Dodgshun started focusing on training for competitive CrossFit only this year. She had previously taken part in a team competition at high school.
Her drive to compete came from a desire to challenge herself, but she had no real expectations.
“I never thought I’d podium, let alone win it,” she said. “I had a goal of top five.”
She was competing in the scaled category — less weight and scaled-down compared with the premier divisions.
“It’s less weight and more speed,” Dodgshun said.
“It’s still not easy. I could hardly walk on Monday.”
Dodgshun wanted to thank her head coach and CrossFit 4010 owner Darryn White for his support.
“I could never have done it without him.”
White said about 90 percent of his clients went to the gym to maintain their health and wellbeing rather than to compete.
He said it took a specific type of dedication to put in the time at the gym to be at a competitive level.
The club’s competition training programme runs twice a day, six days a week.
“It’s more the desire (to compete) than anything,” White said.
“You’re going to have to do more than what you want to do, and your competitors (to win).
“It’s the same in all sports. Not everyone is going to be an All Black.”
The people who challenged themselves and won their division were some of the fittest individuals in the country, he said.
Hutchings was competing for the fifth time in the masters’ 40-to-49-year division and it was the third time she’d won the division.
The first-day exercises suited her strengths, and she was first-equal going into Day 2, with events she wasn’t as strong in.
Yet she secured the title, finishing one second in front of the second-place finisher to secure the overall title in her last year in the division.
Hutchings described the physical and mental drain of having to complete as many repetitions as possible of an exercise in a given timeframe or finishing the workout, as “brutal”.
Competitors do not know what they will encounter until the night before the event, when they are given the eight workouts on which they will be judged.
This year competitors were tested on a range of workouts that included bodyweight movements (pull-ups, press-ups, air squats), running, Olympic lifting (snatch and clean-and-jerk), rowing, gymnastic movements (handstand walking, toes to bar, chest-to-bar pull-ups), dumbbell and barbell movements, wall balls and swimming.
Competitors qualified for the event by posting times of their workouts over a four-week period. They had to video their workout to prove their ability. The top 32 athletes in the country were selected to compete in the national competition, except in the masters’ and teens’ divisions, where only the top eight were selected.
Hutchings said she couldn’t have done it without the community support from CrossFit 4010.
“It has become my extended family, and I feel privileged to be a part of it,” she said.
“These people are some of my closest friends, and my results are largely due to the amazing people I work out with, travel away to competitions with and have many, many laughs with.”
