BILLINGS – For the second year in a row, the CrossFit Games will be held at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison, Wisconsin and a team from Montana will put their training to the test there this week.
The Crossfit Games are the culmination of the 2018 Crossfit Season, which involves hundreds of thousands of competitors worldwide.
Athletes first compete in the open, then regionals. The final teams advance to The Games.
“We will be up against 40 teams in the whole world. It started out with 600 teams at Regionals and narrowed down to 40 worldwide,” team member Mack Unruh said.
Other team members are: Hope Cicero, Yurii Hanson, and Ashley Shaeffer. Evan Corneliusen is an alternate.
This team is the first and only team from Montana to qualify for the CrossFit games.
“I think combined between all of us, it’s 20 years of training for each of us combined,” Unruh said. “It’s been something we’ve all been training for for a very a very long time, and for me it’s just humbling that we get to experience.”
The majority of the workouts they will compete in are kept secret until shortly before they participate.
“I think sky’s the limit, touch on swimming, biking, running, the barbell, heavy lifting, the worm, drags, sprints, there’s an obstacle course, so there’s a lot,” Shaeffer said.
The team has kicked their training up a notch.
“We were lucky enough to work with a guy named Brian R. Chontosh and we did a 24-hour, where we went 24 hours straight of training up at Lake Elmo, carrying what’s called the worm, which is a 400-pound apparatus that we do around the lake, a mile and a half, and swimming around the lake and biking and it’s been very very intense,” Unruh said.
The games will test the top 40 men, 40 women, and 40 teams.
“That’s the great thing about a team is that we all can rely on each other when we are struggling. We have another three people that are going to be there cheering us on and keep us going,” Unruh said.
The Games start Wednesday, August 1, and conclude Sunday, August 5.
