Dating App for CrossFitters Taken Down, New Nike Metcon

The dating app for CrossFitters, WODAboutADate has been taken down due to IT issues. A coach has written an open letter to Dave Castro about the Open.

Wednesday, December 4th, 2019

Good morning and welcome to the WODDITY podcast for news about CrossFit. We are a daily podcast, Monday through Friday, doing CrossFit news in five minutes or less.

My name is Ben Garves and today is Wednesday, the 4th of December, 2019.

New Nike Metcon

Nike has released a new version of the Nike Metcon 5 shoe for CrossFit, and they’re calling it the Nike React Metcon. It features a couple of changes for feel, flexibility, and...ventilation. They’ve swapped the laces for a quick-pull alternative, along with a number of other small tweaks. I for sure consider it an iteration to improve the Metcon 5, but definitely not enough changes to name this the Nike Metcon 6.

Dating App for CrossFit Taken Down

We somehow missed it when things went down in late September, but WODAboutADate, a new dating app for those CrossFit-enthused has been taken offline. The relatively-fresh app, which first launched August 23rd, hit a number of functionality snags. The launch had originally been delayed a number of times after the initial goal of launching August 4th at the 2019 CrossFit Games. The WODAboutADate team has been adamant, including in an appearance on the Make Pods Great Again podcast, that they are focused on a quality user experience, above all else. Their September 28th comment on the take down was that it was due to “unforeseen IT issues” and that they felt it is “in the best interest for everyone involved here that we temporarily suspend our app.”

I’ve reached out to the WODAboutADate team to ask about a timeline to their return and will keep you posted.

A Coach's Open Letter to Dave Castro

BoxRox has shared an open letter to Dave Castro, written by Eggert Olafsson, a coach at CrossFit Reykjavik. The op-ed talks through Olafsson’s view that the CrossFit Open needs to be tweaked to better-serve teenage athletes. He cites movements which are dangerous for developing teens to perform:

"When I say dangerous I don’t mean life threatening, what I mean is that if done incorrectly they can easily lead to injury. Teenage athletes are more fragile than adult athletes. They are often growing at a very fast pace and their hormones are all over the place. These grow spikes can often lead to injury, so you have to be more careful when programming for teenagers. Their knees are a special concern, their legs have grown in length and their leg strength has not caught up yet. Also their motor patterns are not as refined as adults, of course there are exceptions. Movements like pistols are dangerous for teens. I will give ring muscle ups a pass because most likely if they are strong enough to do a muscle up then the movement isn’t dangerous."

I’ve put a link to the letter in my show notes at WODDITY.com, but I wanted to read his solution to you. Feel free to weigh in by messaging WODDITY on Instagram, or emailing me directly at [email protected]. I’d love to share your opinion on the podcast. Olafsson writes:

"I personally don’t like criticism without a solution. I have been thinking a lot about this ever since the Open ended, I have a suggestion on how this can be changed. Drop the Rx version and only have one version, the scaled version...The Online Qualifier is already very heavy and has many high-skill gymnastic movements. So making the Open easier for teen athletes would make zero difference on who makes it to the Games. In this version, only the kids who can handle the volume and intensity of these weights and movements would be performing them in a competition setting. Only the teens who showed great capacity in the Open would be performing heavy lift and high skill/risk gymnastic movements."

And that’s it for news about CrossFit for Wednesday, December 4th. Thanks for listening. Please be sure to rate, review, subscribe, and share. For WODDITY, I’m Ben Garves. We’ll chat tomorrow.