CrossFit Liberate

by Sydney Devine

Every year, functional training brand RPM Training Co. hosts a 10K Challenge benefiting underprivileged youth across the world. The challenge is fairly simple: Participants have 30 days to complete 10,000 jump rope double-unders or jump rope single-unders through Feb. 2. 

During last year’s challenge, thousands of participants from 38 countries logged over 28 million jumps all in support of RPM’s charitable initiative, The Iron Compass. In fact, 71 of those participants came straight from Crossfit Liberate! For those of us new to the challenge and RPM, here’s a quick overview. 

You may have seen the set of multi-colored jump ropes that sit against the wall behind the rig in CrossFit Liberate’s turf room – those are the gym’s set of RPM ropes. And RPM created its life-changing mission, The Iron Compass, to provide assistance to programs that offer free functional training (like CrossFit) and other programs to underprivileged youth across the world. This assistance can provide anything from fitness and mentorship opportunities to functional training and outdoor/action sports activities and initiatives. 

RPM says they “partner with like-minded organizations to give kids the chance to realize their own potential, develop resilience and confidence, and find a sense of belonging in a positive and healthy community.” 

The good news is that 100 percent of any 10K Challenge fees, including registration fees or any merchandise profits, all go straight to the Iron Compass Initiative, which then makes grants to organizations like Forging Youth Resilience, which empowers young people to build physical and mental strength for life through access to a network of community-based fitness and mentorship programs.

For those who choose to participate, not only are you supporting an amazing cause, but as an added bonus, you’re also learning and/or perfecting an important CrossFit skill and movement. Plus, if you don’t have double-unders, this challenge is an excellent way to work on them – or you can always log single-unders as scaled jumps. 

That’s right: You don’t have to have double-unders to participate! When you sign up, you’ll be able to select double-unders, singles, or any combination of both when you go to log your jumps and the leaderboard that you’ll see can be filtered accordingly.

And although that 30-day deadline is approaching, there’s still plenty of time to sign up and log those jumps. Once you register, you can even join the CrossFit Liberate team and see how others in our gym are doing with their 10K jumps. 

All in all, RPM’s 10K Challenge is an excellent way to score some practice on a skill we frequent in workouts, challenge yourself against others you workout with at our gym here in Athens as well as across the world, and donate to a great initiative that gives more opportunities for underprivileged youth to get out and get active. 

So, if you haven’t already and you’d like to sign up, CLICK HERE (or visit: https://rpmtraining.com/pages/10k-challenge). There’s still plenty of time to get those 10,000 jumps in! 

After registering, add yourself to our “CrossFit_Liberate” team in the challenge’s platform so you can see how other participants in our gym are doing with their jumps – it’s a nice way to challenge yourself as you’re chipping away on your own.