Misfit Podcast
Misfit Athletics provides information and programming to competitive Crossfit athletes of all levels.
Misfit Podcast
Whatever it Takes w/ Semifinals Athlete Brandon True - E.358
What would happen if you decided that something was possible instead of impossible? Brandon True's remarkable transformation from struggling CrossFit athlete to two-time semifinals competitor provides a compelling answer to that question.
Brandon's journey began with a casual bet against two 40-year-old CrossFitters who claimed they could beat him in a workout. His competitive spirit ignited, Brandon dove headfirst into CrossFit with the ambitious goal of reaching the CrossFit Games. Little did he know the mental and physical challenges that awaited him on this path.
The turning point came after his first semifinals appearance in 2023, where he finished near the bottom of the field. "I felt like I didn't belong there," Brandon reveals, describing both his performance and physical appearance compared to other competitors. This painful experience became the catalyst for profound change. Working closely with coach Drew Crandall, Brandon embarked on a comprehensive transformation that addressed everything from his nutrition to his mindset.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Brandon's story is his battle with self-limiting beliefs. Despite being exceptionally strong – with impressive numbers in cleans, squats, and deadlifts – Brandon struggled with movements like snatching. When faced with a heavy Isabel workout during qualifying, his initial reaction was "I can't do this." Yet through a powerful mindset shift and targeted coaching, he completed what he thought impossible, proving that many performance limitations exist primarily in our minds.
Perhaps most remarkable was Brandon's transformation in running workouts. After finishing last in a running event at his first semifinals, Brandon made a life-changing decision: "I will never come in last place in a running workout again." Through dedicated aerobic development and mental toughness, he turned his greatest weakness into a competitive strength.
What's your impossible challenge? What would happen if you simply decided it was possible? Take inspiration from Brandon's journey and discover what might be waiting on the other side of your self-imposed limitations.
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We're all misfits, alright, you big, big bunch of misfits. You're a scrappy little misfit, just like me. Biggest bunch of misfits I ever said either.
Speaker 2:That's a good sound effect to start Nice work. Good morning, misfits. You are tuning into another episode of the Misfit Podcast. On today's episode we welcome special guest two-time semifinals athlete Misfit. Athlete Brandon True Brandon, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Guys, before we get into the interview, we'll do our housekeeping. We'll do our live chat, as usual. If you head to the link in bio on Instagram you can get signed up for Misfit Athletics programming on Strivee or Fitter. I had a few people reach out recently about getting a sample. Happy to send you a sample of Pro, of GPP, of Masters, of Hatchet, all that good stuff. Just shoot me a DM Misfit Athletics, a DM with your email and I will send that over to you. Misfit affiliate is also available on stream fit, push, press and sugar wad. Two-week free trial. If you go to team misfitcom, click on sign up. Now you can choose which one of those to be able to get a free trial to our affiliate programming too hard.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sometimes we catch hunter in the aftermath no, it's all too hard and then the logo. Tees and hoodies are available now at sharpen the axe cocom. That is it for housekeeping life chat hunter brandon, what's up what's up?
Speaker 1:did I? Have I uh done life chat about my uh indian chicken? Was that a? Was that a? Mond my Indian chicken? Was that a Monday morning sink? That was a.
Speaker 2:Monday morning sink. I think you got to tell the people about the recipe.
Speaker 1:For sure. They'll definitely understand it. But Taj, our local Indian food watering hole, so to speak, is probably the best Indian food food that we have, and my girlfriend and I have been attempting to replicate said chicken tikka masala like butter chicken chicken tikka masala recipe and I think we have like zeroed in on. I would eat this over taj which is like pretty fucking saying a lot. Does that include the?
Speaker 2:fact that taj will just make it for me. Yeah, so that there. Well, so here's the other.
Speaker 1:That much better yeah, so there, there is a convenience element to it, but you also have to factor in the fact that when you order it from taj, whatever the delivery time it says, you just add 100 to that because yeah, I go pick up for maya and I could be there for a month.
Speaker 2:Right, the amount of people standing there waiting for takeout, yeah, is in. Like. As a small business owner, I'm like tip the cap like you guys are fucking crushing it.
Speaker 3:Good for you oh, 100, um, yeah, no, you guys do you guys know the psychological difference between like somebody else making your food and you making the food?
Speaker 1:have you heard about no, I could make a gander, but go for it.
Speaker 3:So food literally does taste better when somebody else makes it, because you're not like smelling the ingredients while you're cooking, so you're like desensitizing yourself to it while you're making the food. That literally is better if somebody else makes it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, dude, when you're sitting on the couch and somebody hands you a bowl of food. Somebody else makes it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, dude, when you're sitting on the couch and somebody hands you a bowl of food. What a feeling I get it, I get it, yep. So we got that and we got. I mean can't go a week without talking about the us open jj spawn taking a big w 65 feet kicked everyone's ass course kicks everyone ass there's.
Speaker 1:They literally had to squeegee the greens and jj spawn. Just that could have been. That could have easily been like a three putt and then a playoff the next morning, let alone tiger-esque 65 footer for the big, for the w especially after earlier in the day he had that shot that hit the flagpole and then rolled like a hundred yards back off the green.
Speaker 3:Sad dude, you could, he could have just gone in the tank after that. And just like this isn't the day, I started off horrendously.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's like taking, you know, that's like his scores to me accidentally crazy all over the place in the first event yeah, oh my god, I Did they talk about his diabetes thing on the broadcast.
Speaker 2:Did you hear about that? No, so he was super overweight and he was either diagnosed with type 2 or pre-diabetic and really wanted to, like he's a professional athlete, so like wanted to get his shit together. He lost 40 pounds and his A1C did not improve and like went back to the drawing boards trying to figure out, like what to do. I think he lost more weight, went back to the doctor. He was misdiagnosed.
Speaker 2:He's type 1 diabetes, holy I mean so I mean like obviously now, like he's got that shit probably under control, he has the means to, you know, have, have good care and whatnot, but like that's fucking brutal, like I can. I can only imagine how bad that would be, especially with, like, if you're trying to do like crazy dieting and your blood sugar is all over the place, like yeah, and I guess good news that he lost weight.
Speaker 1:like if he hadn't had that would he have just like been like it's just a medication thing, but wow that's fucked. Yeah, pretty crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:My son's new favorite saying is I can't want that and I really just like we're not going to have to go on to Maury Povich and find out who the father is. That's my son Like there's so many things in life that people just want you to play along with and like and I just fucking can't. And him saying I can't want that is just like.
Speaker 1:first of all, it's just funny to hear a two-year-old say that 70 year old buddhist harder, I just can't want that like I fucking love it so much. You've never been so you've never been so right in your life, carter, oh my god yep, yep because.
Speaker 2:Because it's different, that is different than I don't want. That it's like.
Speaker 1:I tried, I just yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm so sorry. Now I want to make one of my t-shirts that says I can't want that on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good one.
Speaker 2:The next time Sticker Mule hits me up with a $19 one-off shirt email. I can't want that. It's coming in hot.
Speaker 3:With an Echo bike on it.
Speaker 2:For real. For me, it would be well. Yeah, it could be an Echo bike, it could be any number of things. I don't know if you can put a burpee on a t-shirt, but if you can, that's what would be on there.
Speaker 3:Brandon, anything non-CrossFit related that you can bring to live chat. I mean, the last two weeks I've kind of just been like a vegetable in my house, so that's been a lot of fun. I got to enjoy all the food that I haven't been eating for the last couple of months, so the ice creams, the cookies, the cakes, it's been a good time, it's been a good time.
Speaker 2:What's the highlight? What was the best thing you ate?
Speaker 3:I mean, so the one thing this is like weird, but the thing that I look forward to the most at the end of the season is a Papa John's buffet, and so I just get like, what did you just say?
Speaker 1:I don't even know what that means. I just like create my own little buffet. Jj Spahn just became a type 2 diabetic.
Speaker 3:So I get two large pizzas right, Because they normally have like a deal they don't have.
Speaker 2:like I can't.
Speaker 3:No, no, no, Give me that. No, no, no. This is just I create. You just keep adding to the cart until you're like that seems about right. Yeah, so you get two large pizzas, One plain one with just the Italian sausage on it, and then you got to get the baked cookie little dish pizza thing in there and then you, depending on how feeling you go with either the regular bread like knots or like the garlic sticks sometimes we'll go wings, it all depends on how we're feeling. But I just get like a big buffet of Papa John's.
Speaker 1:And then that's my meal for like two days.
Speaker 3:Those fucking butter. Garlic cups are just those are, and you always make sure you get one extra per pizza, so you get two pizzas. You do one extra, so you're two extra because each pizza comes with one and then you have an extra one, so you don't have to like skimp at the end yeah, yeah, none of that.
Speaker 1:Are you somebody who gets uh, who, like, did you wait? Have you been doing this for weeks?
Speaker 3:you said now, since semi-finals, like he's only had papa john's the last, the last two weeks, yeah, I've been eating only the the bad stuff do you have any regrets?
Speaker 1:you have any remorse or bad like. I'm like the type who's like so on major golf, major championship weekend, the last like three, it's like pizza, pizza night for like back nine sunday and this past week I was like I just like I'm gonna feel like trash the next day. I can't do it. But I haven't been as restrictive as you have. So I'm wondering if you're like I'm say I'm gonna go on a, b as you have. So I'm wondering if you're like, say I'm going to go on a bender for two weeks and like three days in, you're like I can't do this.
Speaker 3:Definitely not three days in. But I like, I do have moments of like. I kind of regret that. Like I get a carton of ice cream and the only reason that I don't finish it is because my like, my brain is like this is a really gluttonous thing to do. You should probably stop. But like I don't need to stop, I could just finish the whole garden. But my brain is like hey, let's respect ourself a little bit. Today we'll stop at 75, so eat 25 left I have to.
Speaker 1:I tell my girlfriend whenever we order out, and if we order like a giant thing of food or like, say, it's a large pizza or something like that and I don't finish it, I have to make sure that she knows that I could finish this, but I'm choosing not to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I could fucking eat that if I want.
Speaker 1:I just want you to know, I just want I need to make this clear that I'm voluntarily putting this away, not because I need to.
Speaker 3:We were always raised that like, if it's on your plate, you finish it, and so, like I've psychologically been conditioned to, if there's food in front of me, you don't stop when you're full, you stop when it's gone. Yeah, that's a really bad habit to have. I don't recommend it for people. It's just terrible all around, but you put the pizza in front of me.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna eat the pizza so to to go back to my life chat when I was a child and that was put to me you can't leave the table until you finish. I would sit there for like two hours as like a four-year-old and not care I should be like I'm not eating that sorry that was me, with vegetables we're gonna make this guy like we can't make him do it.
Speaker 2:My parents went to pick me up at preschool one day and they were like he wouldn't eat lunch. So we told him that he couldn't have cookies and he said that's fine, I don't like cookies.
Speaker 1:Reverse psychology.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can't want that, yeah, I can't, I can't want that. I really can't. Yeah, I can't, I can't want that, I really can't. I remember that day, specifically, was tuna casserole and it's just like what do you think a tuna casserole made it a daycare taste like, let alone looks like, smells like, like don't, don't come at me.
Speaker 1:That ain't it. Whatever it is, it's not it.
Speaker 2:No, that's not it. All right, brandon, we usually start with CrossFit origin story.
Speaker 3:How did you get into CrossFit? You can take it back to how did you get into strength and conditioning and then try to tell us how that turned into competitive CrossFitter. Go into the gym with him. When I was like seven or eight years old, like I started very early with actual weight training. I played football and I was always like one of the smallest kids on the team. I was very fast, but I was just like I was small and I was always breaking bones. Like every single year I would have a different broken bone. So I think my dad wanted to try to like put a little bit of meat on me so I'd be a little more resilient out there, and so I was lifting when I was eight years old or so with my dad, and then I played football up through high school into college. So lifting was always just part of my life. It became like more of a, a habit than like like it's just what, what I did. It wasn't a decision that I made. It's like you're done with school. Whenever you get out of school you go to the gym. That's just what it was.
Speaker 3:As far as crossfit goes, I actually remember I was on vacation, uh, in ocean city, maryland, and I was probably this would have been 20, probably 13, I think 2012, 2013. This is at the height of like rich froning we were at. We're waiting at a bar to get seated for our dinner and they've got espn up on the tv and this is when crossfit was televised and I was watching them do the crossfit games live and I was like, wow, that looks pretty cool, like that's interesting for you know, something that I would, I could see myself enjoying doing. Then I completely forgot about it for another like six years or so until I ended up.
Speaker 2:I guess I started in 2017 I didn't think you started crossfit that long ago.
Speaker 3:No, no so I forgot about it for about four years because I was like I was very focused on my football training and I didn't understand that there could be like crossover between the two. So all the stuff that I was doing was like agility drills and like jump training and I played defensive back. So all I needed to be was really, really fast. That was it, and I only needed to be fast for about five seconds. If it was any longer than that, they scored. You know, it doesn't matter. So I didn't get into any of that stuff at the time and I actually forgot about it until I was out in Colorado. I was trying to start a new business and there was like an accelerator program out there for new startup businesses and our table was right next to another table.
Speaker 3:There were two dudes in their 40s, right, and they would hear me and the other guy on our team talk about going to the gym. They were like hey, we do CrossFit, you should come over and do crossfit with us sometime. And I I was like the typical gym bro, like mentality stuck, and I was just like laughed at. I'm like crossfit, that's a joke. You guys like don't even do real reps and stuff. And so they're like hey, we bet that we would beat you in a workout and I am too competitive to let two 40 year old guys, when I'm in my young 20s, say that they're fitter than I am.
Speaker 3:So I show up to the gym and, if I remember correctly, the workout had toes-to-bar in it. Because I couldn't do toes-to-bar, I was doing strict and so I was doing two or three at a time and there was something else in there. But they did beat me and that really pissed me off, a a lot like. I got very, very upset. So I went back to the gym another time and, whatever it was, I scaled the workout but I like finished faster than them and I didn't understand the difference. It had double unders in and I couldn't do double under, so I just did a regular jump rope, but like in my head I had won because I didn't understand crossfit yet. But that flashed me back to the CrossFit games and I remember that they have like a Super Bowl, and so I was like well, if I'm going to do this, I don't just want to beat these two 40-year-olds, I want to beat everybody in the world. So that's how we got started.
Speaker 1:That's the natural jump yeah.
Speaker 3:If I'm going to do this, we're going to do it all the way. So do this, we're gonna do it all the way. So what's the timeline from there to getting into competitive crossfit, like I want to? But then, like, when did it really start taking shape for you? Uh, so that would have been. November of 2016 was when I first like dropped it in colorado.
Speaker 3:Uh, and then, as soon as I got back to florida, which is where I was living at the time, I just googled like CrossFit near me and I showed up to the closest gym around me. I got really lucky. It was an awesome gym. It's called CrossFit Conquest, down in Davie, florida. I got really lucky that one. They were a great gym with like really really good coaches and an awesome community and stuff. But then, two, they had a very competitive athlete and an owner who had a lot of knowledge on the sport aspect on top of just like the regular CrossFit stuff.
Speaker 3:So I showed up for like my intro workout and he was like, why do you want to do CrossFit? And I said I want to win the CrossFit Games and he laughed at me. But, like, in like a joking way yeah, in a joke, like you know, when a kid shows up to your gym, he's like I want to win the CrossFit Games. Okay, sure, buddy Takes me on a workout. I'm walking 400 meter runs, and he's like, sure, you're gonna win the CrossFit Games.
Speaker 3:But that was January 2017. And from that, and I was like I'm not here to do classes, I'm not here to like I did classes, but like my goal wasn't to do fitness, like my goal is to train for the CrossFit Games, and so, technically, the competitive side started instantly. I never had like a CrossFit, like for fun fitness goal or trajectory. Like I started from day one. I want to do this as a sport goal or trajectory. Like I started from day one, I want to do this as a sport. Now. It didn't take until two years later for me to do like my first real competition, which would have been a lot of palooza. Uh, I think 2019 as an intermediate. Uh, so that that was my first taste of like competitive crossfit so you qualified for your first semi-final year, 2024.
Speaker 2:Yep, One thing that I actually don't know the answer to. How long would you say that you were trying before that where you felt like you had a legitimate shot to qualify?
Speaker 3:two years before that. Okay, so I had, I had two seasons. It's weird because I got into crossfit right as they started changing the format every single year. So like when I started was the last year of super regionals, okay, and then from that point they started doing all of the different iterations and so, depending on the year, would change how realistic I thought it was to like move on to the next stage, cause it used to just be the open and then whatever the next thing was Right. Yeah, and I also didn't have a great understanding of where I was relative to the rest of the field.
Speaker 3:But if, like realistically, two years before last year was when I was like all right, this is the year I'm moving forward, that would have been when it was 60 people from the East in quarterfinals. The year before, that was 120 total. Then they broke it to the East-West for the first time. They did 60-60. I was like I can do this, didn't do it. The following year was or maybe it was actually it was the 120 and then the 60. Those are the two years that I thought I could make it, because then last year was the first year they did 40.
Speaker 2:120, where they were like okay, everyone's going yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. And like this is my first choice, this is my second choice, and they sent a kid from Texas to Montreal right, so it would have been.
Speaker 3:It would have been like three full seasons of like.
Speaker 2:This is the year before I finally cracked through and you have kind of a cool story about switching after 2023 to misfit athletics. Yeah, like what? What happened? Um for you to for you to make that switch so I was.
Speaker 3:can I say the name of the other program? Does that matter? Okay, I don't know. Um, so I was doing HWPO and that was like a lot for me. I was, I was feeling myself getting pretty beat down doing their professional like track season.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, um, and so when the season was over, I was just kind of like doing stuff over the summer and then their professional like track didn't start until December and I was just lifting I wasn't even doing Metcons and I decided like, okay, I need to start doing some Metcons to kind of like get myself ready for December. I need something from September to December, something from september to december. And I was driving to, uh, the girl's house that I was dating. She's about two hours away. So I was like I just need to throw something on like a podcast or whatever. And you guys, ironically, had just released a podcast that day and so it showed up in my algorithm.
Speaker 3:I'd never seen anything from you guys before. I didn't really know like I knew misfit, but I didn't know anything about you directly and you were talking about the start of I guess it would have been phase one at the time. So you're talking about what phase one is going to focus on, and I listened to the whole podcast about what phase one was going to be, about how you guys go about your programming, and the thing that really sold me was how your, your program has the optional pieces in it and it's designed for every athlete to have something optional that will benefit them, and it's on the athlete to understand, like, what is your best bang for your buck? So I, I really enjoy lifting. I'm a good lifter. I shouldn't be doing more optional lifting, even though I want to. That's like what I would be excited about.
Speaker 3:And so you, you really highlighted that personal responsibility of choosing what you probably don't want to do, but what will what you need to have the most improvement on. And so I was like all right, you know what this is. Three months, I'll do their phase one. It'll lead me right into hwpo. If it doesn't work. It doesn't work, you know, it doesn't matter. Uh, and the first nine weeks of phase one went so well and I felt so good. I was like there's no reason for me to switch off this. I'm just gonna stay this, whatever they're doing, it works really, really well for me, and my ability to choose my own adventure of what I'm improving in just makes me feel like it made me feel like I was getting the benefit that I needed and not like a program that says this is what every athlete needs to get better.
Speaker 1:Which track were you following? Did you follow MFT? Did you follow hatchet? Did you yeah?
Speaker 3:so I started with MFT Because in my head I was like I want to be a semifinals athlete, so I will do the semifinals track. Ironically, that was the wrong decision. That was too much for me, too much volume, especially when phase two hit. I started struggling a lot in phase two and I reached out to Drew and I was like hey, quarterfinals is my Superbowl. I've never broken through to semifinals. Should I be doing MFT because I want to be a semifinals athlete, or should I be doing hatchet because I currently am a quarterfinals athlete trying to break through? And he had me switch, actually downgrade. I shouldn't call it a downgrade, but like to do the hatchet program instead of the MFT, because he's like this will just work better for you. And he was right. It was way better on the volume. My body handled it a lot better and I felt the change and the progress like kind of accelerate once I stopped trying to like force myself to do the really, really hard stuff and just get better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's. The more is not better. Better is better Right. So like you can go in and execute and check those boxes. And the other part of it is making sure that your peaking schedule had you peak for quarterfinals. That's a really important thing, like well, our semifinals athletes, when that was still the structure which it should be the structure. Hey, hq, you want way more signups for the Open. Do quarterfinals.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:When we are athletes that pause a semifinals prep or something like that to do quarterfinals, like they're at 80%, 85%, something like that, at 80%, 85%, something like that, and if you're on the cusp and you're at 80, 85%, what do you think is going to happen? Right? So it's not even just the idea of the volume, because I think it makes even more sense for you in this instance. Athletes who are more powerful have the ability to trash their nervous system if they don't do their pieces in the correct order, right?
Speaker 2:So like hooray, eight by eight minute echo bike is first, with zero seconds rest. You know what I mean. Like things like that. We need that to come first. If you do your sprint intervals first and you're like, hey, I beat everybody on the sprint intervals because it had, you know, 275 pound front squats at the end of it, but the rest of my day, and then consequently the rest of my week, was like great that's awesome.
Speaker 2:So it's not always just related to that and that's the kind of nuance that you probably are going to see directly within something like remote coaching, because if our instructions broke things down to a like muscle fiber type level, they would get even wordier than they already are yeah not the not necessarily the easiest thing to to factor for and to your real quick, to your point about, uh, the peaking like.
Speaker 3:So I? This is the last year when they were taking 40, I finished in 39th. So if I was not 100, like at the maximum capability that I had, I would not have made it. If I tried skating through it even you know, 90, I probably would have missed out by five spots or so. So it was really important for my goals in the programming to converge on quarterfinals the way Hatchett did.
Speaker 2:And my next question. I'll lead you right into it with a response to that. Semifinals prep is a very special undertaking. It is a new and different challenge for athletes Knowing what you knew once you jumped in and joined those athletes on semifinals prep last year. I mean, what place would you have come in if you had just done three or four weeks of that going into quarterfinals?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean not 39th right, even way worse I would have been trashed in hindsight, before you tell us how semifinals prep went in 2024, starting directly after quarterfinals. In hindsight I did. We say drop you into the desert. This is more like dropping you onto the planet Dune, where it's just desert and there's no other place for you to go and nobody taught me how to sandwalk. So I was just no, no, you got eaten by the worm fucking immediately, true otherworlder true, nerds, fucking nerd um so tell the listeners what it's like to go from hatchet to hell.
Speaker 2:Week of semi-finals.
Speaker 3:Well. So I'll actually start that off with saying the way that I approached it also was probably the worst way that you could have done it too. So there's, this is like a double like don't do this, and so because of so the way the video review process worked is they didn't finalize the leaderboard, so the quarterfinals ended on a Sunday night. They didn't finalize the leaderboard until the following Monday, and I was one or two spots outside of the cut line. But we had that advanced notice that they were going hard on the step ups with the penalty, so people were getting dinged daily. So there was a decent chance that I was going to make it into the cut line, but there was also a decent chance that I was going to get a penalty. And so every email that I got for a week was like a heart attack. Like, does it say CrossFit Games? No, it's you know whatever. But so that week I was wishy washy about what I wanted to do, and so I like took the whole week off. I didn't train for that week at all.
Speaker 3:That was the mistake Number one. That really was a bad. I like let myself feel like the season was over for a week, and then that's when I got dropped into the, the semifinals prep too. But so then I went from the mft, which was like a lot for me, back in the fall. Semifinals prep was then another step above what mft was. So I was jumping from hatchet and then a week of non-training to you know, semifinals. Every day has two lifts, two accessories, gymnastics, three, some kind of conditioning pieces with the bitch work, metcon power output To clarify that is Hell Week volume.
Speaker 2:But yes, that's where you started, Right.
Speaker 3:So that was the problem. I had no buildup into it. I was just like I got put into the worst week possible and you even had me cut back on some of that because I was like hey, do I just start this immediately? And you said no, that's the worst thing you could possibly do.
Speaker 1:Were you guys working together at that point. Are you doing this on your own, Brandon?
Speaker 3:I was doing this on my own. I was messaging Drew periodically and being like hey, I think I made semifinals, what's the semifinals track? And then he was like Don't do that, you're going to get hurt. So he modified it a little bit for me and even still it was so much more than I was ready to it hurt here too. Yeah it, it for me. And even still, it was like so much more than I was ready to hear too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it did, I can tell you it hurt here a lot.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, going from like like I had, just like I'd climbed my mountain, I was like I did it. I broke through the semi-finals and now it's like I'm looking at the scores of the other semi-finals athletes and I'm like minutes behind, I'm like that's a bad sign not not good year one at semifinals.
Speaker 2:This is 2024, northeast on the men's and women's side, like that was just. That was one of the the most competitive competitions I've ever been to. Yes, athlete to qual were crossfit, multiple time crossfit games, qualifiers that would come in 30th in a workout and it would be because they lost by like 35 seconds. Like just really really impressive competition to be at. So that was the first. What I thought was the most impressive non-games competition I'd ever saw was your first like elite level CrossFit competition.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it was crazy being there because it felt like I was at the crossfit games, because all I saw was games athletes. Like I'm surrounded by games athletes, I'm warming up next to games athletes. Like it was there was a lot of like celebrity shock, essentially of being like I'm right next to you know, I'm warming up next to dal and pepper, like jason hopper's, right over there, like ben smith and I are sharing a bar right now, you know.
Speaker 2:And you wish you had been back there when everyone back in the day, everyone was your size. Those gentlemen are not your size.
Speaker 3:No, all of a sudden, everybody got real big.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and that's not always a good thing, but that doesn't mean it's not physically intimidating from like, just a generic bro level Like damn look at that guy, because one of the things that was hilarious at the original regionals were the like dudes from like New Jersey who were like as jacked as you could possibly be. They were always wearing board shorts, they never had a shirt on, never a single hair follicle below the neck, and not very good at CrossFit. They looked fantastic, though. Yeah, so talk to us about year one at semifinals for you. What was that experience like?
Speaker 3:it was really challenging because this doesn't sound good, but I'm just I. I tried to be as realistic and honest with myself as possible. Going into that weekend, I essentially knew how it was going to go. I knew that I was fighting for one of the bottom two or three places just based on how the training had been going, how my body was feeling, how I was feeling mentally. And then having Austin Spencer to like bounce stuff off of, and hearing how he was approaching workouts, hearing like the times that he was getting on stuff and like his rep schemes, I knew, unfortunately, that it was going to be a really, really, really rough weekend Like I had. Uh, I'd hit my peak for quarterfinals and I felt like I was falling down the mountain as opposed to ascending at the worst possible time. So that was really challenging, because I am not somebody who is okay with losing in any capacity.
Speaker 3:I'm extremely competitive. I want to win at everything that I do, and so to go somewhere that I'd been dreaming about for years, knowing that I didn't even have the ability to do that, the hardest part about that weekend was that mental challenge. I mean, from a volume standpoint, the weekend wasn't bad at all. I we had done so much more volume and training leading into it. It was the mental like I feel, like I don't belong here, that was really messing with me and made that weekend a lot harder to enjoy and to like to appreciate the growth that I had made because of that. It's like I'm, I'm, I'm out here, you know, I'm the last one on the field for most of the workouts, by enough of a margin that, like I know, everybody in the stands is just looking at me and I'm like this doesn't, this doesn't feel good, like this, yeah, and I'm creating the narrative in my head that, like they're watching, looking at me, saying man, that guy doesn't look like he belongs.
Speaker 2:So what'd you do about it? What came after semifinals last year? That got you to a place where you could make some serious changes?
Speaker 3:I decided that I, for the first time, needed a direct coach and I messaged well, I filled out the form for Misfit and then we got connected and we had our first little phone call interview and I let you know that, like I didn't ever want to feel that again, I never wanted to be at a competition that I felt like I did not belong at, uh, and I decided that I would. We talked about this a lot through the year, like, whatever it takes, I won't let that happen again yeah, what were your primary like weak points at that point like what?
Speaker 1:what did you struggle the most with that year?
Speaker 3:So snatching has always been my kryptonite. It's just the one thing that I've never been able to do. No matter how much I've worked on it, no matter how strong I get, it has never translated over to snatching.
Speaker 2:Let the people know how much you clean, squat, deadlift, that kind of thing people know how much you clean, squat, deadlift, that kind of thing.
Speaker 3:So on the, I actually hit lifetime pr in the phase one of that last year. Um, for squat or for cleans, I hit a 375 clean. Um, I have hit a 500 pound back squat, I typically go off like a 485. I've hit a 550 deadlift like I could move a bar. I just can't snatch, it Just doesn't, it just doesn't happen. Much better, much better. I would like it to be even better than what it is. But we've made like monumental strides working together. But then outside of that, like it was snatching and it was conditioning, I felt like my I just didn't have the ability to move the way the other guys moved. I could. I felt like I just didn't have the ability to move the way the other guys moved. I couldn't hold the paces they were holding. I couldn't finish one movement and just go start the next one. I felt like that was one of the things that I was limiting myself because I wasn't able to use a lot of my strength, often because I was just breathing for too long.
Speaker 1:How much of that was actual fitness versus athlete IQ, just not knowing how to execute workouts and stuff like that?
Speaker 3:At that point I honestly felt like I had a pretty solid athlete IQ. Yeah, Not, like you know, fantastic. There's a lot of mistakes that I made but I felt like it was more of a fitness component than it was a mental component. It wasn't like I was going out there like, yeah, I can start off with 50 chest to bar, that's not a problem. I knew my body well enough from doing this for eight years at that point that I knew kind of what I could and could not hold, what would be a good and what would be a bad decision. For me it was just that I needed to take rests too often and I needed to rest for too long.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the aerobic efficiency, especially for his size, would be a huge issue, right? Because if you're not highly aerobic or huge, you have to leverage.
Speaker 1:Sorry, brent, how tall are you? What are your schematics? Brandon, just for the people, can I get a blueprint?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm 5'8 yeah, so og crossfit size. But in today's day and age with yeah, there you go handstand walking back in the day.
Speaker 2:That is true I beat him at running this year, fuck yeah yes you did that's, that's, yeah, never mind, I'll leave that there so, yeah, the aerobic, the aerobic efficiency side, again at his size, would be one of the number one things. And then, um, maybe he'll laugh, maybe he won't. He's on the opposite side of the athlete iq, that one might guess. We, we say too smart, we're going to need to dumb this shit down a little bit.
Speaker 2:It's a little bit too cute in certain moments with the kind of strategy that maybe you would have heard in a tip video from 2014,. Like, stand two miles away from the wall, ball target, face the opposite direction yeah use a protractor, point your toes out.
Speaker 1:15 and a half degrees, yeah.
Speaker 2:So one thing we could do on this podcast is we could just fast forward now and we can have this magical story of what happened at the 2025 semifinals. Why don't we tell the realistic story about your trajectory through the year? What did phase zero look like for Brandon? True, I have my answer. I'm intrigued by so phase zero for the listener baseline testing actually what happens next after off-season block two. So so coming up somewhat soon here, in about august, and it's baseline testing, where a lot of benchmarks and one rep maxes and things you'll need for data for phase one, two and three get figured out over the course of about five weeks. And this is is this did we start right at the beginning of phase zero? I don't remember exactly, but it was pretty.
Speaker 3:I think it was the first week of August or the last week of July.
Speaker 2:Got it, okay, yeah, so right around then what happened in phase zero? How?
Speaker 3:did that go? So we were talking about dune earlier, with like getting eaten by the worms. Phase zero for me was being inside of the worm's mouth with all of the teeth, or like in Star Wars, when they're about to push him into that pit with the giant worm. That's what phase zero was for me. I was in the middle of having a crisis of identity on top of physically not feeling great, and so the two of those things converged into a really, really, really bad place. I was quitting tests daily, like mid benchmark aerobic stuff, and just like stopping, like I just I don't even have the mental capacity to finish this at any speed, and so I was sending Drew like daily messages. I'm like we're supposed to do like at any speed, and so I was sending Drew daily messages. We were supposed to do a 5K. I think I made it 1,000 meters into that 5K row and just like nah, I can't do this Almost walked my 5K run test.
Speaker 2:You're muted Drew. Muted Drew. He would send me heart rate data that actually matched. So whatever was happening mentally, or even physically, was actually taking place, yeah, which scared the shit out of me, to be honest, like he's a fucking warm-up jog and he's at like a 185.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm like.
Speaker 2:I am very confused about what's going on here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it was like my brain was feeling how my body was or vice versa. They were working together to just sabotage everything that I was doing. And then I was already in the process of coming off of semifinals feeling really, really bad about myself. So, instead of being like, okay, let's get ourself back into, like, let's warm ourself back into it, my brain was like we have to hit this running, like we, we can't let this happen again. We've got to be the best that we've ever been at the time where you're supposed to be like just figuring stuff out. And so it was. It was hell. It was absolute misery. I was in a, in a terrible, terrible mental place and physically my body would not respond to anything like phase zero is. It's hard to really capture how rough and how bad that went?
Speaker 2:yeah, it was. It was weird. And there was, there was a like. The shift in tone was what alarmed me, because our first conversation you're like, let's fucking go, like let's get after it, this is what I want to do. You tell me what to do and I'll do it. And then a week later it was like I dnf'd a 2k row and I'm like, uh, all right yeah, um, and that was daily fascinating about it and and started the beginning of our journey of working through some of the mental side was week two of phase one.
Speaker 2:His scores were so many finals level two weeks later from so. So you can't make that adaptation. It's not physically possible. That's not gonna happen. That comes from your well of fitness that you've worked on for however many years and you can speak to it. I don't know if it was just like testing every day does not work for me, kind of a thing, or it was just I want to PR my 5K run even though I haven't had structured training for months like that kind of thing. So I'm not sure exactly what caused it. But after test, week of phase one were totally fine, like just like, okay, we're in the off season now we're like this is what we're working on.
Speaker 3:We're just gonna go work on it and get into it so I I think I have a really bad mindset around the word test. So, like when we were in phase zero, most days it was test, 5k row test, you know whatever it was, and so I have a really hard time accepting any change to time trial for Brandon's phase zero.
Speaker 3:I have a really hard time taking any steps backwards, even if it's during the time of year where you're not supposed to be like pushing things forward, right? So, even though it was just a test to get a number, if I was not holding whatever the number is that I wanted to hold that I had arbitrarily like picked in my head was the correct pace to hold. As soon as I was unable to hold that pace, my brain stopped being willing to feel discomfort or pain in any regard. I was like I'm not going to get a good score on this already, based on what I've decided would be a good score, and I'm in pain, so I'm just going to stop. And that was what was happening every single day, like I just didn't have the ability to deal with adversity or discomfort at all to any degree during that time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we we talk about like we all know exactly what that feels like. So we talked about the linear progression thing on the podcast last week and we talked about controlling for the other variables, which could be your sleep, your nutrition, what you did the day before, what you did in your morning session, all of these different things. But we all get on the machine with I'm holding a 143 today, and when you're holding it for just round, one of five rounds, and you can tell that there's no fucking chance you're going to, your heart rate goes like skyrockets when you have that kind of panic moment. So we all know what that feels like. You just had it for kind of an extended period of time.
Speaker 2:So, from a remote coaching standpoint, one of the things that we had to do over the course of the year in terms of taking you from a hatchet athlete to an MFT athlete, which would now be referred to as a pro on our on our programs, is can we get to a point where semifinals prep will be appropriate for you? Because one of the things that's my job as a remote coach is to ask you what your goals are and then, like, if they're unrealistic, I got to tell you that they're unrealistic. But sometimes people are like that's my fucking goal, that's what I'm going to do, and at that point it's like, okay, I am going to give you what it takes to reach said goal. And I don't. I won't lie and say that I felt this way during the off season but, like, as we got closer and closer to semifinals prep, I knew that that's what we were doing, that we were like trying literally training to be able to train. So we would have an extra deload every once in a while.
Speaker 2:Again, because you're more of a power athlete, and we would have these moments throughout the season where it was very clear that what we were doing was a little bit too much. But I would always drop you down and then ramp you back up to that place Because, like, within you know a piece or two dropping off a week, that's just. We just know that that's what it takes for for an athlete to be able to go to go crush at at semifinals. Yeah, so I don't want to skip over, you know, phase one, phase two, phase three. I don't know if you have any sort of memorable things from that period of time, but to me, the more the season went on, the more it was like we have to be able to get to a point where we peak for semifinals specifically, which also you can speak to. I know that was stressful for you, like in terms of how, how are we going to qualify?
Speaker 3:like that sort of thing, not peaking for the in, for the, for the in affiliate semifinal, which for you was sort of like your quarterfinals yeah, as far as, like the offseason goes, I have it's probably a skewed memory of how the offseason was, but, like just in my memory, there was a lot of big ups and big downs, like there were times of the there'd be like a week or two that could could be your nickname big ups and big downs.
Speaker 3:Seriously that's, I ride those highs and I sink in those lows, but like there would be a week where I felt like man, I'm so fit, like I am, I'm crushing this. And then there'll be a week where it's like every single thing that I do I'm like dude, I suck. Like what happened? I can't breathe when I'm doing burpees. Like I can't do 20 burpees in a row without having to take a break, like what is happening and like I remember that I honestly it didn't really like click for me that I was like ready to go until january. So september, october, november, december it was just like we're doing this, we're doing this and that wasn't even really from like feeling like I was doing too much from a programming standpoint. That was just like in my memory. It was just random chaos of training where it wasn't like one day. It was always and you know this better than anybody like a lot of that is probably my brain creates the extension of it, instead of just being like today was a bad day, tomorrow we're going to have a good day. It was like if I have a good day, we got a whole week good week. If I have a bad day, this is going to be a bad week, like you know.
Speaker 3:So that was kind of that's kind of my memory of the off season, where the two biggest things that changed for me was in October, when I came to visit you for the three days and we got like hands-on work. One was snatching, because then I finally felt like I'd started to understand what snatches would feel like. But just the whole three days of being with you and feeling like I was doing well in person and knowing that like I can do this, like I've got somebody else's eyes on me so it matters. And all of a sudden I was willing, willing to hurt again because I'm in front of my coach. This isn't just a remote, I'm not just sending him a time anymore, he's watching. That helped switch a little bit for me. And then in January feeling like hey, I'm back to what I was last year when I was feeling my best. Those are the two key, significant moments for me this year and when we and when you came to visit, we reframed.
Speaker 2:You know we joke a little bit about both, like former football players, you know, like to lift weights, meatheads, like that kind of thing. We reframed whatever it takes, because whatever it takes is so often just well.
Speaker 2:If it takes going as hard as I can and smashing my head into a wall, I'm in, but if whatever it takes is couch stretch and barbell therapy, yeah like that kind of thing, reframed what that meant for you, because you just even still in the snatch, do you have access to the positions required to use the strength that you already have? Because, like some of the snatch pulls you've sent me are just like, like for me as someone who's the opposite, that can't pull a barbell off the fucking floor but can get into any position, I'm like, fuck off, you can't snatch that. You can snatch 893 pounds without the kilo conversion wrong If I could pull a barbell like you. So I think that reframe is so important for people and, like you, reframe nutrition.
Speaker 2:You know you had all of these different things that you went in and made the changes on and one of the cool things was, you know a semifinals athlete. Most of them look kind of similar to one another and I remember you telling me last year like I don't look like that guy, like that sort of thing, and we talked about potentially the oreos not being in the macro numbers on top of the macro numbers right right and like when you snacks don't count for macros right, yeah, it's like uh, back in the day when, um, uh, whole milk didn't count because the athlete was drinking it their whole life, not to make it weird, but you didn't.
Speaker 2:You looked very, very, very different in person. Yeah, at semifinals. Yes, and that has a mental effect as well. Right, it's not just this. This body can now accomplish x, and it looks like it can. It's also like no, I do belong out here. This is what a semifinals athlete looks like. I look like a semifinals athlete. Now I can go out here and do my thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, when I said in 2024 that I looked like I didn't belong, it wasn't just my performance. I physically felt like I looked like I did not belong. I felt like I had a much softer physique. I had a lot more stomach fat. I'm standing in the corral next to people and I can look like side to side and I'm like I don't look like these guys, like these guys are. They're what I pictured semifinals and CrossFit games, athletes looking like and I would see pictures of myself or like even just look in the mirror and be like I don't look like them, like I don't belong from a visual standpoint, and I know that how you look has nothing to do with like your crosshair performance.
Speaker 2:But how you feel about the way that you look compared to your competitors has an effect.
Speaker 3:Right. And so, like this year, that was one of the things that I wanted to address and I wanted to change that I wanted to address and I wanted to change. And then there was even there was a moment back in it was either January or February where one of the members of my gym I was telling him about how, like every now and then, I'll just eat a whole pack of Oreos because I just feel like it, and he was like, wow, that's really surprising. Like I can't believe you do that. He wasn't saying it. He wasn't saying it to be mean Exactly it. Like he wasn't saying it to be mean exactly so, and that's exactly how I felt. Like he didn't say it to be mean. He didn't say it in a surprised, exactly in his surprise. I I understood what he said. He was like like, exactly it was shame. I was like dude, holy shit, like I can't believe that. Like you do that right, like somebody who wants to be where you're at is doing that.
Speaker 3:And that internal shame kind of snapped it for me and from that point forward, I was like I need to get in control of this and I can get in control of this. I've just not ever made the decision to actually be the one making the decision, as opposed to letting my brain, my stomach, tell me Oreo sounds pretty good right now. And you're right. I mean, that was the best that I've ever physically looked, leading into semifinals this year. And when I went out there and I'm standing next to the people, I was like, oh no, I look like them, I look like I should be beating these people. I look like I am one of the best athletes at this competition.
Speaker 2:I feel that way mock semifinals we stop basically after hell week, we pause and we do in affiliate semifinals. To be clear, there wasn't like an actual traditional hell week before that. We paid close attention to how you were doing, but you are presented with going into semifinals. So you've had this year of like physically changing, mentally changing, changing. You're on the right track, you're feeling good and they tell you that you need to snatch 225 30 times.
Speaker 2:Your reaction was in the high highs, low lows category and we had a very straightforward conversation about Isabel and actually that conversation was the day before you did it right, yeah, and it was really just. I wanted you to feel like the responsibility was on you, because I know enough about this and have watched enough of this that you can snatch 225 30 times, not only under the time cap, but with an actual competitive score, and I don't know. I feel like I didn't give you a lot of room to respond. It was more of like a, like a hey, drink some fucking caffeine and turn your crazy loud music on and move the barbell like you're the strongest athlete that I've ever worked with, aside from, maybe, the baby gorilla from the throwback days so just do it. What happened between that moment and you spoiler alert having a score that got you to qualify for semifinals? What happened? How'd you do it?
Speaker 3:To be honest with you, you're not giving me room to respond was the most important thing you could have done, like in that moment, because I needed to. I do very well when my like back is against the wall and it's just like you have to do this or nothing else matters. And that's exactly where I was at. I mean, this is bad mentally, but so they released the workouts for in affiliate semifinals on Monday and they did release it at 3pm I think, east Coast time, and I was there in the morning working out and athletes are like Are you excited? Are you excited? And I was like Well, there's there's probably two things that if they program, I'm just not even going to sign up. And I joked with them that one of them would be if they programmed heavy Isabel or just heavy snatches in general. And I told multiple people that and I was half joking I'm not going to waste $100 if I legitimately know like I can't do a workout.
Speaker 3:And Monday comes along, I get the email, I'm looking at it, boom, there's heavy Isabel. And so I immediately have a crisis like I've just wasted this entire year because I can't do this one movement, and I had like the full range of grief, like I hit all the seven steps of mourning or whatever. And so then we had our conversation and I had to come to grips with like, like I said, it's you either, I think I would. You said this first. Like you either complete the snatches in an appropriate amount of time or every single other workout doesn't matter. You could win the next four workouts and it doesn't matter because you did so poor on one thing.
Speaker 2:That's how it works, right, right, you can just be so incredibly good at, which is so different than in-person competition. You can be so good at these workouts, but you don't have the like. By the way, 300 people beat you bye-bye.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 3:So I was already in that mindset, right. And then, plus, you had broken it down for me and I'm like, okay, so the day before we go in we do our primer, we were doing 185 snatches and I decided that I was going to take that barbell and I was going to throw it to the ceiling as hard as I could on every single rep. I'm like I'm done trying to feel the correct position, I'm done trying to make sure I'm getting into you know all these things. I'm like I just need to go into monkey mode right now and just barbell overhead as hard as possible. So I did that. I sent you the video and I was like, hey, I can do this. And that was the very. That was like so that was wednesday, that was the first time that I actually believed I had any chance whatsoever of completing those snatches from the entire year. Like that single moment was the first time that I had belief and wasn't just like parroting, you know words. So I sent you that and then you kind of gassed me up a little bit, being like hell, yeah, man, like that was super easy. So, okay, the next day I went in and we're warming up and I had.
Speaker 3:Before I got to the heavy bar, I had a moment with myself in the mirror and this is going to be a little bit personal, but so the girl that I had been dating me and her broke up back in October of the previous year, and it was because of CrossFit. It was because CrossFit was causing our relationship to sacrifice so many things and she just wasn't okay with what it would take anymore, and just the whole competitive part of CrossFit was too much. So essentially, if you want to make it black and white, I lost a relationship that was really important to me because of CrossFit, which is another thing that was super important to me. And so I looked at myself in the mirror and I just said, if you don't do this right now, you lost a relationship that was really important to you for nothing. It literally means nothing, because you're not even going to make it to semifinals this year. You spent this entire year training, you sacrificed so much, much, and if you don't pick this bar up, all of it means nothing.
Speaker 3:And so that I went back out, put 220 bar, threw it over my head as hard as I could, made it, looked at the person who can be the judge and I was like we need to start the camera right now, like there's a small window that I'm in, like I am, am, I am God in this moment and I need to. Just I cannot. If I wait too long and another thought creeps in, I lose this. I've hit the downward momentum. I need to, just we need to go. So it was hit play three, two, one, go.
Speaker 3:And it was the same same thing where, like you said, I needed to hit a rep every like 12 seconds. So I tried to stay on that, that timeframe. But more than anything, I was like I I told my judge don't count the reps, I don't want to know where I'm at All. That matters is every 12 seconds. This bar needs to go overhead and it doesn't matter how it gets there. I'm hands on bar at 12 seconds, I'm pulling as hard as I absolutely can and as hard as I absolutely can, and it either goes or it doesn't, and we're going to ride this until the wheels fall off. And then at one point he was like 27. And I said, holy shit, I'm three away. And then we went one, two, three and the rest is history. But it wasn't until 24 hours before doing that, that I even believed it was possible.
Speaker 2:Have you considered believing in yourself every time? What place would you come in in 2026 if you believed in your capabilities in the open, online and in person? Just throwing that out there as a runway for our next conversation.
Speaker 3:I don't know if we were going to talk about this. I recognize that the way I approached the two workouts that I did excuse me the best in at semifinals this year was different than the way I approached the workouts that I did not do well in, and it was because of belief. Like I, I went out there not just thinking but knowing that I could get a really good score, and so I approached the workouts and I attacked the workouts with the I'm going to do very well in this workout mentality, and the results were what the results were. So, to your point, there's probably a lot of hidden potential that I'm not allowing myself to use because, to your point, I am sometimes too smart and don't just like gas myself into believing.
Speaker 2:A lot of CrossFitters out there would be in real trouble if they got a lobotomy, like their athlete IQ was already too low. If we lose a little bit of your frontal lobe, I think we're off to the races. Dude, I'm an overthinker.
Speaker 3:Yeah, if we can just get that, what are they? The ice cream scooper, a little bit of your frontal lobe, I think we're off to the races dude, I'm an overthinker.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if we can just get that, what are they?
Speaker 3:the ice, the ice cream scooper yeah, yeah, just take out a little bit. Yeah, I mean it's helpful sometimes and it's harmful a lot of the times.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I would argue and this is like bordering on kind of what my I was thinking about my final thoughts on this, but like throughout the whole conversation that we've had, a lot of it has been you saying literally the words I made the decision. So it's like, in a lot of ways, like you've you've made a ton of progress just as far as like deciding to do something right, like let's see if this happens, versus like the mentality of like I'm changing this, like I'm actually like it's actionable as opposed to kind of ethereal. It's like I am going to put this bar over my head. Like someone asks you about Oreos, it's like huh, I'm going to not eat the Oreos. It's like and over the course of the last couple of years, it sounds like there have been a lot of those moments and both small and significant decisions like that what you were just saying about relationships and stuff like that, that's a very non-trivial thing, decision to make. But it's like all of that still does come back to the fact that you, under your own power, made the decision right. Like all of that still does come back to the fact that you, like, under your own power, made the decision right, like you just decided that this is how this was going to go, as opposed to like okay, I'm going to.
Speaker 1:What a lot of athletes do is like I'm going to try, like I'll do my best, and it's like I'm not to put that kind of mentality down.
Speaker 1:But it's usually more that than like I'm no, I'm just I'm deciding that this is how it's going to go and like I think there's a lot to be said about that mentality.
Speaker 1:And just doing that over and over and over again in a whole shitload of different areas of your you know kind of competitive CrossFit career up to this point has probably put you in the place that you are now right, which is talking about like finishing isabel, you know something you basically thought you would dnf and maybe hopefully get a handful of reps on. It's like we did it, you know, in seven and a half minutes in competition, um, so I just thought it was more just a comment than anything, but that that mentality of just I'm gonna make the decision is super powerful and hopefully people have heard like the recurrence of that statement and mentality over the last hour to say, like, like, what if you just make that decision Right, like you know, is there something worth saying that you're going to make that or making that decision for. And then, if you actually put the time, the energy and the effort that you've clearly put into this endeavor, where what's the effort that you've clearly put into this endeavor? Where what's the ceiling on someone who's able to do that?
Speaker 3:My, my brain is like very much a double edged sword, as we've established. It can make me do so poorly that Drew is like, hey, something is physically wrong with him. Or it can make the decision that like we're just going to do something and it's going to happen and I that is like a recurring theme, just like in my life in general I have the ability to if something is important to important enough to me, I can make 180 life changes. I can cold turkey stuff like. I can make drastic, drastic changes at the drop of a dime because I've decided that that is now what is important or what is necessary for me. My problem is that a lot of the time there's a dam and I need it to overflow. It needs to hit a certain point before I've decided that. Okay, now I will fully commit and make this decision.
Speaker 1:Almost to the point where the decision gets made for you, in a way right.
Speaker 3:It's like yeah if I was better at controlling that, I think I could remove a lot of limiters that I'm like unconsciously creating.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the the thing that we have not the thing that we have not covered. I'm just checking. One thing here is running. We haven't talked about the running transformation, we'll call it.
Speaker 3:You want to talk about mental yeah.
Speaker 2:This will be a well, it's not a compliment sandwich, because it starts with the negative. You're supposed to put the positive then the negative, then the positive. Brandon, you're a nice guy, it's a paleo sandwich.
Speaker 1:It doesn't have any bread.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's open-faced, all right. You last year, did you come in last in the running workout? The run clean and jerk I came in.
Speaker 3:I came in second to last because that one guy um his name is stefane. The one guy was standing still at the garage door. So remember how the run was like you go out the garage already, go up the up the hill. In round four I think it was he was standing still, hands on, knees bent over, like not even walking, like complete stop. I don't know what he did in the first three rounds, but he redlined so hard in the first 15 minutes of a 27 minute workout that he was at a stop and that's the only reason I didn't come in. Last is because he had an epic implosion.
Speaker 2:There was another guy that beat you by one spot, that walked a significant amount of the workouts. I just want to set the stage here. Okay, all right, we're really going to put an exclamation point on Brandon making up his mind about, page with page you know, bottom of the bottom of the games leaderboard and running workouts, and then 17th and then 13th and then 12th and then fourth. You know things of that nature. Um, and I always say to people you know we, we sell our programs, we sell. You know nine weeks to get better at rowing. I will send any person for free every workout that you did in the last year. Good fucking luck. The programming is free, the coaching is not is something that Logan from Deuce Gym says. People come to us for a very specific reason and a lot of times words on a page are not what that is and I would happily do that.
Speaker 2:You did a lot of zone two. You did a lot of first and second and third and fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh and eighth gear running and you mixed that with the nutrition, with taking care of a lot of these things and in the yoke repeater, which was significantly more running biased than last year's test, you took 16th in the Northeast and one of the things that you said to me while we were there at the end was my lowest finish this year was higher than my highest finish last year, which is honestly like that's not going to happen very often, but just such a very cool thing to see. You know being the, you know the lifting type or the like. You know you're very good at the types of CrossFit workouts That'd be a little bit shorter, a little bit more based on, you know, cycle rate, things of that nature. This couldn't be further from that. Hey, brandon, you get your two feet and you get to listen to yourself. Huff and puff, get your ass out on the road and go get to work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's the kind of adaptation, that's the kind of thing, that's the kind of journey that brings me back to want to coach for a stint fucking year at regionals. It's those types of things taking place and convincing someone like this is what we're going to go do, and it's really just about cause. Like we followed that progression of very zone too heavy to start. Let's get your legs onto you.
Speaker 2:That sort of thing Like the whatever it takes is going to feel different and you bought into it and some of your scores, just those last like like it was so funny to go from phase zero I DNF to my 5k to like very high level scores and our last few workouts, the semifinals prep, it was right into that thing and a lot of it's, because in my mind it was like what does this progression look like? I want it to really make sense to him. But just one of those things where, like I'm sure it must've felt good to like have the resistance of like a high heart rate and like those people out there with you and you get to have that moment where you're kind of grin through it and maybe even run a little bit harder. That must've just felt so much different from last year of like, for the love of God, survive.
Speaker 3:Well. So like last year they were the 800 meter runs in the second round. So the five, five round workout like on average, is taking people 25 minutes or so, about five minutes around in the second round of the workout. I was in last place on an 800 meter run and I could not see another athlete anywhere. Like we're six minutes into a workout maybe, and I already know I'm in last place to the point where I can't see anybody else. There's not even like somebody. I'm like chasing, like they're just I'm essentially alone for the next 20 minutes and if it wasn't for that other guy like imploding, like that's how it would have been the entire time and that that moment, especially because we ran around vendor village so so like we're running around other people and the people outside can't tell that I'm in last place but I'm sure they could figure it out with how slow I was running but like that moment was so abrasive and felt so bad. It's my first ever semifinals workout and I'm like for the next 20 minutes I'm in last place and we just have to do this. There's no quitting at a semifinal. You don't get to just decide I'm not going to do this anymore.
Speaker 3:That was that was so it made me feel so uncomfortable that I made the decision that again made the decision for the rest of my life, like I will never come in last place in a running workout again, because it's so much different on a running workout. You don't have the crowd most of the time, you don't have the music most of the time, to your point, it's breathing heavy and it's the voices in your head, and nothing gets grosser and more disgusting than the voices in your head when you are in last place and you have no chance of catching up. So I was like we're not ever doing that again and that was one of the major goals that I set by myself for this year and I would send Drew throughout the year operation never last place in a running workout again. Like that was my, that was my little tagline for it, and it was a very resounding success and we made strides that I didn't even know were possible with it.
Speaker 2:So last kind of anecdote here put a period on this, this kind of story. We made progress in making progress in that you had the Isabel moment, you were having those running scores, and then they announced the 200 pound sandbag and once again, one of the strongest people I've ever met in my whole life tells me he can't lift it. The funny thing, too, is I actually I sent Hunter the video that you sent me. Yeah, just in terms of like hey, are you seeing anything different here? That sort of thing.
Speaker 2:And I wanted to be very clear to the listeners when you are at a high level, you can't guess what thing to go fix on a list of like 80 things.
Speaker 2:You really can't. You want to get stronger, you want to get better at getting better, you want to get fitter, like those things. You know the nutrition, you control the controllables, and what happens is we get these announcements of the workouts and even the most hardened athletes lose their fucking mind like a vested muscle up or I gotta do pistols on one leg. They try it for five fucking seconds and then say they can't do it. But I'm so used to this that I'm like, okay, sure you can't. And we work on it right, like we overdo it a little bit, we kind of get to that point and we were able to to go from. I think I have a literal message that says I can't lift this thing, and then when I said, show me, you did one, so that refutes so I sent, I sent you the message after trying to do one and failing it, and I go oh, I literally can't do this yes, you did a set of touch and go sandbag cleans with the 200 on the back half of the back nine.
Speaker 2:The only reason I'm bringing this up is we had the whole podcast about linear progression last week and I swear to god, that's how I think about everything in life in terms of I'm at point A and I want to be at point B and you are shortening that window of time that says I can't do this to. Let's go figure out how to do it and then we'll execute. Right, it's not binary, it's not ones and zeros. At this point it's like there is a plan that we can put in place over this period of time to be able to go in and do that. So you shortening that window of time is just as important as you changing your diet and getting into the mobility and actually getting yourself fitter. If there's anything within this podcast that people should latch onto is the power of what your mindset and what your attitude can do to you or for you. Like that's. That's the whole thing, because at the end of the day, we're all going to be running and deadlifting and bench pressing and doing muscle ups and doing you know we're doing the same things. Most programs have kind of a similar elements to them, like what actually does move the needle and like that's the biggest reason why I wanted to have you on this podcast.
Speaker 2:I think your last couple of seasons are significantly more relatable than a lot of other situations. For people, it's not just to have you on here and say he signed up for remote coaching and jumped up the leaderboard. Like how is that possible? Like what happens there, like like going to misfitathfit athleticscom does not. Like typing it into a computer and hitting enter does not make you go up the leader board. That's fucking fantastic if it did right. It does not work that way. So what actually takes place physically, mentally you know these decisions that we make that puts you there. So hunter you, you call in the, you call in your that that was a good final thoughts. Do you want to? Do you want to end with that?
Speaker 1:I mean, I I just like feel like that's a we we heard from start to finish the the journey of the athlete. And it's like you hear it often not often, but like someone, someone on that journey or who has that goal in their head. They follow a very similar path to what you did and you actually kind of like everything you said we've heard beef, you know, in just a different iteration from a different athlete. Not to not to make that sound like you're not unique, but it's like everybody has gone through those kind of like intersections and checkpoints. It's like, okay, I'm gonna start following, like you know, why do I follow the program? It's like, oh, well, I I'm choosing this because it allows me to work on weaknesses. And it's like, okay, there's like first step in the like good, like good judgment column athlete. Like next step is like, okay, I'm gonna ask somebody do I follow the program that I am like I I aspire to be at? Or do I follow the pro you know, or do I follow hatchet, for example? And it's like there's a lot of athletes who like that's their first wrong mistake. It's like, well, I want to be in the CrossFit game, so I'm going to follow the CrossFit games program. It's like right, motherfucker, you want to be in the NFL. You don't suit up.
Speaker 1:And they're just like, over the course of the whole conversation, there's all these checkpoints where it's like, ok, well, what do I do here? What do I do here? And it's just like decision points where you get to go left or you go right, and for the most part you made it seem like you made really good decisions. Or like ask the right people for their, for their guidance. You know you used your intellect to make the right decision, but also knew when to hand the buck off to someone like Drew. For it's like okay, I've probably reached the limit of my capacity to make good decisions for myself and now I need somebody else to help make them for me.
Speaker 1:And then it kind of ended, culminated with that. You know that conversation that Drew had for you where it's like you don't get to, like you don't have a say in this, like you don't get to like you don't have a say in this, like you're going to do this. You've done all the right things up to this point. And you know, in a way, that's kind of nice, where it's like hey, coach, let me put the pack on for a second for you and say like, hey, you've done all the work, you've made all the right decisions to get to where you're at right now and, like now, you just need to fucking giddy up. We do need to maybe work on turning your brain off a little bit more often, but like like that's.
Speaker 1:I think that's just kind of like that's the nature of the longer you do.
Speaker 1:I feel like the longer you do crossfit at any level, the easier it is to like outsmart yourself into thinking that you've you've figured out how to get around things that either you're not good at, or, like you know, stepping away from the things that continue to give you progress in the first place, because you've somehow managed to become smarter than, like the work that it took to get where you're at.
Speaker 1:And it's like just kind of came back to the like nope, I'm just going to make the decision to do the correct thing. It's going to take some time, but like I'm willing to make those like sacrifices all the way up to that point. So I think like the whole your whole story and whole journey, from start to start to where you're at now, is like an outstanding just example for somebody who is trying to like get on the path to competitive CrossFit, whatever their end goal is whether it's quarterfinals, semifinals, the CrossFit games it's like it's like hey, here are lots of checkpoints that you might come across in your journey, and here's somebody who made the right decision, went in the right direction nine out of 10 times and it's like look at where he ended up. So kudos to you, man.
Speaker 3:I'd add to that like, if there there was, if there's anybody who's listening to this, who was in my position a year, a year ago, who, like, is hearing this for the first time and you're deciding like, hey, I want to try out misfit for for this season or whatever was. I tried not to reach out too often because I didn't want to feel like I was taking advantage of, like drew's time because I was not a remote client. I guess it was two years ago when I was first starting with misfit, like I wasn't a remote client, I wasn't paying for anything besides just the programming and I didn't want to feel like I was like constantly asking drew's advice. And so I only reached out those few times or so.
Speaker 3:But I'll say, don't be scared to reach out to Drew or Hunter or the coaches in the Misfit Discord, because those were the things that saved me from making the wrong decisions was asking those people. And Drew and Hunter, they respond to people in the Discord, they're always being helpful, answering questions. I don't go overboard, I would probably say, but like, don't be afraid to ask the people who know what is the best decision and how can you, you know, improve in that. So like that was just be my final thoughts on on your what you were pointing out about making the right decision is you got to know when to ask the other people.
Speaker 2:And I truly believe that that's what separates our program and I actually recently have changed the welcome message that you get when you start to follow our programs. I give out my email address, I give out the groups that you can go into. The actual message is like something that you can just respond to, like in fitter. That's what is different about our programming. That's why you would pay the price that you would pay for. Our programming is you do have access to me and of course there are different levels to that. Like, if every single person expects remote coaching, then we're kind of in deep shit. But the smaller questions that you're referencing can be these really long levers that you pull, so definitely reach out.
Speaker 2:My final thoughts are a little sports that go to the pros and don't do very well because they are screaming in a 32-year-old man's face who makes 20 million dollars a year. And I don't use the being a hard ass. I mean we've mentioned some of them on this podcast. Being a hard ass is a tool in my tool belt, but isn't really something that I think fits into a lot of scenarios where an adult is coaching an adult. That's what I'm doing as my job 99.9% of the time. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because I do not blow smoke up people's asses, but I think that because believing in yourself can be that final hurdle for so many people that they think that that's what I'm doing and it's like. No, I have your scores right here.
Speaker 2:Like there are athletes who will tell me they can't hold a pace that they held a year and a half ago, that they they they're significantly fitter and it's like it's. You wrote it right there. Like that is you. You typed that in. Like this was my pace felt great today, that sort of thing. So when I do that for athletes, when I tell them I know that you can do this, I know that you can break this up into these sets and I know that you can hold this pace on this machine. You know that sort of thing. It's wouldn't do me any good to say that shit If it wasn't real. Like if I said to you just go, fucking snatch it 30 times. It's on the ground, put it over your head, done Like come on now. If I had said that to you and you couldn't do it, there'd be a fucking horrendous coaching tactic right.
Speaker 2:You truly could only power snatch 205. It's like nah, man, I think you got this. That would do more harm than good, right? So that is something that kind of popped into my head. And I do see, on the coaching side, too much of the ego of the coach, too much of the I am in control. You're going to listen to me Like I don't want to throw people under the bus, you know, in terms of like, hey, if you want to yell at the athlete during a competition, I guess that's between you and them sort of a thing. But I just think in the relationships that we're building again, an adult coaching an adult there is kind of that level of respect that's there. And I have to often tell my athletes hey, I'm not trying to make you feel better right now. I'm giving you objective data that says you can do this. So like, go do it. This isn't like you're so good, oh my goodness. Every time you work out, I'm like hooray, this is fantastic. Like that's not where this is coming from. This is data that we're using and that's the kind of thing where, over time, you would want less and less occurrences and I'm talking to you directly, brandon less and less occurrences of like oh yeah, sure, sure, I can that kind of thing, sure, I can Like that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:2026 preview. Brandon believes in each and all of his abilities. That's the goal. Scary.
Speaker 3:Anything else. Gentlemen, I think we did it. I appreciate you having me on.
Speaker 2:Absolutely man.
Speaker 3:Great episode.
Speaker 2:Thanks for joining, dude. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of the Misfit Podcast. Head to sharpentheaxecocom. Get your new logo Misfit tees and hoodies. Head to teammisfitcom. Click on the sign up now button. Get a two-week free trial of our affiliate programming on StreamFit, pushpress or SugarWad. And if you would like to follow the same program, a similar program to Brandon, you can head to the link in bio and sign up. On Strivee or Fitter, he doesn't know it yet, but he will be in the pro telegram group. So if you join the pro subscription, please only join it. If you should join it, join the comp one. If you should be on hatchet, I doubt we have listeners left because they think we've started the ads. But for the love of God, please sign up for comp. That's how you know it's real. It costs less money. I'm telling you to sign up for the one that costs less money because it's appropriate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this has gone on too long.
Speaker 2:Follow the programming. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next week.