Fight Gone Bad is a WOD that also doubles as CrossFit's signature annual charity fundraising event. It started five years ago, and has since raised over $2 million. This year, the three nonprofits supported by Fight Gone Bad 5 are LIVESTRONG, The Wounded Warrior Project and the CrossFit Foundation.
And why's it called "Fight Gone Bad"? Because after finishing this workout for the first time, UFC champ B.J. Penn said: "That was like a fight gone bad."
Here's the workout: You rotate through five stations, spending one minute at each:
- Wall ball: 20 pound ball, 10 foot target. Each rep is scored as 1 point.
- Sumo deadlift high pull: 75 pounds. Each rep is scored as 1 point.
- Box Jump: 20″ box. Each rep is scored as 1 point.
- Barbell push-press: 75 pounds. Each rep is scored as 1 point.
- Row: Your butt off. Each calorie burned (according to the monitor) is scored as 1 point.
The clock isn't reset or stopped between exercises; someone just calls out “rotate,” and you immediately stagger from one station to next.
Almost two dozen of us packed into our little CrossFit box for Fight Gone Bad (and for the post-workout birthday barbecue for Tim, our coach). Many of us dragged along family members and friends, too. I brought my kids (ages 2 and 5), who watched (with almost zero interest) as multiple heats of sweaty men and women jumped, rowed, and frantically heaved medicine balls and barbells around the gym.
You may not believe this, but my plan was to just watch everyone else pummel themselves with Fight Gone Bad. It's not that I didn't want to join in, but M's working this weekend, so I was supposed to be keeping an eye on the kids -- something I wouldn't be able to do if I were in the middle of a long WOD. But a few of the other adults volunteered to watch the boys, so at the last minute, I changed out of my khakis and into a pair of shorts and grabbed a score sheet.
I won't lie: Fight Gone Bad kicked my ass. I went into the workout hoping I could score at least 15 points per station, so my goal was to hit 225 in total. But by the time the third round started, I was running on fumes. Screw 225 -- my goal was just to finish without passing out in front of my kids.
In the end, I was happy to eke out 209 points -- and pleased that I did it without scaling down the difficulty of any of the exercises. (I stuck with the standard RXed weights for men.)
But the next time I do this? 225, baby.
