This year’s Battle Bunker competition consisted of a “Pipeline” that involved a virtual “Combine”. The top athletes from the combine move on to the Battle Bunker Regionals. Athletes were selected to compete at the Eastern Regionals in North Carolina or Western Regionals in Texas.

Both events took place on separate weekends but consisted of the same three workouts. Looking ahead to the Hybricon Games which will take place on October 28th and 29th we crunched the numbers to give us a feel for where athletes might stack up when they go head to head. We recognize a variety of factors could impact the athlete’s performance. But, given that, here is the Battle Bunker Cross-Regional Comparison: 

Event One: “Yard Work”

The first event tested the athlete’s functional capacity in a “Murph” inspired test. This was the most grueling test of the day and set the tone for the rest of the competition. The test was:

1 Mile Run

60 Sandbag Shoulder to Overhead (70 lbs)

120 Push Ups

240 Air Squats

1 Mile Run

All of the work was completed wearing a fourteen-pound weight vest. Here is how all of the finalists would have ranked if they were at the same regionals

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Event Two: Barbell Capacity

In the second event, the stronger competitors were able to make a big jump up the leaderboard. The event was:

60 seconds Max Reps Bench Press (135 lbs)

*3 minutes rest*

60 seconds Max Reps Deadlift (225 lbs)

The score was the combined total of reps. Carly Wopat was the star here as she had the best score in both the Bench (19 reps) and the Deadlift (31 reps) across both regionals. Here is where all of the qualifiers ranked:

Event Three: “Last Athlete Standing”

The final event was pure running. The pack of runners all started together, and after each lap, the back of the pack would be eliminated until only one athlete remained. Due to the nature of this event, it was impossible to do a cross-regional comparison. Thankfully the athletes all ran a 1600m time trial in the combine which correlated highly with the results of “Last Athlete Standing”. So, for our purposes, we will use those times for comparison. Lauren Weeks and Meg Jacoby ran away with this event at their regionals, but here is where the ladies ranked in 1600m times:

*There was no 1600m time listed for Courtney so we placed her where she finished relative to her direct competitors in “Last Athlete Standing”

Final Tally:

For the final tally, we will use the same system that Battle Bunker used at Regionals (One Point for First, Two Points for Second, and so on.) Here is where the athletes shook out

We look forward to seeing how the events take place come October in Chula Vista for the 2023 Hybricon Games.

Fun Fact – 2 of the top 5 women are Aussies, Jess Pettrow and Calypso Sheridan.

Click here for the men’s combined results.