Can you talk about your experience competing on Team Canada at the CrossFit Invitational?

Question

Patrick Vellner · Answer

It was always a really big honor and privilege to be invited to the Invitational at all and to be able to represent your country anytime is really cool. But I kind of have three reasons why I really loved competing for Team Canada at the Invitational. One is the Invitational was always a kind of testing ground for new equipment, new concepts that CrossFit would bring to the table. So we kind of got to be the first ones to play with some stuff and try new things and that's always a lot of fun. The second is all the athletes that went there were all individual athletes and we all consider ourselves individuals, we compete as individuals. So being put on a team, the pressure kind of changed. Everybody was just in an unfamiliar territory and nobody took it too seriously. So you'd kind of get to go somewhere really cool, spend a week with a bunch of the athletes, get to know them a little better because you don't have that same stress of competition hanging around all the time. So you got to make friends and just have a lot of fun around the event knowing it wasn't super serious and nobody's hanging their hat on how well they competed at the Invitational. And then lastly, you make some fun stories and memories doing those kind of trips. I wish they still did it, it would be awesome if they brought it back. I still, one of my favorite stories in my career is in the 2016 Invitational. It was my coach Michelle's last year as an athlete, she was on the team. We were using the worm and in the last event, everyone on our team kept jumping forward and I was on the back of the worm. And by the end, I was holding basically the whole back half of the worm by myself. And I remember finishing that event feeling just wasted and everybody else on my team talking about how good they felt in that last section. And it made me feel pretty bad about my fitness for about a day until this photo surfaced. And now I always take advantage of any opportunity to bust it out and rub it in my coach's face when she says I'm slacking.

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"Can you talk about your experience competing on Team Canada at the CrossFit Invitational?"