“There are about six days of the year that are pretty exciting — the Regionals and the Games — other than that, it’s pretty low key.”
That’s Brent Fikowski describing his life and that sentence pretty much encapsulates the man. The self-effacing nice guy and reigning second Fittest Man on Earth™ has become the subject of a series of documentaries produced by Common Goal that they’ve entitled “All In,” and he’s intent on convincing you that he’s not that interesting.
After all, he’s still a full time accountant and if we’ve learned anything from all those Mat Fraser documentaries it’s that CrossFit’s fittest people pretty much spend all their time working out, eating, recovering, eating, working out, and working out.
But somehow Fikowski is a pretty compelling subject as far as CrossFit® athletes go. In a sport where the best of the best are so single minded and their lifestyles seem so monotonous that watching documentaries about them sometimes makes you wish you didn’t, this accountant manages to come off as a guy you want to know more about.
[Read our review of “The Redeemed and the Dominant,” the documentary about last year’s Reebok CrossFit Games.]
For a documentary about CrossFit there’s quite a lot of tongue in cheek, much of it from Fikowski himself. But while he admits that he doesn’t take himself quite as seriously as his American brethren, it’s clear that his finance-y, accountant-y mind has applied systems and statistics to the sport of CrossFit to produce an unusual approach to the sport. Our favorite quote:
The way that this sport works is as you get better and better you learn that there’s these very subtle differences between the Open, the Regionals, and the Games, and how they’re programmed.
Someone likened it to hockey (…) you go, well, the Open’s roller hockey and then the Regionals is ice hockey and then the Games is field hockey. If you’re a pretty good hockey player, you’re probably going to be fine in all three but there’s these subtle differences at each stage of competition that might favor a certain type of athlete.
And so for me, I’m going to do better as the season progresses, typically, against this pool of competitive athletes because the further the season goes along the more spread out the workouts become. As you have to cover more distance height plays a role. I have a background in swimming so I’m guaranteed to have a high finish in at least one event of the Games.
(In) my training I definitely focus on peaking at Regionals and having a second peak at Games, as opposed to making sure I’m really fit at the Open and then trying to hold on to that for 6 months.
The guy has a mathematical approach to the sport, which is again on display when he describes the strategy he used for crushing 18.1. (That workout starts at about 13:45, he talks strategy at about 16:44.)
Either you find that kind of stuff interesting or you don’t but if you did, it looks like there are plenty more in this series on the way.
Featured image via STORYHIVE on YouTube.