Every summer my business and personal travel schedule keeps me away from my home box. In fact, when I started CrossFit 3 years ago, I was thrown in to learn all about programming quickly because most travel destinations had no CF gyms. (Well how much that changed…).
Back in 2011, Aimee, my first coach patiently explained the programming template and structured my first month of remote training. After a while things started to make more and more sense. In fact, understanding programming can be very useful to address skill issues, weaknesses or training plateaus. So then I developed my first training template. In many was I keep returning to this one 2 years later as I’m combining strength, metcon and endurance again.
Since then programming creatively became the way of life on business trips. In fact, the travel WODs were in many ways much more demanding than life back in the Box. Some examples that I loved were the Heaven and Hell Week in Beijing in 2011, the 12 Days of Xmas the same year, the Month of benchmark WODs in 2012, Combining SEALFit with the CrossFit routine in 2013.
After a while I tried to distill my travel WOD learnings into some overarching training wisdom with varying levels of success here, here and here.
For this summer’s travel season I’m sure more dubious wisdom shall follow.