The back aches and eyes water contemplating it, but the impending mind games loom largest for Mt Maunganui's Luke McGruer, Mahdi Te Heuheu and John Templeton as they skip the ditch and bid to become the fittest person on earth.
The trio, who established the Mount CrossFit gym at Owens Place last June, are already among the 60 fittest in Australasia, and will this weekend go up against their rivals, fighting it out for a top three spot to make it all the way to the Reebok CrossFit Games in California. McGruer, Templeton and Te Heuheu were among 50,000 worldwide competing in the Crossfit Open competition, qualifying for the CrossFit Regionals in Wollongong.
They'll have a couple of days to complete six workouts, with their CrossFit gym also sending a group of six - Kate Jenkins, Rachelle Brightwell, Whitney Teesdale, Zach Morton-Adair, Tim Patton and Geoff Roberts - to fight it out in the teams' section.
Butch Bulgarian brutes and body odour spring to mind when lifting weights crops up but Templeton, recently crowned Cleo Bachelor of the Year, said CrossFit wasn't just a workout for the obsessed or hardcore.
The first CrossFit gym opened in 1995 in California; today there are about 2000 worldwide, including 31 in New Zealand. Founders Greg and Lauren Glassman blended weightlifting, gymnastics, kettle bell training and calisthenics to create a new form of fitness training that's now widely used by police departments and armed forces.
"It's not just for the fitness-obsessed but it's a great way of getting really fit really quickly, or losing a lot of weight," Templeton said. "Anybody can do any workout because it's tailored for them. We've got one girl who comes in who can barely lift the [weights] bar so we've got a special bar for her."