Hello All,

As some of you know as well as being a coach at Crossfit Avon I also work for St Peter's Hospice, the local adult Hospice here in Bristol. We are in the midst of a massive fundraising appeal for a huge rebuild of our inpatient ward. The ward is vital in our care, providing a specialist palliative care unit where people can be admitted.

We’ve raised £5.5 million already, and now have the last £940,000 to go! The rebuild will enable us to keep caring  for both patients & families well into the future.

So, I had a crazy idea which is where I need your help! A LOT of help from A LOT of you!

St Peter's Hospice cares for people throughout the whole of Bristol, 500sq miles (we have a fantastic community team of nurses!). 500 miles equates to 811km (I’ve dropped the sq miles otherwise we’d be there forever!) . So the aim is to row 811km on our concept 2 rowing machines.

For me to do this alone would be bonkers, I’d be there forever and would fail! So this is where I need your help please. I need you to come and row whilst raising money!

On Saturday 24th Feb we’ll set all our rowers out at CrossFit Avon (after morning classes) and get going, aiming to start at 12 noon! This means you can have a good lie in and time for a great breakfast!! We’re also going to take a rower in the morning just down the road outside our charity shop/cafe, so we can get folk on Gloucester Road to give some money! 

Obviously the aim is to raise as much money as we possibly can and will do this by you ‘buying’ a rowing slot. So get your friends, family and work colleagues to donate, in essence sponsoring you! Maybe even consider asking your manager if your company would like to donate to our appeal! We are a local charity serving the local community so it's a great opportunity to support the hospice. 

I’m acutely aware given our large membership that some of you have sadly had direct contact with our services. I’ve already had such conversations. I hope that for you this will help support those you care for. You already know the reason we need to raise as much as we can.

So......

BOOKING DEATILS:

You can either go solo for an hour or more!!, or team up with 3 others to make a team of 4!

There’ll be prizes for the furthest rowed in an hour! 

To book a rowing slot please email me on: stpetershospicerow@gmail.com stating a preference for a time slot. All one hour slots will start on the hour.

Please let me know your name, if you are going solo or in a team and how many slots you want! I’m really hoping many of you will stay with me for the whole thing! The more people we have row the quicker we will get it done!

DONATIONS:
To donate please do so on: http://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Caroline-Mundy1

Many thanks in advance, I really appreciate it.

Caz 

PS here is a video to explain why we need the rebuild:

Over the Xmas period we announced that changes were coming to our athletic levels. The new Athletic Levels can be downloaded from the resources page on our website or viewed at the box.

This is a working document for a constantly developing system. We’re pretty confident with the numbers we’ve arrived at for most things, but there are still some unanswered questions:

(i) Running - You’ll notice that “Helen” is still a goal met-con for Level 4, despite the fact that we can’t run on the road anymore. We’ve also still left running times for 400m and 1km in there. Running ability is a really important part of your overall athletic skills set, so we want it to still be something that we evaluate. We’re working hard on coming up with solutions for this for the future. One idea is trying to find some space for treadmills (we particularly like the self-propelled versions used in the CrossFit Regionals/Games workouts like the Trueform/Assault Air Runner), but that isn’t likely to be a solution for group classes. Another will be to do some track sessions on a semi-regular basis (we’ll speak to local tracks about this), but that isn’t going to enable us to do many met-cons that require a pull up rig/barbells alongside the running. The reason we’ve kept “Helen” in there is that it’s often one of the first CrossFit Benchmark workouts that people are able to do “As RX”. It’s also a fantastic gauge of your fitness, containing a good mix of monostructural (running), simple weightlifting (kettlebell swings) and gymnastics (pull ups) over a moderate time frame (9-15 mins). So, it may be one that people just do on their own in an open session for now. We may, on the other hand, decide to take it out in the future. We’ll let you know.

(ii) Assault Bike – We wanted to test short, lactate system capacity, and thought a minute test on the Assault Bike a great way to test that. We haven’t had much of a chance to check our numbers on that yet though, so we may adjust these in the future if we think we’ve got them wrong.
The new Level 1 we feel is a crucial addition for those people who are less trained and need some realistic figures to aim for in their first few months.

As we mentioned in the previous post announcing these changes, we are now encouraging more of you to move up to the Performance Programme, if you’ve hit the numbers on the new Level 3. If you’ve got all these, or have all but 1-2, speak to Jon about moving up (some of these are definite pre-requisites, whereas others may be overlooked for a while). He’ll check with you that you’ve not got any niggles that need looking at before starting and may ask to see some lifting/kipping or anything else he fancies checking first.

At Level 3, you will be scaling almost all of the Performance Programme workouts. The Performance programme is written with RX being for someone at Level 4/5, so if you don’t scale you’re not going to get the intended stimulus (you won’t be able to maintain the same speed and intensity the workout is designed to be done at).

Our new Level 4 is roughly equivalent to the old Level 2. It’s at this point that we feel you may be ready to compete in the sport of CrossFit, if you are interested in that. You are likely to be able to do many of the workouts RX, although you will probably still need to scale some. Find out the suggested finishing times or expected scores for a workout and scale to achieve that if necessary.

Level 6 is roughly current CrossFit Regionals standard. For those aiming high, those are the numbers you’re likely to need.

We hope this will be a really useful framework for you to assess where you’re at and help you to make some goals for the coming months.

The new Athletic Levels can be downloaded from the resources page on our website.