CrossFit champ Mat Fraser finds time to unwind
WILLISTON - The Fittest Man on Earth spent the last two weeks doing as little as possible.
It was about time Mat Fraser checked out.
A boys-only, four-day motorcycle trip to Yosemite National Park served as the appetizer. Lakeside seclusion in southern Ontario was the main course and dessert. The 2016 CrossFit Games champion had earned a few cheat days.
“My girlfriend and I went up to my family camp — no cell phone, no internet, no nothing. Just sat on a dock and drank coffee for two weeks,” said Fraser, 26. “It was nice.”
His relentless, emphatic victory last month — Fraser outpaced runner-up Ben Smith, the 2015 champ, by a record 197 points — meant the days after the Games were utterly doubt-free. Not only could he take a vacation, it felt like one too.
“I think it was a little too good,” Fraser said Tuesday afternoon at Champlain Valley CrossFit. “I completed my goal so I found comfort in that. I was able to just (exhale). It was a big weight off my shoulders, I was able to take time off and be OK with it.”
Monday was Fraser’s first day back in his home gym since his coronation at the StubHub Center in Carson, California, and the $275,000 first-prize check that came with it. Only light stuff on the menu: Push-ups, pull-ups, a few minutes on the stationary bike. He didn’t touch any weights until Tuesday — and even that was brief, a handful of one-arm snatches with an 80-pound dumbbell.
Colchester's Mathew Fraser wins CrossFit Games
The newly-minted champ wasn’t rushing back into his pre-Games regimen just yet.
“I did five minutes on the AirBike at a pace that a month ago I literally could’ve held for an hour,” Fraser said. “I did it for five minutes and my lungs were burning.”
But it was a good burn, an enjoyable one. After losing to Smith by just 36 points a year ago, the sensation was head to toe.
Bursting on the scene with a second-place showing as a rookie in 2014, Fraser was the heir apparent 12 months later. Four-time defending champion Rich Froning Jr. had retired from individual competition and Fraser, the sport’s rising star, was fresh off winning the CrossFit Open, the worldwide regional qualifying competition.
Living up to such lofty expectations turned out to be a different story when it came time for the Games. Fraser faltered on the second day and, after pushing to get back near the lead, came up short after placing 17th in the final event.
“Going into 2015, I’d won the Open, and that was like the first time Froning hadn’t won the Open, so I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve got this in the bag,’” Fraser said. “I had no reason to cut out those bad habits, take the other stuff seriously that I wasn’t doing.
“Getting hit over the head one more time it was like, ‘Alright, time to get my stuff together.”
Colchester man finds 2nd calling in CrossFit
The biggest boost for the 2016 came at the end of 2015, when Fraser finished his bachelor’s at the University of Vermont, a double-major in mechanical engineering and engineering management.
He graduated to a full-time job training for CrossFit.
“I’m able to dedicate the entire day,” he said. “I’m able to dedicate more time to warm-ups, cool-downs, working on the little things, the 1-percenters that add up, whereas before I would just come in and have to hit my workout quick and be done.”
Those extra hours in the day allowed the former Colchester Laker to use the high school track for running sessions, rather than the asphalt parking lot behind the CrossFit gym. He could log reps in the pool. His sleep schedule and eating habits improved drastically.
“Those nights of having to stay up until the early hours studying, getting projects or homework done, those are gone,” Fraser said.
The year-to-year difference, as evidenced by his performance last month, was staggering.
Five days of competition couldn’t rattle the former member of the U.S. Olympic weightlifting program. The rest of the field couldn’t match his pace.
Fraser claimed first the opening event, a trail run in Aromas, California, the site of the first Games, and never looked back. He took runner-up honors in seven of the 14 remaining tests — the rest of the top 10 men, by comparison, combined for just nine finishes of second-or-better.
“I went into it, I don’t want to say with the expectation of winning, but I knew I’d be disappointed with anything but,” Fraser said. “I know what I’ve done all year — I’ve worked hard the last year. The events where I did so poorly the year prior, all my results improved dramatically and it was just because the areas I neglected before I did so much work in this year.”
But the really scary part for the rest of the world’s elite CrossFit competitors?
The superstar from Vermont plans to use his win as a blueprint to get even better. Fraser now has a granular, step-by-step checklist to go about fixing even his most minor flaws from competition this year.
“I kinda went through each workout from the Games, regionals, and looked at what events gave me trouble, why they gave me trouble,” he said. “Was it a specific movement? Was it a specific stimulus? Once those are identified, what needs to get better, was it my positioning, my mentality going into it?”
A busy few months loom before Fraser gets back to the full-scale training program he employed for his first win. Promotional appearances, coaching stopovers and a competition will take him to Chile, Brazil, Australia, Dubai, Switzerland and Italy — all before December.
That prospect has the reigning king of CrossFit sounding like the budding star he was just two years ago, when everything was new, exhilarating and exhausting at the same time.
“Hell yeah, it’s fun. I get to work out all day every day and go travel the world,” Fraser said. “It’s great.”
This story was originally published Aug. 10, 2016. Contact Austin Danforth at 651-4851 or edanforth@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/eadanforth