Hard to believe that the Disney Fit Challenge is only 5 days away. I signed up for this thing 6 months ago…oh how quickly time flies! While I’m still slightly excited for the event, I have more feelings of disappointment with the level of disorganization and lack of information that Disney has shown, particularly in the last 6 weeks. For a company with the high level of resources and experience in planning events of this nature, this is turning out to be quite a mess.
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First was the schedule change that was announced 6 weeks ago. This wasn’t just a small change to the timing, but a change to the ENTIRE event. It was moved from a one-day event with your choice of competing on Friday or Saturday followed by the finals on Sunday, to a full two-day event with mandatory workouts on Saturday and Sunday. Like many other people, I signed up for this event and booked my travel back in March and this puts a wrench in travel plans. Walt Disney World is a destination. They had to expect people were coming with family and friends for a longer vacation and not just taking part in the event that weekend. This was a big fail on their part.
The next disappointment was the announcement of the workouts. Not only did they wait to release them until less than 2 weeks before the event, they first consisted of things that those of us in the CrossFit community had never heard of before and also were so vague that it left many people with a laundry list of questions to be answered. I’m in the scaled female division so let’s take a look at a few of those WODs.
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Right off the bat, my questions were:
- What is the height for the wall balls?
- What is the time cap?
Obvious questions that you would think would be clarified right off the bat. Also, I had never heard of a “Cluster” before thankfully that was originally clarified as a “squat-clean-thruster or power-clean-thruster.” The odd thing about this WOD is that wall balls and thrusters are essentially the same movement. Typically you would see thrusters paired with burpees or pull-ups, and wall balls paired with toes-to-bar or box jumps. This is just seems repetitive. Moving on…
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So I’m wondering…
- What the hell is a hurdle?
- Are knees-to-arms like knees-to-elbows? Do we have to touch our arms?
- Again, what is the time cap?
I am VERY interested to see how many people in the CrossFit community are hoping hurdles at their box. I have NEVER heard of this and for someone who has trouble jump on boxes, you now want me to hop a hurdle?? Beyond confused. Overall, the challenges are very odd and nothing like scaled versions of competitions I have ever seen before. Nothing is varied and we are seeing moves like box jumps, wall balls and sprints repeated through various workouts. Plus, there is hardly any weightlifting involved and that makes me pretty sad.
I quickly learned that I was not the only one scratching my head about these things as the Facebook event page blew up with similar questions. The most disappointing thing about this is that Disney Sports isn’t addressing ANY of our concerns in the group. They are answering our individual questions by phone or email and have since released updated athlete guides for the event that answer some (not all!) of our questions and concerns, but the lack of communication has been horrible.
Finally, we are now 5 days out and the heats have not been released for the events. Yes the times have been released but I still have no idea which one I’m in, meaning I could be competing in event #1 anytime between 8:15 am and 11:00 am on Saturday. That’s 3 hours!
I’m trying to remain positive about this whole experience and hoping it won’t be a complete mess when we get there. I know my friend Kat, who isn’t a Disney freak like I am, was really looking forward to this event more than the actual Disney trip (shocking I know!!) and she is feeling disappointed that she is traveling all the way to Florida for something that is turning out to be highly disorganized. Fingers crossed that once we get there everything will fall into place and we will have a blast. I mean we have a monorail crawl planned and the Epcot International Food & Wine Festival is going on, so how could we not?? Lapu Lapus anyone??
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Anyone else find all of this strange and feeling frustrated??
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The post The Disney Fit Challenge is Almost Here and I'm Feeling Frustrated first appeared on RAD Living.