S05E166 Bison Brawl 2024 Recap with Adam Ramsden
Join us as we peel back the curtain on the Bison Brawl 2024 with our insightful Join coaches David Syvertsen @davesy85 and Adam Ramsden @w.a.ramsden. Our conversation offers a unique perspective into the meticulous art of planning and executing a successful CrossFit event, revealing both the triumphs and the unexpected hurdles encountered along the way.
You'll gain an appreciation for the immense role of community and volunteer support, as well as the careful choreography behind the heat schedules and equipment management that keep the competition running smoothly.
Witness the behind-the-scenes drama as we tackle the unforeseen challenges that arise in the heat of competition. From last-minute equipment adjustments to scheduling conundrums, Coach Adam shares his strategy of taking mental snapshots to appreciate the chaos while maintaining focus on delivering an exceptional athlete experience.
Our stories underscore the importance of adaptability and quick decision-making, drawing parallels to the athletic mindset needed for peak performance. Despite the logistical stressors, our resolve remains unwavering: to create a fun, safe, and memorable environment for all involved.
Reflecting on the vibrant atmosphere and the evolution of workout formats, we celebrate the grassroots nature of events like the Bison Brawl. These competitions not only test the limits of elite athletes with accessible yet challenging exercises but also foster a sense of unity and support local economies.
As we recount the memorable moments and rewarding feedback from participants, our commitment to the fitness community shines through, reaffirming the significance of planning and creating unforgettable experiences for both athletes and spectators alike.
@crossfitbison @crossfittraining @crossfit @crossfitgames #crossfit #sports #exercise #health #movement #crossfitcoach #agoq #clean #fitness #ItAllStartsHere #CrossFitOpen #CrossFit #CrossFitCommunity @CrossFitAffiliates #supportyourlocalbox #crossfitaffiliate #personalizedfitness
S05E166 Bison Brawl 2024 Recap with Adam Ramsden
TRANSCRIPT
Speaker Names
David SyvertsenHost
00:05
Hey everybody, welcome to the Herd Fit Podcast with Dr Sam Rhee and myself, coach David Syverson. This podcast is aimed at helping anyone and everyone looking to enhance their healthy lifestyle through fitness, nutrition and, most importantly, mindset. All right, welcome back to the Herd Fit Podcast. I am Coach David Syrvson. I'm here with coach and mastermind of the 2024 Bison Brawl 1, coach Adam Ramson. What's up, my man? Good to be back A little tired, but we're okay.
00:36
This is the least stressed I've seen Adam in a long time. We are just about maybe 15 to 17 hours away from the conclusion of the bison brawl and we want to get kind of our wrap-ups, uh, synopsis of what happened in the months, weeks, days, hours, minutes leading up to the bison bowl and give you kind of, like some behind the scenes, our perspective of what it was like it. Just a little bit of reflection. It's going to be kind of conversation based and that's going to kind of be the, the, the, the feel. The flow of today's podcast is kind of get a feel of all right, what was it like to run this, what was it like the day of and what are our conclusion thoughts as we kind of move on to maybe next year We'll see.
01:25
Adam. You came over after we were done wrapping up, the gym was set up and you had a Sierra Nevada one of our vendors and sponsors, thank you, corey for that and gave it to me and I was like that was when I realized it was over. That was like the first time. I was like, wow, we, we got this done. And where? What was your? Where was your head at at that moment, right after the conclusion of the bicep roll?
Adam RamsdenCo-host
01:44
It was tough to process just like the whole day because you spend so much time planning and thinking and visualizing. So I tried during the workouts to take like mental pictures. You know, on your wedding day they're always like take mental images, just like kind of try and remember and enjoy what you're doing, yep. But it's hard to do that when you're constantly running around, you're constantly checking in on, you know how the workouts are going, whether your volunteers are ready or where they're supposed to be and stuff like that. And we had no problem with that yesterday. But yeah, once it was over and you know you kind of everybody started to leave. That's when you're just like okay, we made it Like it was a success from you know what I heard from a lot of people, and so you can kind of just pump the brakes just a little bit.
David SyvertsenHost
02:37
Yeah, even in the moment after, we got a lot of positive feedback and we'll get into even some positive and negatives. That's how we're wired. But we did get a lot of positive feedback after and even during. Towards, like the end, it's like oh, this is the smoothest run comp fun workouts, great volunteers, great judging all this stuff and even though you take in these, this positivity around you, you're still thinking about, like how we're gonna get the dumbbells onto the floor. Are the kettlebells lined up correctly? Did we tape correctly where the wall walk lines? Should we have done this zone? Should we move these people to that zone?
03:07
You don't actually get to enjoy the appreciation of it being over until you have that beer. We cheers a beer and we drink it. And Adam and I are wired similar in some ways in that our first real conversation about the comp was so, what did we do wrong? What should we have done differently? And we are going to get to that.
03:29
But I think the most important part that we probably both feel is just an enormous amount of gratitude towards the Bison community and also the athletes, the vendors that showed up, the spectators. We have been in the game long enough, both as competitors and as spectators and coaches. It's a grueling day for everyone involved, including the people watching the competition, and I have so much respect for every athlete that signed up, shelled out money, woke up at 6 am. Some of these people drove over an hour, competed all day, did that last workout and, you know, left with a big smile on that face. I think this is such like that is such CrossFit to me, yep, and we need more of it to kind of keep this ship going. But I want to just reflect Adam, a little bit on how much help we had and how much it meant to us.
Adam RamsdenCo-host
04:22
Yeah, I mean, it would have been impossible without all of the volunteers that, um, you know, we had, whether it was judging whether it was set up, clean up, like we never had a point in time where we were scrambling for anything, um, you know, set up. We had probably too many people that came, um, you know, everybody's like what do you need me to do? What do you need me to do? And we're like we have too much help. I feel bad, yeah, and we're. You know, I think you and I were both all in on making sure or doing as much as we could ourselves.
05:09
But once it came to yesterday and you know, 5 30 am, we had people walking in just being like, oh okay, let's figure out the scoring, let's, you know, be setting up areas of the gym that we hadn't set up prior to, and then, throughout the day, anytime I needed something. It didn't take me more than five to ten seconds to scan the crowd to find Keith or Mike or Hovig and just say, you know, could we have these ready or stuff like that. And it was done Like. I never felt like I had to scramble to find you to get a problem solved. It was just like if we had a specific question. You know, and we had some good questions throughout the day and situations that came up, but we had all the volunteers that were just ready to say, okay, how are we going to solve this problem? Let me go do that.
David SyvertsenHost
05:52
Yeah, problem solving 101. That is how you run a competition. That is often the difference between a good competition and bad competition, and I hate saying I've been to bad competitions before. I don't I want. I would just say the ones that don't run on time or they didn't have solutions to problems.
06:10
Problem solving one-on-one after owning an affiliate for 10 years, like that's 90% of the battle. It's not the music and the programming, the equipment, it's. Can you solve problems? And on the same level, if you want to run a good, clean competition, you have to be good at problem solving, and there's so many bullet points that go under that. But a lot of it just centers around teamwork and humility and having help of our volunteers. They were, they were like that's all we can do, that's it. That's it and that's just when you are around a bunch of selfless people. I got a few messages yesterday from people I had not met prior to the competition and they're like your members are amazing. And we both got a few texts yesterday saying hey guys, great job today. You guys crushed it. The first response is we had so much help and I kind of want to dive into some of the background of the months and weeks leading up to what was like Because I know some of you guys that are listening A you just like hearing about this stuff, but, b you might want to run a comp at some point and I want to encourage a lot of people out there that are on the fence about running one to do it.
07:23
We ran one in 2017 and 2018 at our old space called Bison Classic and they were both successful events. Again, same thing a lot of help, good competition. It was clean, everything was on time. Every year at our gym we run the Bison Bowl, which is an intra gym competition, meaning a competition only for our members. Gym competition meaning a competition only for our members. It's a much more kind of fun vibe, you know, not so serious. It costs $10, not 200. We don't have vendors, but that kind of experience it did help, uh, help plan this out in terms of just heats and pull up bars and zones and what you need for everything.
08:01
And I'll kind of want you guys to kind of get a little, you know, maybe backstage approach to what was going on in the months and weeks leading up to and we had, we had been asked from a few different angles like hey, you guys should run a comp. You guys run a comp. And as positive as I am in life and about life in general, I would always find five reasons to say no. You know, the parking, the uh, I mean that's like a primary one. The parking, I mean that's a primary one. The parking is always tough in situations like this.
08:26
Do I really want to shut the gym down on a Saturday and take a class away from our members? Do I want to spend months and weeks leading up to just stressed out in general? But we definitely did it, and one of the first decisions I made when I said all right, we're going to do this was I wanted to get someone to really be the point person for it, and that was Adam, and it was obviously a very good decision there. Obviously, he crushed it. But, adam, when we started talking about this, this was back in the summer, and what was your primary goal of the competition and do you feel like you achieved it?
Adam RamsdenCo-host
09:03
I guess my first goal was to make sure that the athletes had a good experience. I knew, going in, we would have the help we needed. You know, whatever we came up with as far as workouts, setup, cleanup, you know, just knowing our community, that wasn't a problem. I said we're going to have enough help. So let's make this a good experience for the athletes. Um, and I think just the way that we ended up working um, the flow through the workouts, timing and everything like that, I think we achieved it. I hope we did Um, I hope there wasn't anybody that walked out saying you know, that wasn't a good test of fitness. That wasn't, you know, what I was looking for when I signed up, when I paid my money, um, and so hopefully, you know, I'm sure if somebody didn't have a good experience, I wouldn't hear about that, um, but uh, you know, if there was anybody, you know we can try hard.
David SyvertsenHost
09:59
Yeah, and we do like feedback. You know like you have to be open to feedback, even the stuff that you don't want to hear. So if there were any issues that you guys felt like we had, we're all our doors open. We'll probably even send out a conclusion email soon just saying if anyone has any thoughts, please reach out, because we do want to make it better if we do it again.
10:18
But the weeks leading up to so you know you and I spent some time planning out the workouts and you really one of your goals was I want to use a lot of different. I call them toys, like pieces of equipment. We use kettlebells, dumbbells, bike box, sandbag, barbells, rig wall, wall ball. I mean I don't think I've ever seen a three workout competition with so many different movements and pieces of equipment. That tested fitness slightly different than what you might train on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis. So that was a really cool move. I think that enhances the athlete experience. It makes it more complicated for us, but again, we knew we would have enough help to get the job done there. The weeks leading up to so this is after the workouts are announced. After the initial communication has been put out, the registration is closed for the most part. Um, what were the weeks leading up to? Let's create a, a two-week window? What were those two weeks like leading up to for you?
Adam RamsdenCo-host
11:16
so that was the most interesting part for me, because once we came up with the workouts, once we said, okay, we picked the date and everything like that, there was a big lull where I was kind of just like I feel like we're not doing anything. You know, and you know you were taking a lot care of a lot of stuff with the scoring system and everything like that on the back end and vendors. But then we met, I think like about a month ago, and you said you know, there's really not a lot to do until the two weeks prior, right. And then you know you have your set number of teams as far as you think you know. And then you know now it's just coming up with heat assignment, heat times, you know, lane assignments, kind of getting a flow of. If you start at nine o'clock, how long is that first workout going to take? You know how long is that first workout going to take, how long is the second workout going to take, how much time do you need in between heats for equipment change?
12:09
We even had people from the equipment team wiping down the wall balls in between heats, which was gigantic, because it's just like some teams would walk up and they'd be like, ooh, that wall ball's sweaty. I hate those athletes that sweat a lot, it's just awful. No, but we had people coming in you know spray. One person went down the line, sprayed all the wall balls. The next person came down the line it was like an assembly line cleaning the wall balls, so it was never, you know. And I caught one athlete, you know kind of looked at the wall ball and then saw somebody come clean and goes well, ok, that's, that's pretty cool, you know, and that was something that we didn't even plan for. Yeah, you know, our volunteers just said oh, this would be a good idea. You know, we're getting some wet wall balls. Let's wipe them down real quick in between each heat. It was awesome.
David SyvertsenHost
13:00
Yeah, that that's. That's again. You're just blessed with good members and, just honestly, some smart people that have done this a long time. You know they've seen the Bison Bowl, so I bet some of that motivation behind wiping down a wall ball has been hey, I've been here for seven years. I've done Partner Saturdays, I've done the Bison Bowl, I've seen other competitions because I go and watch and support and you know we're always in the crowd chirping like, oh man, that wobble is wet, right, but the these people take it on themselves and that's like to me, that's kind of what humility is. It's not expecting someone else to do it, you just go take it on yourself. You don't expect to thank you, you just do it. And that that's a huge part of of a real quality volunteer staff in which we had. They just take it on themselves because they're smart and they're humble. It's a really good combination of personality traits. Um, one of the reasons I really wanted to have, you know, some, like you know, established help like a person like adam uh, to run this with was, you know, there's a lot that goes into it, but the heats making this schedule is probably, in my opinion, is probably other than safety and fun for the athletes, right, and we'll get into that as well. It are the heats, and there's so much that goes into that. We wish we could just, you know, take the teams in the order in which they lined up, signed up and just put them in heat one, heat two, heat three.
14:21
But at the start of this, guys, we had six divisions. We had scaled men and women, rx men and women, masters men and women. We called an audible the week of the competition and we put masters I feel like I'm gonna sneeze again. We put masters into the rx division. Now, before anyone's like, no, no, you know, protect the old people. The workouts and the weights were the same for Masters. They were simply just going to compete against each other, but the numbers just weren't there. I think we had a division of four and a division of three and I just I don't like that. If you can avoid it, if that is what it is, you go for it. Like example, if they had the different weights and movements, we probably would have just rolled with it. But because you had all of these different divisions and again, guys, it's same gender. So competitions that are mixed gender, one guy, one girl you cut out. You can cut the divisions in half by doing that, so there's just a lot of separation.
15:20
So you're talking about the logistics of equipment changes in between. You're talking about trying to get the teams in the division. We were so detailed and probably care too much for the athletes, to be honest with you about this that we asked every athlete how tall are you? Because we want to give you the most optimal height pull-up bar for you in the one workout that you might be touching the rig. You might not be that those kind of things that can keep you up at night for weeks and it can really take away from trying to plan the other components of it. And Adam took that on 99% by himself. And that, to me, is probably the most valuable asset to running a good competition is making sure you make the heats economic. You make them efficient. Adam, when you started building that together, were you able to like wrap your head around it, or was it something that you had to adjust as you went?
Adam RamsdenCo-host
16:21
Um, I think the the, the flow of the first workout made it easy. Like a new team starting every two and a half minutes. You know, like that's pretty much locked in um. Now it could have gone off the rails if a team wasn't ready for their heat or they didn't know where they were going. There was one time we were missing a team, um, but we got them in right under the gun, you know, like five seconds before they were about to go off. Um, but that workout, the kind of waterfall flow made it easy for the timing.
16:53
Yep, um, the other ones, it's tough because you know you have how long the workout's going to take, like how long 12 minute time, cap, 11 minute time, cap, um, but how much time do you need in between those heats to set up? You know, uh, we had to call an audible with some zones just because of people. The pull up bars weren't exactly what people wanted. So you know, that's why, having the volunteers and we'll come back to this, I'm sure, multiple more times you know we were just like listen, we need these stacks of weights. Move to zone four instead of zone two, and you're talking about 300 pounds worth of weight.
David SyvertsenHost
17:27
Yes.
Adam RamsdenCo-host
17:28
Yeah, and it was done in 45 seconds. Yeah, you know Could have been faster, but just kidding. So, you know, just having that help allows you to call those audibles when you need to. You know, and solve those problems really quickly to be. You know you can set things up which how you think is perfectly right for the data flow. You know, without a hitch and something's gonna go wrong, yep, and how you adjust to that and sometimes you can adjust to it. You know, I always think back to Asbury when they had the lifting platforms that broke. Yeah, you know, you had a problem. Solve that really quickly. And you know, if you didn't have the ability to call that audible, you know you could have ruined the athlete experience, you know. So it's thinking on your feet. What can you do? And just having enough help to be able to solve those problems when they arise.
David SyvertsenHost
18:24
Yeah, and that's exactly it. Can you have solutions to problems when you don't know what problems are going to come up yet? Like having that, like that what's the word I'm looking for? Like the pre-decided, you know, factors of like all right, if X, y, z happens, we're going to go to ABC. If ABC happens, you know, we're going to DEF. Like that. Those are the things that I think the best competition runners, the ones that have the most experience, they do, and I would liken that to CrossFit gyms. Is that and I was just thinking about this on the way here, because I got cut off by a fire truck and his lights were on.
19:02
I was at a light, I was about to go and all of a sudden, like I had my music way too loud and all of a sudden I see these big flashing lights to my right and as he's driving this is literally 20 minutes ago, I'm saying a firefighter on a Sunday morning like what could they be solving a Sunday morning at 7.15 am and these guys that have been in there for 10, 15 years. You can kind of immediately tear it into a certain section of problems. Every problem has its own respective details and it needs its own specific attention. Take a situation and be like all right, I've been in a very similar thought process over the past five to 10 years as a CrossFit coach. To be like this is the proper solution. You think about it for seven seconds.
19:59
Here's a mistake that Adam and I we both collectively made. We were going to take one of the sections that has two low pull-up bars and we were going to raise one of them to a medium height and we put teams in that zone that had tall athletes in it, meaning they had to have a medium bar pull apart. They're usually good for anyone like 510 to 6261, but they the bars that they were the height that was. It was. There was someone that was probably five, seven or lower. Every team had someone that was probably 5'7 or lower. Every team had someone that was taller, because that's the way we set up the heats, adam I forget what night it was, I think it was Tuesday night we were putting these heats together and we went through the height of all 76 athletes and made sure we visually went to the zone and said, hey, this zone will be good for this team, and there were teams that had a really tall athlete. I think we had a team that had a six foot two athlete and a five foot six athlete, so they needed both. Right, you can't give them the same pull-up bar. This is not right, it's not. It's not the right thing to do.
20:57
So we went to every zone. Every team said this will be good, we forgot to raise that pull-up bar and we'd realized it at the start of the workout. We both kind of like wide-eyed it was, we forgot to raise the pull bar. But you know what? I've been here before. You want to know why? Because at CrossFit Bison, every class you sign up for we put people into zones. You don't show up and go pick where you're going to work out.
21:19
Some call it a control freak. We think it's a good system. So do our members, and we've done this before where someone signs up for a class last second or they need a different pull-up bar like, you immediately just know what to go Like. We both kind of came up with solutions to that problem at the same time in under five seconds. Hey, two open zones down there, done, they have the medium and low bar, blah, blah, blah, blah and like. And then we have a staff of five volunteers that can move weights over.
21:45
That is a situation that I want to compare it to a firefighter. Like they go to a fire at 7 am on a Sunday morning. They've probably done something very similar over the years, so they kind of know what to expect and the solution isn't like, hey, let's think about it for 15 minutes. Let's like, nope, we're done. Do you kind of see any other situations or just any thoughts on being prepared for problems, with solutions that to problems that you don't even know exist yet? Can you, as a teacher, even think about something like that?
Adam RamsdenCo-host
22:16
yeah, I mean you never know. I mean, as a teacher, you never know the makeup of your class. You know you're going to get emails about students not sitting next to each other and stuff like that. So you kind of just have to be able to think on the fly. You know, where can I move these, this equipment or anything like that? You know, when you have a team sign up and they thought that they were going to be in one division, they were in another division. Like how do you? You know kind of scaffold, who's going to be put out by that?
22:52
You know, if they made the mistake, then you know the athlete experience has to take a hit for that. You know, because you can't be messing with the flow of everybody else's workout Just because they misread an email or anything like that, even though you emailed them back and said you know this is the situation. So you kind of have to just be able to think on the fly, because there's no way to plan for everything that's going to happen day of. So you have to kind of visualize as many things as you can see going wrong, but then know that new things are going to pop up day of, but then know that new things are going to pop up day of morning, of afternoon, of you know so A birdie told me that you were up till 1.30 the morning before the competition and you were at the gym at 5.30.
David SyvertsenHost
23:39
So if anyone wants to do some math there, you probably slept less than four hours the day before the competition. When you woke up and you're on your way to the gym, what's the main stressor that you were going through leading up to?
Adam RamsdenCo-host
23:52
your way to the gym.
23:52
What's the main stressor that you were going through leading up to?
24:00
Just not not having the experience of planning workouts and you know, knowing how one movement's going to lead to another, how you know and you helped with this um, not making sure that we had too much pulling from the ground know, in all three workouts. Um, because that was initially a problem that we ran into when planning the workouts yep, um, so, just driving over, I was just like just let everything go. Okay, you know, let let's survive, don't worry about it being great, just get through it for this first time. And then, if you do it again, you know, take all the things that you learned from this time and put it into the next one. And it's like doing, you know workouts, you know you kind of survive, fran, the first time you do it and you're like, okay, let's, how can I do this differently next time and improve and stuff like that, and that's what you're always looking for, yeah that's a good analogy right there, like workouts that you repeat, you know you get it done, you survive.
David SyvertsenHost
24:53
Like what could I have done a little differently to improve my score, improve my time? And that's kind of like how running competition does feel the main stressor and it was easy to get overwhelmed in something like this. And this is a much smaller competition than some of the big big ones out there. And this is a much smaller competition than some of the big big ones out there. But I think it all kind of circles back to the same thing is you have to keep the main thing. The main thing and what our goal was to provide a fun, safe, community field day that revolves around fitness and competition.
25:24
And every time I found myself stressing about about which vendor was going to be here at which time and where they were going to be in the gym and what they were going to supply for us and what we were going to supply for them, and were these people going to show up on time? And what are we going to do about the park? I don't know why I always freak out about parking. Um, I think it's just something that's in my head that I just can't get out. Like, where are people going to park? Are they going to go here? They can go there. Are they going to go here? Are they going to go there? Are they going to block someone's driveway? Is a cop going to walk in and say, hey, shut the thing down? Like every time I look at the door I'm like I'm hoping I don't see three police officers saying you got to wrap this thing up. But I always circled back to and I said this to you. I think it was Tuesday night. I was like dude, our priority this year is to run a good competition. Everything else is secondary. Everything. Vendors and I'm going to give you guys a shout out in a little bit spectators parking is. Let's focus on the heats, the athletes and the judging. That actually helped calm me down a few times because at the end of the day, there's a lot of factors that you cannot control. But focus on what you can control and it's amazing how things fall into place. It's like I think it was like 745 that it's starting to fill up a little bit.
26:41
Athlete meeting was at 8. So a lot of the athletes were there, spectators, judges, everything. And I asked someone. It was the only time I asked all day. I was like, what's it like out there, the parking, what's it like? And she's like, you know, it's kind of like your wedding. You'd rather just not know what's going on behind the scenes. And that was the last time. That was a great line. I forget who gave it to me, it was Vivian or Lisa. She's just like it's kind of reflect on our first issue of the day and it actually had to do with the scoring.
27:15
We converted RX to Masters pretty late in the process, like I said, the week of, and we got the scoring system set up the night before slash, the morning of. I mean, we had set it up in July but we were actually starting to experiment with the scores. Now that all the teams are in there, I brought my computer from home and I'm going through it. I'm like all of our master's teams are not in here and in my head I'm immediately being like we're going to have to build our own score sheet through Excel in the next hour. And I knew, honestly, if we had to, I knew we would, we'd be able to, but it just would have taken a lot of time. So I'm on the phone with someone from the program, from the software company at 745.
27:55
At the same time we had a team check in that we actually opened up registration late for them to sign up. So first of all, ashley walks up and I can tell Ashley, my wife is walking towards me. I'm like this is not going to be good just the way she was walking and she goes, goes. There's a team here that says they signed up, but they're not signed up, they're not in our registration thing. And I'm like jesus and I almost got up and said hey guys, um, you're out, like you can't show up to the day of the competition, like it's not gonna happen. And then I got the team name from them and I said I know exactly what happened. I want to give you guys a background story on this. A team asked someone from a gym, asked if another pair of people from their gym could sign up for the competition, and she said that these two guys want to do scale. And I said you know what? Let's do it, we'll just work it out. Adam had, I think, already started putting the schedule together, but we'll figure it out. It's only one team.
28:53
Registration comes through a day later as Masters. Masters at that point had already been converted to RX. So I emailed back and I said hey, you said they were signed up for a scale. I saw they signed up for Masters. I just want to let you know that Masters is now RX and that I left it there because I assumed that they looked at the workouts and Masters were the same as RX. They should be able to do the weights.
29:17
The reason why there was confusion about the registration process was those guys wanted to do scaled and that's why they were not on our scaled list. They were not in the RX list because they didn't sign up RX. They weren't on the master. They they the masters had to put into rx. So there was confusion. They did have a registration but after the heats had been made they said hey guys, we're not doing rx, we can't do those weights, we are going to get broken if we try. Adam, your first thought on that in terms of this started off the flow of our day and you're like what do we do here?
Adam RamsdenCo-host
29:54
I immediately said in my head, not to them, I said you're going to ruin my dream of workout one Because, um, as of you know, uh, two days ago, we had seven scaled men teams and seven scaled women teams and the flow of workout one was that scaled men and scaled women were going at the same time on two sides of the gym, flowing down, and then we were going to have an open heat where we could quickly switch out equipment from scale to RX, and then the RX teams were going to flow down and it was just, it was a thing of beauty in my mind, and I saw somebody throwing a rock through the window of my glass house, through the window of my glass house. And so, you know, when I went out and talked to them, I was like okay. Well, you know, rx and masters were the same weights and you know all it is is. You know, the guy was like 50 pound dumbbell that's impossible 155 shoulder to overhead impossible. And we were like okay.
31:05
So you know, luckily, they understood that, um, because of the mix-up, um, you know, their athlete experience might be a little different than the other teams, so we put them as the first team to go by themselves. Yep, they were by themselves in station one and you know, workout one helped with this, um, because the flow of two minutes, two and a half minutes after they started, two teams were behind them starting, so it wasn't like they had a full workout by themselves. Um, and we got lucky that the way the uh scaled team numbers worked out was that we were going to have four in one heat, three in another. Because there were seven teams, we could just fit them in to that open spot in the second heat, right. So a lot of things went well with that problem to be able to solve it easily Credit to them.
David SyvertsenHost
31:53
Those two guys were very team player with us. They were like whatever you want us to do, if we get less rest between workouts, we'll do that. You could throw us in the between workouts, we'll do that. You could throw us in the corner, we'll do that. I mean that that could have gone a lot worse, but so their reactions to our solutions were were a huge part of it being an efficient answer to that problem.
32:09
Another angle to it, though that did make it a little bit more stressful. We originally had and we're going to get into heat sizes in a little bit that we originally had two scaled heats, right for A group of four and a group of three, yes, for the scaled guys. And then, after talking and after kind of mapping things out, we said you know what, I bet we can get away with doing all of them in one heat, because one of our goals was to finish before 3 o'clock and to really kind of keep this thing on time. Nailed it, yeah, let's go RX+. And we said you know what, instead of having two heats of scaled, just putting them into one heat, that alone saves us about 30 minutes, 25 to 30 minutes, so the heat of seven scaled men was the biggest right and the women.
Adam RamsdenCo-host
32:52
Yeah, in the second workout and adding in that eighth team, we had eight teams on the floor.
David SyvertsenHost
32:58
Yeah, that was a stressor. It's like man, that already is the biggest heat. Now we're adding a team and those guys had different heights. I don't want to go back into that fiasco, but that was something that we were able to take on and it really did not disrupt the flow. There was a little bit of confusion and communication with the people that are corralling the teams and that's something that really did help us kind of just move forward and stay on time. Flow of the day is that's kind of that's how the day started right A scoring issue, a registration issue, and by 80, sorry, by 905, there were zero issues. It was solved right away.
33:38
So, like I said, the goal was to stay on, get on time, stay on time and it's really important to communicate to athletes. Hey, guys, your heats are on time right now. So a lot of these guys plan their warmups, their preparation, even their eating in some cases, around what time their next workout will be, and if you're going to be late, it's okay, but you have to relay that to the athletes. So we had Guillermo on the microphone. Guillermo and Jody did a great job corralling athletes and helping us stay on time and communicating to the athletes, which is always a big deal, but at one at any point we did get a little behind schedule.
34:15
At some point we actually ended up making up some ground in that last workout. Where did you see any potential? Because now we'll start diving into some of the things that we could have done different and maybe that we will do different in the future, but what are a few things that kind of just swallowed up a little bit more time than we thought that maybe, if anyone's ever running a competition, just try to keep some attention on this, in contrast to what we did.
Adam RamsdenCo-host
34:41
When we initially came up with the heat list and the judges for each heat, I had it all in one document and it was kind of like one spreadsheet that showed all of workout one, all of workout two, all of workout three.
34:55
And then two nights ago I had, you know, when we were thinking about corralling athletes, I said, you know what It'd be nice if Bill and Jody each had kind of a picture of the gym for each heat and say, okay, this is the time this heat's supposed to go, these are the zone assignments for the teams.
35:17
Thinking back now, I would have liked to have put the judges judges names in there and had every volunteer have a copy of that. I mean, it would have been papers all over the gym, um, but you know, talking to Dan Cota last night, um, you know he said, oh, it would have been nice to have just like a list of my assignments for the day. Got it? You know it would have been a lot more work, yeah, but it's something we could have done to make just the flow of getting everybody in place a little bit quicker and save a minute or two in between some of those heats where it's like, okay, this team doesn't know where they're supposed to be. They were supposed to be in zone 14, but we moved them to zone 12, you know, and just communicating that.
David SyvertsenHost
36:02
Got it. Yeah, that's actually a good thought and you know, I would say one issue of putting the whole schedule together for each individual judge, which would be a lot of work and a lot of stress, is like if you have one little change at some point, it could throw the whole thing off and then it just it could cause confusion.
Adam RamsdenCo-host
36:17
Yeah, and you're trying to be down to the minute, right? You know, literally At some point Ashley had like 17 different times on her arm and she comes up to me and she goes we're off. And she points to one part and she's like I'm supposed to be judging at 1 o'clock, it's 1.07. And I was like all right, listen, thanks, ash, things aren't going gonna go perfectly sorry about your arm, something, yeah, something that was erasable on your arm.
David SyvertsenHost
36:47
Are you sure that's a seven ash? It might be a one, uh, yeah, I. I would even say one thing I noticed that I would want to do different is we went from guys rx to girl. Sorry, guys scaled to girls scaled, and then guys Rx to girls Rx. And that's okay when you have 20 people changing equipment, but it is a lot of changing stuff in and out, and it was I was just thinking about this last night. Was there a possibility? And we could even probably find a hole in this right now? But could you do? Guys are scaled into, guys are X, so that you know the barbells don't have to be changed out. You still do have to change some of the other things, but and then you do girls scaled, girls are X.
37:37
Again, the barbells can say because the hardest thing to move, in my opinion, it's usually barbells can say because the hardest thing to move, in my opinion, it's usually barbells. Yes, they're heavier, they're awkward, they're long, you know you have to find a spot to store them. So that would say, cut out one transition of of weights, um, instead of just constantly going back and forth guys to girls ashley had mentioned, like why was it impossible to keep all the guy heats on one side of the gym and all the girl heats on the other side of the gym? I kind of said no, because it just would have. You know, it doesn't come down to genders always. It usually comes down to height and you have some girls that are 5, 10, 5, 11, some guys that are 5, 5, 5, 6, so that kind of throws off that that side of it as well yeah, I, I mean, I think the the layout of our gym is that and just from coaching classes, you're kind of like one side of the gym, you know the left hand side is more girl heavy.
Adam RamsdenCo-host
38:26
It just has more low pull-up bars and stuff like that. So as you're building your classes, putting things in, you're checking zen planner, who's in this class just more girls end up on the left hand side than the right hand side. More guys end up on the right hand side. So that would be doable, I think, with our layout. Um, but you also just want to have the ability or at least in my mind for an, a male athlete, to look around the gym or look behind him and be like, oh, they're not resting, we gotta go. That's a good point. That's you. You want that intensity level. Yep, um, and I'm sure you can get that with guys and girls working out at the same time too. But you just do want to have, you know, some of those teams that know okay, those guys are in second place, yeah, these guys are in third place. Like, we have to move here.
David SyvertsenHost
39:13
Yeah, you know, I talked to Tim and Aaron. They used to run an individual competition in October called the Garden State Open and I think Tim said they peaked at 150 athletes individuals, just think about that not teams. So that's 150 stations per workout that you need set up and I remember we actually talked about this yesterday, him and I just a little bit, where I think Aaron was there too, because Aaron's like a mastermind behind that competition, in that you had to put you to put, uh, heats that had mixed divisions in it, like you would have. I remember working out there and being like all right, there's 12 of us rx and the eight of those guys are skilled and which is great for the efficiency of running on time. It's great for the feel of like, hey, the gym is full, a lot of energy, a lot of spect. The more people working out, the more spectators you have in there. Right, because everyone has like their own group of fans and spectators cheering them on. But it actually is not spectator friendly because a different movements, different weights, but also you don't really know who's in first and who's the second. Sometimes, even if they're on separate sides of the gym, you know if a skilled guy is over there getting to the rig first, or the barbell first or the wall ball first, and other people are over there. It's like wait, is he in for? No? No, he's a skilled okay. So is he in first or is he in second? That that can be hard to determine. Um, and not. Not especially in a local gym like this. It is the spectacle and and and, seeing who's in first, who's the second, and it being spectator friendly, is a goal, but it's not a primary goal.
40:38
Like we, you do, like I think the last workout was perfect for all. Right, we can see where people are because it's chipper style, so like, hey, they're on that movement. But I was thinking a few times yesterday and it's one thing that I had thought last night could we have made the heats bigger to a just speed it up a little bit? Not that we needed to, but I'm thinking more like next year, like, let's say, we have double the teams next year. We can't have, you know, a heat of four and a heat of five. But at the same time I want to kick back on that for our first competition, because part of the advantage of having smaller heats is that we had so much control, flexibility, and we had too much help, and I'd rather have too much help than not enough. Correct Yep, absolutely so. That's one thing I would expect for next year if we do this again. We'll talk about that towards the end.
41:31
We're going to wrap this up soon, but that is partially dictated by your schedule what you want it to feel like, your health, but also the workouts day. Workouts dictate a lot about how much action you could have out there, um at once to keep it safe. Um, what were we the most proud of, the most pleased with? Again, I mean, we could circle back to the spectators. I do. I really do think that was it. But what were you, and don't hesitate to like? Really the first thing that comes to your mind, like, what was the thing that you were like really really gave you a sense of pride after this, because you do deserve to feel that way.
Adam RamsdenCo-host
42:04
Okay, this is going to sound bad, but here we go. The thing I was most pleased with was that everybody had trouble getting up on top of the podium. Done. Stepping up on that box was one of the hardest things that everybody had to do.
David SyvertsenHost
42:20
It was funny how they looked at it for like seven seconds and they're like wait, wait, how do I? Is there a ladder?
Adam RamsdenCo-host
42:25
One more box step up. But yeah, just like circling back to the beginning of our conversation, of taking those mental pictures, you know I when we first came up with that first workout the waterfall style and we tested it out you know you don't get a clear picture of having 12 athletes doing six different things at all times and whether that's going to work out with the judging and everything like that. People are going to be where they need to be every two and a half minutes. So there was one point in the middle of that workout where I was just like it's working. Oh my God, this is great. Um. And then that third workout of you know, as I was walking around, just people being like this is awful, what have you done?
David SyvertsenHost
43:13
Um, and that's just like you know, you get the proud parent uh moment where you're like, yeah, this is my creation and it's working out how you thought it was, painfully but yeah, yeah, that last workout was so awesome to watch because, like the elite of the elite, like we had some elite athletes there and I don't want to get into like good, bad athletes, but like I'm just saying, every athlete in that room, whether you were the elite of the elite or it was your first borderline at failure, or actually at failure of a simple handstand hold or push-up hold and wall balls and you still had like 30 of them left, 50 of them left, 60 of them left. That to me it just goes to show there was nothing very high skill in that workout. I don't consider wall walk high skill the ones that go fast, sure, but it's funny how these elite-level athletes can take on simple tasks with a light kettlebell. By the way, and you know, the first half of it's a partner workout, so you're resting for half of the workout, for the first half anyway, all right, where they were at—it's like the simplicity of crosses sometimes gets overlooked, like it doesn't need to be squats. We had different versions of this workout. I believe the first one had power snatches in it.
44:36
I want to say the last workout Okay, I think we did. It might have been the second one, but there was a barbell in the third workout and not in the. Yeah, there was going to be a barbell in the third workout. Then we said, hey, we don't want to have barbell in every workout. And I just remember thinking like, should we go with the heavy kettlebell? I'm so glad we didn't go with the heavy kettlebell 100% and I told that to a bunch of people yesterday, that thing being light.
44:58
I bet there's some guys in there that have not touched a 35-pound kettlebell in nine years. Yep, and same thing with the girls using a 26-pound kettlebell that you can make workouts very challenging for the elite of the elite and not go crazy heavy, not go crazy high skill and not go crazy volume. Right, anyone in the world can create a hard workout. You're not special if you create a one, but I do think there's some special in creating really hard workouts that elite athletes fail at or borderline fail at, when you're using very simple concepts. Reflect on that last workout a little bit more and then I'll give my favorite part of what I'm most proud of, and just in terms of the envisioning of it, because I think that workout is going to be what people will remember about the first bison brawl.
Adam RamsdenCo-host
45:42
Yeah, and I want to give a shout out to the scaled athletes because I think they had a harder time with that third workout. I think the third workout was harder scaled than it was RX with the bear crawls. I was going to say why Because of the bear crawls. I mean, you think when you start bear crawls that you know, oh, I can go so quickly, like this is, I'm going to rip through these, and then you get five bear crawls in and you're like I don't want to ever do another one ever again. Yep, and crawls in and you're like I don't want to ever do another one ever again.
46:11
Um, and you know we had the conversation afterwards where, where there are too many bear crawls, should we have taken that number down? Um, and I don't think so, because I think everybody got where we wanted them to get in the workout. Um, and it was kind of like, you know, the goal of the workout was how hard can you push when you got to the wall balls? And you know we had a race between our first and second place team in the scaled men's division where it was down to the wall ball. You know how many were they going to be able to get how many reps?
David SyvertsenHost
46:42
And that came down to two things yeah, what's your wall ball capacity, and can you hold a handstand during your quote? Rest or hold the top of a pushup.
Adam RamsdenCo-host
46:49
Yeah, and it was just like the struggle on holding the top of a pushup, which you know athletic people can do for minutes at a time. At the end of that workout it it borderline on being impossible to hold it up, which is great.
Change Speaker
David SyvertsenHost
47:04
Yeah, that was just an awesome, awesome end to it. Um, I think my favorite part of it was something that we talked about when we initially announced that we were running this competition. I had a few moments where I was going outside it was really close to the end where I knew like, alright, we made it, we have one heat left, two heats left. You go outside and there's you know, 20 tents in the parking lot. There's vendors, there's athletes, there's people sitting on the chairs, people getting sun, there's little kids running around, and it did help that it was one of the nicest days of the year, like 72 and perfect weather, blue sky, not humid. Um didn't even think about the temperature in the gym once the entire time and I just remember thinking, like you know, through all this, where I'm pretty connected to what's going on with crossfit and the turmoil at the top and some of the loud voices in the media always wanted to cause problems, and I always feel like one. One thing when I really kind of get down on the situation overall is just the amount of people that have just started to kind of like either turn against it or turn against each other, and I think the future across. It is going to revolve around days like what we did yesterday, like I want to see more of these competitions pop up, I think in the heyday of the growth of bison, the competitions that we've done and I know schedules are tough right, like you're in it right now, adam. Like you got you and alana run around like chickens with your head cut off, with sports, like just, it's always so. I know we can't expect everyone to show up to everything and be as available as possible, but I want to challenge some of you gym owners and coaches and CrossFitters, the athletes and judges and all this members of gyms to try and find opportunities to build up days like yesterday, because I remember looking out up there I'm like this is where it's at. It's not the games, it's not the games, it's not social media, it's people from all over the place coming together sitting in a parking lot throwing down with some workouts, good, bad.
49:01
We didn't have any major egotistical athletes yesterday that were causing problems. I mean, hey, competition can bring out that kind of attitude in anyone. But overall it was such a positive vibe all around. Like that is why I was really happy with the day. Yes, being on time. Yes, no one getting hurt, yes, not having to use our EMT that we hired to come and spend the day there, and I actually think we helped out some of the local economy. Like I don't think people realize how much influence a CrossFit can have on a local economy. Like we had the vendors there yesterday. Like I know a couple of talk to them. A couple of them make bank, they get new customers. Like it's there's so many positives out of a day like this that it makes the stress of leading up to really feel like it was completely worth it. That that was my favorite part.
Adam RamsdenCo-host
49:51
Yeah, and I remember, you know, yesterday you said after the podium announcements you were like, all right, you know, hang out for an hour, blah, blah, blah. And these people have been here since 7 am and so you're just like they probably just want to leave. Yeah, right, you know. And then I looked outside 45 minutes later and people are still out there hanging out like talking to new people. You know the the, just the environment of everybody being intense outside, it just lends themselves to as you're walking past, you're like good workout, you know stuff like that, and you, you build relationships that way, um, and and I think that, yeah, that's one of the definite positives that comes out to all the, all the hard work that you put into it.
David SyvertsenHost
50:30
Yeah, yep. So, guys, that's going to wrap it up for our summary of the 2024 Bison Ball 1. And I'm going to have to ask Adam on the fly are we doing this again next year, or what?
Adam RamsdenCo-host
50:42
Yeah, all right.
David SyvertsenHost
50:55
Let's do it. So I'm telling you this right now Adam's going to be thinking about workouts nonstop in this gym, visualizing because I've been there before, and it kind of starts to take over and I can guarantee we're probably going to start trading some workout ideas with each other over the next nine to ten months. So keep your eyes open, your ears listening to when we are going to announce. I can tell you right now it's probably going to be this first weekend of October. If we have to move it a week or two, we will, but it will be in this kind of like early to mid fall stage. So then, just because of the weather base and what's going on around the CrossFit community around that time, but we will be back for Bison Brawl 2. We hope to see you there. And last thing I would say and I'll let Adam wrap it up is if you don't want to compete, you have no interest.
51:40
We started something called the Bison Spirit Award that we hand out after the Open every year, and it's not just about the Open, which is about four and a half months away, everybody that we want people to look at this as an opportunity to really kind of serve the community, not just your gym, although you are going to be helping them out, but this is something that I think a lot of people took pride in yesterday that they were really truly a key, integral part to the success of the Bison Brawl.
52:07
So, even if the comp scene is not your thing you don't do CrossFit for competition this is a huge opportunity to help the greater community out. That has helped you out in ways that you probably don't even fathom yet. So this is a really big way to kind of pay back, pay it forward. So if you're part of a gym that's running competition, go ask what you can do. And to the gym owners and coaches that run these kind of things, take note who helps you out, because at some point you should be paying them back as well. Adam, wrap it up, my man.
Adam RamsdenCo-host
52:36
Yeah, love it. You know the amount that you give to your gym you get back tenfold, no matter what it is. So yeah, help out and just have fun with it and you'll enjoy it.
David SyvertsenHost
52:52
Bison Brawl 2,. See you guys next year. Thank you everybody for taking the time out of your day to listen to the Herd Fit Podcast. Be on the lookout for next week's episode.
