Local CrossFit Athlete Headed To ‘Sanctionals’ In Dublin, Miami
Local CrossFit Athlete Headed To ‘Sanctionals’ In Dublin, Miami
Posted
Gary Gerard-ggerard@timesuniononline.com
Local CrossFit Athlete Headed To ‘Sanctionals’ In Dublin, MiamiA local CrossFit athlete will travel to Dublin and Miami to compete in events planned as part of the 2020 “CrossFit Sanctionals” season.
Bryan Wong, 32, Warsaw, qualified for the two events by successfully completing five prescribed workouts. The workouts – which are videotaped, judged and certified – encompass all aspects of CrossFit training.
Wong, 5 foot 9 inches and 200 pounds, trains at CrossFit Haymaker in Warsaw.
The CrossFit Sanctionals season kicks off with the Dublin event, the Filthy 150, in November. The season concludes with the Mayan CrossFit Championship in July. The Miami event Wong will attend – Wodapalooza – is in February.
According to a news release from CrossFit Inc., “the 2020 CrossFit Sanctionals season will span the globe: 28 events in 21 different countries on six continents.”
Top finishers in each event will be invited to compete against national champions and the top 20 Open finishers at the 2020 Reebok CrossFit Games in Madison, Wis.
The Sanctionals season is in its second year. Previously, athletes qualified for the CrossFit games by competing in regional competitions.
Wong qualified for regionals in 2016, 2017 and 2018. The top 40 of approximately 20,000 athletes competed in those events and Wong’s top finish was 16th.
This year, Wong finished 13th in qualifying for the Dublin Filthy 150 and 16th for the Miami Wodapalooza.
The Dublin event accepted 30 qualifiers out of more than 1,800 athletes in a single, elite men’s division.
In Miami, which had five divisions, 20 qualifiers were accepted out of more than 15,000 athletes.
Wong says he started his fitness journey when he was around 14 years old, lifting weights and working out for high school football at Tippecanoe Valley, where he also played basketball and ran track.
He played football at Rose Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute, for four years.
CrossFit was the next evolution.
“I learned about CrossFit and I started doing it on my own my senior year in college. When I moved back home I started training for tough mudders and then I went back to CrossFit, just doing it on my own like at Anytime Fitness or where ever there were weights available,” he said.
He did primarily strength training every day – more bodybuilding-type workouts – but then added CrossFit to his routine for conditioning.
What makes Wong unique is the fact that many of the athletes he will be competing against either own gyms or have sponsors and literally can spend all day working out if they choose.
Wong and his wife, Tara, have two children, Nova, 3, and Nash, 7 months, and he is a degreed manufacturing engineer at Medtronic in Warsaw.
“I try to get an hour of something in every day,” he said. “Some days I get the opportunity to come in and in the mornings I coach. Before I go to work, I do a quick training session and then I can usually get an hour in on my lunch break.”
CrossFit Haymaker owner Ryan Hill said Wong became one of the gym’s original coaches when it opened in 2014.
Hill was running martial arts schools and doing personal training when one of his friends – a UFC fighter – suggested CrossFit.
“I had no idea what it was,” Hill said. Eventually, as he looked more into it, he thought about opening a gym. He discussed it with his wife and, “She looked at me at that time and said, ‘No way you’re doing anything else besides the schools, we’re busy enough with that,’” Hill said with a chuckle.
Later, as personal training kept growing and an opportunity arose at Haymaker’s current location, Hill said, “I was lucky enough to have some people willing to say, ‘Hey, we want to bring you into Warsaw.’ And we kind of hit the ground running with all those personal training clients we had.”
Haymaker today has 300 members.
“Wong was one of my original coaches,” Hill said. “We used to have a thing on FaceBook, like, ‘CrossFitters in Warsaw’ and I noticed this guy putting these workouts on from Anytime. It drew my attention because I didn’t know how he was doing all those types of workouts with the equipment at Anytime.”
Wong was putting up exceptional scores so Hill reached out to him and Wong became part of CrossFit Haymaker.
“Bryan was one of those guys, when we started working out, you could tell he had a gift physically for the realm of CrossFit competition,” Hill said.
Wong is especially fond of CrossFit Haymaker.
“This place is great. Competing’s never been my favorite part about this. I like competing, but it’s the community. It’s the people,” he said.
“We learn from each other. We coach each other. And I’ve got a lot of great friends out of it. We push each other daily and it’s a blessing to have so many people with the same goals.”
