2021 Summer Fitness Olympics Recap

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Overall, I think these Olympics were a HUGE success. In general, participation was off the charts which means a lot of you were doing extra work to complete these events in addition to your normal workouts. During the last week especially, people were redoing many events to beat someone in front of them. This then pushed the one who got beat to try again to improve their time/score. And this was really the whole point of doing these olympics. To push one another to BECOME BETTER.

Here are three of my favorite stories from these Olympics:

Shay Powell needed to bench 150.5 lbs to take 1st place over Coach Paige which would have been a great personal best for her. She did just that on the final Monday. Friday roles around and Candice, who failed to bench over 140 the previous week decides she wants to move up the rankings on the final day. After hitting 140 and 145 she attempts and hits 151 to take over first place. Shay, who REALLY wanted that first place, received the notification from Coach Dan that she was beaten and immediately decides to come back into the gym to try to take her spot back. 30 minutes later, Shay was in first place once again with a 151.5 bench. I loved how they were able to push one another to become just a little bit better.
Ed Talarico had the deadhang record at just over 4 minutes. Ryan’s last day in the gym for the week was Tuesday. Ryan thought he could take the lead in the deadhang. Even though Ryan was hurting from the beginning he managed to take the lead with a 4:21.6 time. What he didn’t realize though was that Ed was coming in 10 minutes later. Ed quickly finished his normal workout and wanted the title back. It took quite literally everything Ed had to do it, but he fell off the bar at 4:22.0 to reclaim his spot. And when I say fell off the bar, I mean he fell off the bar and tumbled into the white cabinets by the window.
I thought Kerry Hartman secured the BOSU ball challenge with a plus 9 minute time. However, Nicholas Usher at no point thought that would be enough. Using some motivational screaming soundtrack in his ear he somehow managed a time over 12 minutes. The most impressive part was that at 3 different times he almost had the ball in the center, knocked it out too aggressively and had the ball on the very edge of the BOSU before bringing it back under control like it was no problem.

With that being said we obviously had a lot of hiccups/issues too that I would like to address and apologize for as well. This was our first time doing this and looking back I know there were some things that we can do better and change next year.

We had a lot of rule changes to events after we started. Such as the sled and long jump which could have been planned better

It was much harder than we anticipated to get relay teams together. And then it also wasn’t super clear about people doing events fresh or after workouts.
The gym was more chaotic at times because people would stay after to do events (which is what we wanted), but then that caused more overlap between time sessions. This was especially true the last week.
I am not a professional test maker, so some of the questions on the tests could have been explained better.
I was so caught up in wanting 3-4 total teams in the beginning that I grossly underestimated how much Paige was going to be here and how much that would affect her team. Even helping her pick some people that she didn’t know, but we knew would be around a lot this summer would have at least helped a little with her team's participation (especially the guys side of her team since she mostly just drafted women). Looking back I realize that halfway through we probably should have added just split her team up among Joey’s and mine (which also would have made the relay event easier). So if people felt left out of the team aspect being on her team I take responsibility for that and I hope you still found it fun to individually compete up the leader board.

We hope to correct some of these mistakes next year by re-balancing teams, planning the events better from the beginning so there aren’t last minute changes, space out clients more, plan ahead for team events, and give more specific cut off times for ending events. We have heard lots of ideas from many of you on how we can accomplish these things. We also have a short survey that will be at the gym over the next week that you can fill out too anonymously if you would like.

Some of the ideas include:

Having coaches do events and if clients beat them they get bonus points.
Doing different fitness events or games on weekends for team bonus points.
Redrafting teams, but coaches will have some options to hold on to some of their team.
Events where you challenge opposing teams

Please let us know if you have any other ideas for us to consider next summer!