Part 1: Intro and 7K Run - Men’s 09 Games

These are unbelievably high quality!
Thanks!

I'm looking forward to the affiliate cup videos!

The free release of the games coverage is really commendable on HQ's part. It must have taken a lot of work to edit all the footage and to give it to the community free of charge is impressive. Thank you for your generosity.

Yay, they are finally here! But they're so big :-( wish my internet connection was better, internet in rural OZ sucks. :-S lol

Thanks for these excellent videos coach.
Cant wit ti watch them all!!

Thanks for doing this! I am anxiously awaiting each day's release, haha.

I just watched it.
These are amazingly edited and put together!
This is exactly the kind of coverage I had hoped for!

These videos are worth the subscription cost alone.

Awesome! Can't wait for the live stream of the 2010 CrossFit games!

Epic video guys, thanks for sharing this!

I wish I didn't know how this event turned out - great job of putting together the story of what is was like to be there!

Uh, there was one girl pretty hurt after that run.

Excellent video, what a great start to a hotly anticipated movie! To see Khalipa so down and out on the run and then crank out 505 on the deads? Magical stuff.

this is one of the many reasons i have not regreted subscribing. the journal rocks. I check the web site every day for new things and i watch them as soon as they appear. and this video is awesome

Awesome video - can't wait for the rest. Even though I know the outcome, the Khalipa story is epic.

HQ, when you guys do stuff about the athletes, you really shine.

Excellent - nice work, great quality, sweet coverage, well put together. I love how you're putting them out in sections, can't wait for the next ones. Well done HQ. Thanks -

Epic video. Let's see more elite athletes! Way more motivating and valuable to me than seeing Barry Sears repeat the same stuff in video after video.

so much for my work productivity today
thanks

Thanks to everyone who helped make the CF Games happen, took part in the creation of these amazing videos, and everyone associated with the CF Journal. To receive all of this hard work from hundreds of people for free blows my mind. (I basically consider the cost of the journal to be free. I spend more money on coffee each month than I do for a year of the CFJ)

After being associated with CF for years I'm still continually amazed at the the generosity. This is the coolest community in the world.

absolutely awesome video, very inspiring! and to get it as part of the subscription too, i'll echo what pat said, this is the coolest community in the world!

AMEN Pat Sherwood!

While I agree that the video is awesome and inspiring, I am disappointed that no female athletes are interviewed or identified. Women make up a huge segment of the CF community, and I for one would like to see us represented in videos like this.

All the womens events will be shown after they release the affiliate cup clips.

Loved this. Poor Jason Khalipa. Looking forward to more.

@Kim Collier: There's going to be separate women's coverage. From the 2010 Games website:

"We are releasing one event per day. Part 1 is free to everyone. The rest of the men's competition will be only for Journal subscribers. After the men's competition, we'll run the Affiliate Cup (three parts, the second is free), and then the women's competition (eight parts, the fifth is free)."

I thought they were going to require that you have a journal subscription to view these videos. At least for this first one, it is a free download. Wow.

Sad to see that so many had such problems with the 7k run. Looks like people dont work on their weaknesses.

Really appreciate the content being released for free to journal members. Top notch editing and quality - can't wait to see the rest of them.

Not having run the course, I do not have any idea of how hard the terrain was.

Does someone know, how fast guys like Chris Spealler or Mikka Salo are on a "normal", flat 5k run? That would be something I can better imagine and compare.

Thanks in advance

Can HQ host these files as torrents? Let's put the community to work, hosting and distributing these files. Plus we should all get faster d/l times to boot and not strain HQ's resources.

#22...WHAT WAS UR RUN TIME SIR?

I'm not sure what Spealler's time is on a 5K but I hear he was a pretty decent triathlete before he became a Crossfitter so I would assume he has decent 5 and 10K times.

To Danny Lau #26, that guy had a good point, why are you getting on his case? There seems to have been a trend in Crossfit over the last few years towards a "strength bias" and the first two games events highlighted that discrepancy. In the run you had 3 guys putting up good times but still with some separation and then a big gap to 4th and down from there and on the Deadlift event you have 16 guys all able to max out the ladder. That would indicate to me that clearly many Crossfit athletes are focusing too much on strength and not enough on endurance. Khalipa was clearly deficient in running ability and was lucky he didn't get bounced in the first event. Pretty tough to call yourself the world's fittest person if you can't even finish a 7K trail run without falling over and cramping up.

To all the armchair quarterbacks:

Unless you've been to the Ranch and competed, criticism of these athletes is pathetic at best. The issue was certainly not the distance, it was the difficulty; there aren't very many 7K runs in the WORLD that are as hard as this course was. Add on top of that, the fact that this was the first event of the Games and that many of the athletes' first exposure to the course and terrain were in the video released a few days prior.

As for Khalipa, before you begin to place judgment on the guy, close your eyes and spend 5 minutes imagining the enormous pressure that the guy was facing going into the '09 Games and how the nerves, anticipation, and adrenaline would impact the first few miles of the run. If you don't think that it would make a difference, then you are sorely mistaken.

- Alex

is anyone else having trouble playing the videos? they show up in my itunes under podcasts....and i can click on them all day and nothing happens...any resolutions?

Alex, easy there buddy, no need to get defensive. I was just saying that based on the results of the first two events it seems obvious that most of the athletes spent more time lifting weights than running. I know the course was very hard, I don't live that far from Santa Cruz and I actually do lots of trail running in terrain virtually identical to that of the ranch. It's tough!

As far as pressure is concerned, I don't really care. Sure, Khalipa has a lot of pressure, so do NFL quarterbacks who are paid millions of dollars and are watched by millions of people. Part of what makes a champion is the ability to handle pressure well. I would argue that Khalipa was double whammied by not being in very good running shape and succumbing to pressure in trying to push himself too hard on the first event. Is that an unfair assessment? If so, please tell me why. Further more, I think he stepped it up and performed quite well in the subsequent events.

BTW - in the WORLD! there are much harder 7K courses, this one was steep but it wasn't even at elevation, a few years ago I ran the Vail half marathon, it starts at 8200' elevation and you run up the Vail Mountain. That was a hard run.

Thanks Jesse for replying on my behalf, you covered my thoughts and observations.

It aint bashing. Some of the guys basicly admitted that they were not good runners and that they havn't been working on it in the video.

Just wait for the womens portion of the videos to come out. Me and my wife are excited to watch them all! Our 'date nights' now consist of WOD and watching a video during a cool down--so romantic!

I think Jesse Gray and Richard Meurk should complete in the 2010 games.

I am having that exact problem! Did you get it figured out? Dying to watch these!

Danny, obiously you are not reading our posts. I do hill running 7,8k two times a week(and CF), running is my strong side, has always been. So I would beat many of the athletes competing in the CF Games 09 on this part. But Im no where near the deadlift weights most of them are lifting, witch is my weak side, witch Im AWARE of, witch Im WORKING on, cause I know its my weakness.

Observing the results of the running event and the talk of the athletes before and during the event one can come to the conclusion that there are quite a suprisingly high number of athletes in this years games that where not good runners, and sadly, they havent been working on it either. Mikko was one of very few who ended with very good results in both running and deadlift.

And please stop being this defensive and leave my and Jesses performances outside this discussion cause it got nothing to do with it. The discussion I and Jesse started was about the endurance performances of the CF games athletes, nothing else.

Does anybody love Mikko's running style as much as I?

He moves with such ease and looks so light on his feet.

Has anyone had trouble with their pc/laptop after downloading the HD version? i downloaded it on Monday 14th and ever since the laptop started freezing. I've spent the best part of a week trying to fix the problem without even thinking it would be the CF video. I've just deleted it and it's now fine! I live near London in the UK (if that makes a difference?) and was wondering if anyone else has had the problem same problem (UK or not), or if HQ new about it?
I've also tried it on another laptop and it has the same problem!?

32:05 - Chris Speiler was pointed in the wrong direction by a judge. The judge pointed left towards the finish line. Tony had to point Chris back right. Chris and Tony looked pissed at the judge...last time he did that.

Damn I gotta watch this whole series now for sure. The hill looks so rough!!