monday meals.

Who is this man? Why is he dressed this way? What possible athletic advantage is he hoping to capitalize on?

Post your best guess to comments.

Angela, along with Jo Ann Arnold, will be holding her next Clean Clinic on Sunday, August 10 from 2pm to 4pm.

The clinic is limited to five spots, and three of them have already been sold.

The two remaining spots will be filled on a first-come, first-serve basis.

The CrossFit diet
The simple prescription is this:

Protein should be lean and varied and account for about 30% of your total caloric load.
Carbohydrates should be predominantly low-glycemic and account for about 40% of your total caloric load.
Fat should be predominantly monounsaturated and account for about 30% of your total caloric load.

What Should I Eat?
In plain language, base your diet on garden vegetables, especially greens, lean meats, nuts and seeds, little starch, and no sugar. That's about as simple as we can get. Many have observed that keeping your grocery cart to the perimeter of the grocery store while avoiding the aisles is a great way to protect your health. Food is perishable. The stuff with long shelf life is all suspect. If you follow these simple guidelines you will benefit from nearly all that can be achieved through nutrition.

What Foods Should I Avoid?
Excessive consumption of high-glycemic carbohydrates is the primary culprit in nutritionally caused health problems. High glycemic carbohydrates are those that raise blood sugar too rapidly. They include rice, bread, candy, potato, sweets, sodas, and most processed carbohydrates. Processing can include bleaching, baking, grinding, and refining. Processing of carbohydrates greatly increases their glycemic index, a measure of their propensity to elevate blood sugar.

What is the Problem with High-Glycemic Carbohydrates?
The problem with high-glycemic carbohydrates is that they give an inordinate insulin response. Insulin is an essential hormone for life, yet acute, chronic elevation of insulin leads to hyperinsulinism, which has been positively linked to obesity, elevated cholesterol levels, blood pressure, mood dysfunction and a Pandora's box of disease and disability. Research quot;hyperinsulinism" on the Internet. There's a gold mine of information pertinent to your health available there. The CrossFit prescription is a low-glycemic diet and consequently severely blunts the insulin response.

Caloric Restriction and Longevity
Current research strongly supports the link between caloric restriction and an increased life expectancy. The incidence of cancers and heart disease sharply decline with a diet that is carefully limited in controlling caloric intake. “Caloric Restriction” is another fruitful area for Internet search. The CrossFit prescription is consistent with this research.
The CrossFit prescription allows a reduced caloric intake and yet still provides ample nutrition for rigorous activity.

There are countless people at CrossFit Oakland who have made the Zone a lifestyle! Look around you, ask questions and when your ready to take the leap talk to us, and we can help you get started!

Here's an excerpt from "Getting off the Crack" by Nicole Carroll

That said, at ten blocks per day, I found the first three weeks of the Zone to be
some of the hardest days of my life.

Day 1: The 3pm tuna sandwich put me over the edge. I had been hanging on by a thread all morning. I ate the two ounces of tuna, one piece of toast, one tablespoon of Mayonnaise, and lettuce that was supposed to be a satisfying lunch…twenty minutes later my stomach was grumbling and I was FREAKING STARVING! To this day I will not eat tuna sandwiches. The hunger was the worst. I could not believe I would survive on such a small amount of food. I was living meal to miserably small, unsatisfying, two-block meal. At some point each day for the first
week I ended up on the couch crying. Maybe some part of me really thought I was going to die.

Day 2: CrossFit Santa Cruz: I told the Glassmans I was starving. They said, “You’re not hungry. It’s just a craving for the insulin response.” I argued, “No. I really am hungry; my stomach is grumbling twenty minutes after eating. I think I need more food…DON’T TELL ME I’M NOT HUNGRY!” To which Greg responded, “Eat two blocks of low-GI [glycemic index] veggies at your meals and then tell me you’re honestly hungry.”

I tried it. It helped. Broccoli became a truly beautiful thing in my life. Meals held me over longer. But socially I was useless. Every ounce of energy I had was going into just sticking with it. People would ask the daily nicety “How are you?” and all I wanted to say was, “I am on this stupid diet and it’s killing me.” And so it went for many days.

Day 13, CrossFit Santa Cruz: Fat Fran. I was using 65 pounds for the thrusters and it felt like 165. It sucked. Everything sucked. I would cry on warm-up runs, in the bathroom after workouts, if someone looked at me weird. I cried A LOT. I was also craving fat like it was ice cream. More than anything I wanted to sit down with a jar of almond butter and a spoon. I was clearly too lean. I was at 111lbs. from 115 and ripped. My performance times were down by minutes and I was an emotional wreck. Because I was somewhat lean to begin with Greg originally suggested I start the diet at 2 or 3x fat. I ignored him, thinking less fat would be better. I was stubborn, stupid and fat phobic. Now I was paying the price.

Day 14: I began to add more fat into my diet.

Day 21: I was eating five times the fat allotted in the standard Zone prescription, up from the original 15 grams to 75 grams per day. Once I made that change, it got much easier because the benefits came quickly. With the “crack” cravings quelled and little thought of wanting more food, I was now chasing results.

How did I make it to this point? What kept me going through the first brutal weeks? Most likely it was a combination of stubbornness, anger and curiosity. I was pissed that this moderate way of eating was kicking my ass. I thought it should not be this hard and that I should not give into my own weak will. Furthermore, around day 3, I was told that I was complaining too much to get a cheat day. Then I became doubly pissed. I decided I would show her, and do the freaking diet even if it killed me. Finally, I was intrigued. Clearly this was powerful stuff. I started to feel more confident that if I got over the hump and dialed it in properly, it would have a profound affect on me.

And indeed it did. I had never experienced so directly and consistently the practice of not giving up when it gets hard. Every time I entered my kitchen I had the opportunity to fail. It would have been so easy. But I didn’t, and I cannot describe emphatically enough the rewards—both physical and mental— that getting through that has brought to my life.

I went from not believing I could survive on the Zone to not believing how much I could thrive on it. In just 4 weeks.

Try it.

Post your own version of getting off the crack to comments.

Our next F.U.E.L (Feeding U Energy for Life) seminar will be Saturday, August 16 from 11am to 1pm.

As usual, we will be covering a variety of topics, including but not limited to the following:

Strategies for healthy eating in the real world
Foraging in the urban jungle
How to eat “in the Zone”
Fat is not the enemy
Real World Eats
The real deal on carbs
Real women eat real food
Top Fuel eating for serious athletes
Adult Beverages 101
Paleo/Zone (the ultimate fuel for athletes)
Hormonal effects of food
Disease prevention with food

The cost for the seminar is $100/person and includes food and drink (we've gotta put you to the test afterward and make sure you can apply what you learn in the seminar!).

To register for the seminar, contact us at (510) 595-9348 or info@crossfitoakland.com.

From Jon Gilson of Again Faster (http://www.againfaster.com/articles/)

Give a guy with four pull-ups and two dips a set of rings, and he’ll pine for a muscle-up. He’ll pull on those rings two or three times, confident that the next rep will be the one. On rep five, his gaze finds the ground, and the little muscles surrounding his eyes relax. By attempt ten, he’s defeated, and the swearing starts.

The curse of the novice is two-fold. Along with a wanton desire for progress comes a concomitant failure to realize that advanced skills are not the province of the beginner.

Little attention is paid to such lowly matters as the air squat while the newly christened athlete seeks the clean. The push press is left aside in favor of the split jerk, and the pull-up gives valuable practice time to the muscle-up.

This phenomenon is unavoidable in our culture of instant gratification, so there is little point in disparaging our collective lack of patience. Without fail, we’d rather be the CEO than the mailroom clerk, and ambition should not be dampened.

Nonetheless, our ring-wielding athlete is unprepared to succeed, and he hasn’t given himself permission to fail--a surefire recipe for rage.

Make your preparations, and assault your target, never forgetting that victory is the end state of persistence. The first step to mastery is preparation. The dips and the pull-ups need to be there prior to the muscle-up attempts, or the frustration will be unending. Our athlete needs to own the basics, or advanced movement will never happen.

Even with proper preparation, the athlete must be willing to fail repeatedly, practicing the impossible until it is no longer so. This journey, a seemingly endless parade of incompetence, is hard on the psyche. At every moment, it’s easier to quit than continue.

The ensuing struggle between ego and reality is won by the ego more often than not, and practice ceases in favor of easier tasks and quicker victories. This keeps experience within narrow bounds, impeding athletic progress for the sake of transient happiness.

Recognize that competence lies on the other side of slogging failure. Make your preparations, and assault your target, never forgetting that victory is the end state of persistence. You’ll find that the curse of the novice is no longer yours, as you’ve recognized that success comes only by embracing failure at every stage of the game.

POST YOUR MOST MEMORABLE CROSSFIT FAILURE TO COMMENTS.

Brandy and Candy looking stunning in our new CFO tees

The new CFO t-shirts are here!

(And a big thanks to Vee for coming up with the design!)

The cost for these t-shirts is $20, and if you placed an order for one, we have yours. For everyone else who missed out on this first production run, I have a feeling there will be another run in the future.

And don't forget CF Gamers, we're holding a meeting tomorrow night at 6:30pm at CFO. Don't miss it!

The CF Games begin on Saturday, July 5th! Team CFO has been training hard and is geared up and ready for Aromas! We have 16 athletes competing: Nabil, Brandon, Patrick, Daniel, Tamara, Candace, Loren, Connor, Lance, Journey, Sierra, Laura, Audra, Tom, Mike and Connie.

Our competitors will be doing the following WODs over the course of two days (order to be determined the day's of the event).

Workout A: 12 minute time limit
21-15-9
Thrusters
Pull-Ups
Men=95#
Women=65#
Standards: Thruster-Hip crease below knee cap. Thruster- Full lock out/ear must be visible from the side. Pull-Ups-Any part of the chest from the clavicle down physically touches the bar.

Workout B: 12 Minute Time Limit
5 Rounds:
275# DL Men
185# DL Women
10 Burpees
Standards: Deadlift-Legs at full extension at the top, with shoulders behind the plane of the bar/weight must touch the ground for each rep. Burpees-Chest and thighs touch the ground, hands clap overhead while airborne, ears must be visible in front of your arm.

Workout C: 20 minute cut-off
750 m uphill run

Workout D:
Hopper will decide Saturday night for Sunday competition!

Standards from HQ here:
http://games.crossfit.com/documents/GamesFormat_Final.pdf

ATHLETES:
We will be meeting at the Games at 7:30 a.m. under the CFO (will say St. Mary's) canopy for a team meeting and review of the movement standards.

WATCH THIS, more about the format:
http://media.crossfit.com/cf-video/CrossFitGames_08FormatExplanation.mov

Community!
We will have a BBQ running and ready to feed out team, please feel free to come and help support our team!

Post your well wishes to Team CFO to comments!

Schedule Changes for July 4th Weekend:
July 4th: Weekend Schedule 9a.m., 10a.m., and 4p.m. classes only!
July 5th : Regular Weekend Schedule
July 6th: CLOSED!

A picture of beets and cabbage, from the NY Times

11 Best Foods You Aren't Eating

The title of the NY Times article that I've excerpted below says it all: "The 11 Best Foods You Aren't Eating."

You can read the full article here.

Here's the list:

1. Beets

Think of beets as red spinach, Dr. Bowden said, because they are a rich source of folate as well as natural red pigments that may be cancer fighters.

How to eat: Fresh, raw and grated to make a salad. Heating decreases the antioxidant power.

2. Cabbage

Loaded with nutrients like sulforaphane, a chemical said to boost cancer-fighting enzymes.

How to eat: Asian-style slaw or as a crunchy topping on burgers and sandwiches.

3. Swiss Chard

A leafy green vegetable packed with carotenoids that protect aging eyes.

How to eat it: Chop and saute in olive oil.

4. Cinnamon

May help control blood sugar and cholesterol.

How to eat it: Sprinkle on coffee or oatmeal.

5. Pomegranate Juice

Appears to lower blood pressure and loaded with antioxidants.

How to eat: Just drink it.

[Ed note: Watch the carb content in any kind of juice. A little goes a long way.]

6. Dried Plums

Okay, so they are really prunes, but they are packed with antioxidants.

How to eat: Wrapped in prosciutto and baked.

[Ed note: Just as with juice, watch the carb content of dried fruit. Again, a little goes a long way.]

7. Pumpkin Seeds

The most nutritious part of the pumpkin and packed with magnesium; high levels of the mineral are associated with lower risk for early death.

How to eat: Roasted as a snack, or sprinkled on salad.

8. Sardines

Dr. Bowden calls them “health food in a can.'’ They are high in omega-3’s, contain virtually no mercury and are loaded with calcium. They also contain iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, zinc, copper and manganese as well as a full complement of B vitamins.

How to eat: Choose sardines packed in olive or sardine oil. Eat plain, mixed with salad, on toast, or mashed with dijon mustard and onions as a spread.

9. Turmeric

The “superstar of spices,'’ it may have anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer properties.

How to eat: Mix with scrambled eggs or in any vegetable dish.

10. Frozen Blueberries

Even though freezing can degrade some of the nutrients in fruits and vegetables, frozen blueberries are available year-round and don’t spoil; associated with better memory in animal studies.

How to eat: Blended with yogurt or chocolate soy milk and sprinkled with crushed almonds.

[Ed note: Ditch the soy milk. Might as well just drink good ol' milk instead.]

11. Canned Pumpkin

A low-calorie vegetable that is high in fiber and immune-stimulating vitamin A; fills you up on very few calories.

How to eat: Mix with a little butter, cinnamon and nutmeg.

fuel2go

And speaking of food, Lance has announced Monday's menu:

Roast natural chicken, french green lentils, romano beans, and cilantro salsa verde.

Prices are the same as last week. Go to the fuel2go blog to place your order after Lance has posted the menu there.

***And finally, attention CF Gamers***

Do not forget, we will be meeting at the CFO tent Saturday morning at 7:30am to go over the movement standards so that each individual is squared away on what is a valid move and what is not.

Registration opens at 6am so get registered as early as you can!

Eat well and rest up over the next 36 hours. I can't wait to compete alongside each and every one of you! Go Team CFO!

Games Site in Aromas

We are all settling into the lovely Hilton in Gilroy which is now bristling with CrossFitters from all over the country! On site we have set up a shady CFO HQ replete with massage table, BBQ, peanut butter sandwiches (thanks Melissa), and a lot of other power snacks for our brilliant team to re-fuel on between events. We are looking forward to a full day of great performances...

Post your predictions for top finishers to comments.

Just one of the couple thousand (no joke) photos we snapped of CFOers at the CrossFit Games

We're at the Games and it's quite an event, to put it mildly.

Everyone from the team did great on the first day, which involved a brutal triplet of WODs (hill run, thrusters and pull-ups, and deadlifts and burpees). The really good news is that after day one, Candace is sitting in 8th place and Tami in 10th place.

The clean-and-jerk workout tomorrow really plays to their strengths, so we'll just have to see what happens.

The men's division is highly competitive. The good news is that we have five men currently standing between 44th and 53rd place. The bad news is that we have no one higher than that. All that being said, there have been some great performances and I expect our guys to move up a few places in tomorrow's clean-and-jerk workout.

We have much more to say, and many more photos to post, but I'll save that for another blog entry.

And a big thank-you to all of you who came out and screamed and shouted for us today. It was a big boost.

Post final-day prognostications to comments.

Tami, Daniel, Brandon, and Candace, CFO's top four point-earners at this weekend's CF Games

I'm going to make this brief because I'm really frickin' tired so here goes....

Congratulations to everyone on the team. We went down and came out on top!

Daniel and Brandon ended up being our top two male performers, and on the women's side it was Tami and Candace. But EVERYONE contributed!

Props to Tami for just missing out on a medal (she finished 4th overall) and to Mike "MJJ" for winning the men's 1000m challenge. We now have a new rower at CFO courtesy of MJJ's rowing performance!

And a giant thank you to all who came out to support us, but most especially Nicole and Franklin, who literally made it happen for us this weekend.

As soon as we can, we'll have a picture up of the entire team. For now, you'll just have to settle for the name of everyone who made up Team CFO this year.

Daniel
Brandon
Nabil
Connor
Patrick
Lance
Tom C
Loren
Tamara
Candace
Audra
Sierra
Journey
Connie
Laura

Give it up to Team CFO in comments!