Five-time CrossFit Games winner Mat Fraser has been pacing his Team HWPO athletes through the kind of session that quietly defines a contender ahead of the 2026 CrossFit Games. The team's most recent published training day, captured in their behind-the-scenes content, ran a deceptively simple workout — mile run, 30 worm clean and jerks, mile run — at a track that, by the team's own description, turned out longer than advertised.
The pacing strategy was Fraser-classic. "We didn't really talk about a game plan going into the cleaner jerks," one of the athletes explained on the team's recap. "Did talk about a game plan for the mile, which we stuck to, paced the first one, so that we were all moderately uncomfortable, but able to come in and pick the bag right up."
The team's pacing logic kicked in over the closing mile. "We pushed our final mile and it was about 10 to 15 seconds — I've got to look at the watch — faster than our first one," the athlete added. "Which was exactly what we're looking for. And we finished pretty, pretty uncomfortable. I don't know that we had much more push in us. If we had to clean that workout up, it'd be in the clean and jerks and the miles would be about the same pace."
The HWPO ethos comes through in those caveats. The team doesn't chase perfect runs in training; it manufactures discomfort and then forces real-time decisions while taxed. "Stuff like that in training feels like a competition," the athlete said. "And so it's easy to go into it with this mindset of, oh, we might not do well. But the reality is, if you don't do well or something goes wrong or you come out, you're like, I could have done that better. It's why we do this stuff in training is to practice."
By the end of the session, the math was as eye-catching as the time. The track was not the assumed 800 metres around — closer to 1.2 miles per supposed mile, by the team's reckoning — meaning the headline mile times the athletes were reading off their watches actually represented a longer distance than they had budgeted for. That extra load, willingly walked into, is the kind of detail that marks Fraser's coaching style.
With the 2026 Games scheduled for the SAP Center in California and venue prep already underway by general manager Dave Castro and his crew, HWPO will be aiming to be among the dominant teams when the field lines up. Sessions like the mile-and-worm reveal how the team plans to get there: no perfect scripts, plenty of unscripted decision-making, and a willingness to come out of training day a little less pretty than they'd like.
