Amy is ready to take on Monday with the same drive she used to tackle this heavy prowler.
Femme Royale is just around the corner. . .
Ladies!! It’s not too late to get signed up for this one day, partner competition being held at Verve on Saturday September 8th. Femme Royale has 3 conception divisions: For Fun, 50/50, and RX. Having 3 divisions means that quite literally anyone can participate. There is something for every skill level. For more information and to register, click here. The workouts are already listed, so you can start practicing now.
Gentlemen and ladies not competing!!We could always use some volunteers to help the day run smoothly. We need help with judging athletes during the workouts and assisting with equipment set-up throughout the day. Femme Royale gives each volunteer $20, lunch (which usually comes from Jimmy Johns), and a t-shirt that says “judge” if you are judging. Here’s what we need from you:
*Click here to see our volunteer sign up sheet. *Fill in name and email. *Put an “X” in all areas that apply- Can you help us in the morning? How about the afternoon? Both? Put an “X” in all that apply. Would you prefer to judge? How about just move equipment around? Doesn’t matter, you could do either? Put an “X” in all that apply.
Dean’s face says it all…. Don’t let “NOT FOR TIME” deceive you!!
ONLY 8 MORE DAYS!!
Thank you so much for the generous donations so far to IMPACT HUMANITY. There are 8 more days to get donations in. Charities often receive many clothing items but are in great need of personal hygiene items. If you can imagine not having easy access to a toothbrush and toothpaste for oral care, clean socks without holes, or a water bottle that you can refill that will last – these are the items that make a great impact.
Krisitn and Mike are super bummed about something happening at Verve lately. You should read the blog to learn all about what brings these two down.
This Public Service Announcement is brought to you by a concerned business owner:
Folks, I’m sorry that I have to say this but Verve is currently having a major problem with cars being broken into in the parking lot across the street. The culprit(s) will break a window and take whatever they see. We have posted about this several times in the CrossFit Verve social page on Facebook, but it’s continuing to happen, and when it does I hear some pretty common things:
But my car was locked.
There was nothing of value that they stole.
Is it really happening in the middle of the day?
I am going to try and be super blunt and give you as much detail as possible because truly the only way to stop this problem is to prevent this problem.
I hope you understand it does not matter if your car is locked. They are breaking windows. Locks mean nothing.
It does not matter if what they took from your car had value to you or not. They do not know that, they simply see something that has the potential for value, and they are willing to take it. So the question is, are you willing to lose a window over a gym bag with wrist wraps and olympic lifting shoes? “Why would anyone want to steal that?”. Well, they wouldn’t, but to them it’s a bag that may contain something else.
Yes, it’s happening during the day. The prime times seem to be 6:30am and 4:30pm. I believe these times are being hit most frequently because that is when the parking lot is the most full. It is easier for people to slip between cars, casing and smashing without being seen. I think people have also become aware that when someone leaves their car, they are either going to yoga or Verve, which means they will not be returning to the car for about an hour, so bad people have some time.
At this point, it has occurred with such frequency the Denver Police will not respond to take a report. You can call them and they will simply advise that you file one online. They have mentioned increasing patrol, but I have yet to see it.
The parking lot is private property owned by EXDO. They have discussed adding cameras. Seems like that might be nice, but can we honestly ask ourselves if we think that will prevent this problem? I don’t think people smashing car windows in the middle of the day give any cares about cameras. So then, what? What can be done about this problem?
PLEASE STOP LEAVING STUFF IN YOUR CAR.
That’s it. Whether you think it has value or not, do not leave stuff visible in your car. Do not leave it in the console, on the floorboards, in the back seat. . . either lock it in the trunk or bring it into Verve.
I am begging you from the bottom of my heart. I have no way of helping you when this tragedy happens. All I can do is continue to warn you and hope that the warning is listened to. I don’t have an answer for why this has become such a big problem in the last month. And genuinely the only solution I can offer is what I have said before, don’t leave anything in your car.
Again, I’m sorry that this is even an issue that needs to be addressed. Please let me know if you have any other questions, if I know the answer, I will give them to you.
Danielle knows the way to my heart. A well organized anything!
A lot of us travel quite a bit for work or pleasure. Below is an article we posted a few years back about ways to keep up a healthy lifestyle when you’re on the go.
Stuck in an airport? Automatically think that travel days are “goners” for eating well and exercising? Make the most out of your long waits, layovers, delays, and discomforts with these unconventional travel tips.
Pack Your (Lunch) Bag. The best food in the airport is the food you bring with you. For day-of travel, pack your sack with non-liquid based foods. Salmon and roasted veggies tossed in olive oil. Burger patties, sweet potato wedges, and asparagus spears. Homemade chicken salad, cashews, and an apple. Traveling home from your destination, stop by Whole Foods or another clean-eating restaurant spot on the way to the airport to find grub that’s healthy (and more budget-friendly) then you find at the airport.
Always Prepare. Failing to prepare is preparing to fail, especially when layovers, missed flights, and changing schedules happen. Keep easy travel snacks with you at all times: coconut butter packets, almond butter packets, nitrate-free jerky, canned wild salmon and tuna packets, additive-free protein powder and a shaker bottle, Kale Krunch, apples or oranges, carrots and celery, plantain chips, raw nuts and seeds, Bulletproof collagen protein bars, RX Bars, and more.
Handle Your Poop Problems. Traveler’s constipation does exist (#TheStruggleIsReal). Your bod is thrown off from schedule changes, poor hydration, and the change in cabin pressure. Arm your digestion and elimination to work like a champ with these tactics:
Drink Up. Make a conscious effort to drink water the days before travel and throughout your travel day to keep things running smoothly Probiotic Power. Carry a quality probiotic supplement in your bag to ensure you are armed with good bacteria.
Chew Your Food. As simple as it sounds, being “on the go” often times means eating fast, which is not optimal for digestion. Chew your food. Rest and digest. Enzyme Supplements. The second line of defense for digesting your food after you’ve minded thorough chewing, water, and probiotics. Enzymes supplements give your body the extra oomph to break down your food and send it on its merry way through the digestive process.
Get Your Sweat On. For years I’ve been saying there need to be gyms in airports. Until that happens, bring your workout to a long travel day. Instead of using the downtime between flights sitting and working on your computer or reading (you can do this on the plane), move a bit. Stretch your legs, walk around, or even break out your jump rope or do a bodyweight WOD. Here are a few ideas:
Tabata x 8-minutes: Hollow Body Holds & Push-ups (alternate between the two movements, 20-seconds on, 10-seconds off)
Roll Out. Don’t let stiff muscles happen to you. Use the downtime on the plane and sitting around to roll out. Pack a lacrosse ball or band in your carry on and take advantage of the opportunity to mobilize.
Boost Your Brain. How many times have you said, “I don’t have the time to ______ (read, write, learn, listen)”? Now you do. Use your travel day to boost your self-development with a book, audible book, podcast, or a good ol’ pen and paper brainstorming session to grow some brain muscle.
Om. I can’t help it – I always fall asleep on airplanes. I have a philosophy that there is a lack of oxygen higher up in the air that knocks me out like a sleeping baby. Sometimes you just need to chill out. If you are a go-go-go person like I am, naps, Zen, and even sleep are sometimes neglected. Consider your travel day a restoration day.
Jess and Danielle showing us how team work makes the dream work.
Calling all volunteers!!
Femme Royale is coming back to Verve in 3 weeks. This is a fun, 1 day, ladies only partner competition.
Saturday September 8th ladies from all over the Denver Metro area will be arriving to Verve, dressed all matchy matchy with their bestie, ready to do some fitness for time. Part of what makes this day run so smoothly is with the help and assistance of volunteers from the community. We need help with judging the workouts as well as setting up equipment between workouts and between heats of the workouts.
As a volunteer what do you have coming your way? Femme Royale gives each volunteer $20, lunch, and a shirt that says “judge” (if you are in fact judging).
Here’s what we need. . .
*Click here to see our volunteer sign up sheet. *Fill in name and email. *Put an “X” in all areas that apply- Can you help us in the morning? How about the afternoon? Both? Put an “X” in all that apply. Would you prefer to judge? How about just move equipment around? Doesn’t matter, you could do either? Put an “X” in all that apply.
Folks, volunteers make the work go round. They make events possible. We could use your help. We would love your assistance. If you have some hours in the day, please sign up!!
5 Rounds on a 4 minute clock: 100′ Farmer carry 100′ Prowler push 100′ Walking lunge As many double unders as possible in remaining time Rest 1 minute between rounds
Just a nice leisurely warm up on the rower with friends. Who would be happy to not sit on a rower again for a while after yesterday’s 50 minute row WOD?
In 2007, Wimbledon made a change to award equal prize money to men and women.
It was the last major tennis tournament to do so, and it was behind the U.S. Open by 34 years.
That same year, the Sport of Fitness was born, and equality was a prominent feature from Day 1.
In the first CrossFit Games, held June 30-July 1, 2007, in Aromas, California, James FitzGerald and Jolie Gentry (now Gentry Macias) were both awarded US$500.
Dave Castro, Director of the CrossFit Games, explained why the prizes were equal.
“When we first created the CrossFit Games in 2007 and decided to award cash prizes for the winners of events and the overall title, it never even crossed my mind to do anything but make the amounts equal. We do not look to major sports or leagues for guidance on how to handle our sport. We make decisions based on what’s right for our sport, and oftentimes that has to do with what’s fair, morally and ethically,” he said.
Nicole Carroll was an athlete and coach at CrossFit Founder Greg Glassman’s original gym, and she was featured in the “Nasty Girls” video many women have pointed to as their reason for starting CrossFit. Carroll is now CrossFit’s Co-Director of Certification and Training. She said equal prize money came about because equality was always part of CrossFit.
“It was not part of our culture to even consider that women are not equal or that their performance should not be as equally valued,” Carroll recalled.
The pattern hasn’t changed over the years. When a major sponsor signed on to increase the prize money in 2011, the total purse grew dramatically, but the split remained exactly equal.
“The discussion wasn’t even had about the cash prizes being higher for the men and less for the women,” Castro said of the era when prize money jumped to six figures. “We just did what we all intuitively knew was right: equal prizes for both genders.
“I can’t imagine what message it would have sent to our athletes and, more importantly, our community if we would have given the men more than the women. It’s frankly just wrong.”
In 2017, Mat Fraser and Tia-Clair Toomey both took home $285,000 for winning the Games, and this year’s champs will walk away with $300,000.
Not so in other sports.
Forbes’ 2018 list of the world’s highest-paid athletes is a boys’ club. No females are on the list, though one might suggest Serena Williams would have made it had she not taken time off in 2017 to have a baby. In another article, Forbes noted that Williams had made $27 million in prize money and endorsements in a 12-month period.
Forbes noted Williams is an anomaly: “Her earnings between June 2016 and June 2017 of $27 million from prize money and endorsements are twice the total from any other female athlete in the world.”
Tennis, of course, is an exception. Women in most sports are not treated as equals. For but one dramatic example, you need only look at basketball. The average NBA salary is about $5.7 million, while the average WNBA salary is about $72,000. The maximum salary in the WNBA is less than $116,000. Stephen Curry and LeBron James both made over $33 million in the 2017-2018 season.
Revenue and economics clearly play a part in the disparity, but that doesn’t mean the disparity can be disregarded.
If Serena Williams is an outlier in the sports world, so is CrossFit. But that’s always been the case.
CrossFit Founder Greg Glassman was kicked out of gyms repeatedly as he bucked the machine-driven, 3-sets-of-8 trend and developed his revolutionary program. Similarly, Glassman had the vision to let women train on gymnastics rings—an apparatus they’d never use in traditional gymnastics—and he had no qualms about having women compete with men or beat them in the same workout. That attitude continued when his company grew dramatically.
“Whether my involvement was with the sport of CrossFit, being a trainer at the original gym or being an executive in the company, I’ve never felt that I was given any less opportunity or pay than anyone else—especially not based on my gender,” Carroll said. “If anything, I feel that I was given more opportunity due to my gender. I was given the opportunity to compete and win against men. At a certain point, this was even expected of me.”
In the early days of CrossFit, when most people were coming to seminars after years of isolation training and what Glassman called “the dumbing down of PT,” Carroll was given the chance to prove CrossFit’s efficacy by beating men in tests including overhead-squat showdowns.
“During each seminar, my job was to beat the men using the same loading,” Carroll said. “The bigger, the fitter, the more alpha those men were, the better.
“The idea behind this—and this is important—was not to shame men or anyone else. These men often held jobs where a lack of fitness could cost their lives or the lives of others, and we wanted to shame the damn PT they were wasting their time with. It was effective. It was not uncommon to hear things like this: ‘I cannot believe a 5-foot-2 pottery teacher from the hippie high school in Santa Cruz just overhead-squatted more than me.’
“From there, it was very difficult for them to deny that what we were doing was more effective than what they’d been doing.”
Carroll said the men she beat never once responded with anger or arrogance. It was clear, even in those early seminars, that CrossFit culture places respect and hard work above all else.
For years, Glassman and his staff never posted “women’s weights” to CrossFit.com. The load was the load, and to hell with the chromosomes. CrossFit.com only recently started posting loads for women, but that was in response to a mountain of requests for help with scaling. The women’s loads are guidelines only. Strong, fit women are more than welcome to go head-to-head with their male counterparts in any workout.
Go ahead. Beat the boys. We encourage it.
In CrossFit competition, women are often given a chance to compete against men, either by comparison after the fact or in mass-start events that are easier to run at the Games, where space and logistics are lesser concerns.
For example, consider Emily Bridgers’ recent time in Regional Event 3, a triplet featuring muscle-ups, handstand walks and single-leg squats. Her 8:21—a record among women—places her seventh overall on a leaderboard that combines both sexes. Helen Harding, the 68th and last woman to complete all the work before the 13-minute time cap, would have placed 161st on a combined leaderboard—one spot ahead of 2014 Games veteran Eric Carmody. Many men could not log all the reps before the time cap, meaning 68 women bested more than 150 Regional-level men in an event that was the same for both sexes.
In Run Swim Run at the 2017 Games, eventual champion Tia-Clair Toomey beat every male except Brent Fikowski—and she was less than a second behind him. In previous years, Sam Briggs, Julie Foucher and others provided similar moments. You can expect more in the future.
It’s in our DNA to treat men and women as equals and celebrate the accomplishments of women who ignore outdated, misguided gender roles and refuse to be called “the weaker sex.” Equality is simply part of CrossFit.
“A funny thing about CrossFit is that we’ve always been edgy and, at times, quite irreverent in language or humor, but true sportsmanship, hard work and respect are the pillars upon which our culture has been built,” Carroll said.
She continued: “It makes me proud to be part of an organization with roots in such an ethos, and these roots inspire a passionate determination to see these values carried on for all who come in contact with our sport.”
And so prize money will always be equal at the Games, regardless of whether other sports follow suit.
The two different courses are pictured above. The images might be difficult to read, so click HERE and HERE for a more detailed description of the courses and the areas of Denver that will be affected.
Saturday, stage 3, the race will be in RiNo on Blake and 27th. There is also a 3 day music festival happening around Blake and 27th so certain roads will be closed. For more information about the music festival, click HERE.
Sunday, the race will be in and around Verve so plan accordingly given that certain roads will be closed for the race and most likely a couple days leading up to the race as the organizers set up fences and start restricting parking and closing certain roads. The race will 8 laps for the men and 4 laps for the women. Walnut Street is the main road for the RiNo portion of the race with the racers turning west on 33rd as the furthest point north.
Stay tuned to Verve Social and the blog for more information as it becomes available.
Ali is all smiles thinking about her favorite event of the year coming up. . . it’s Turkey Challenge time.
Here is a list of a few things coming up over the next couple of months:
Labor Day- Monday September 3rd – We will have an abbreviated schedule, please see class times in MBO and get signed up for class
Femme Royale- Saturday September 8th @ Verve – Verve will be closed that day, no classes or open gym – Ladies can get registered by clicking here – We are always looking for volunteers, please keep an eye for a link to register to volunteer to help set up equipment and judge
Registrations opens for the 2018 MBS Turkey Challenge- Monday September 17th – This is a fun annual local competition, drawing a huge number of competitors, spectators, and vendors. – You can register as an individual or in a team, but you gotta register fast cause this event always sells out!! – Mark your calendars and set your alarms. You can get more info about the event by clicking here.
Verve celebrates 10 years in business!!- Saturday October 6th @ Verve – Folks, we are going to party. Big. – We will send out an actual invite but mark your calendars now and schedule a babysitter, it’s adult party time. . . and you are gonna love the theme. We promise.
