Well that was a hell of a season. We saw the overwhelming favorite, Mat Fraser, once again come up just short on the last couple events. We watched the fittest females in the world struggle to complete a deceptively simple exercise. We even witnessed an attempted mass murder as Dave Castro tried to Murph 80 of the fittest men and women on Earth to death. But what did we learn from the 2015 Reebok CrossFit Games? Let's start with what the competitors should take away form the Games:

Know Your Roots

Ah, the peg board. To many athletes, this was a huge hole in their game. I've only ever seen a handful of CrossFit gyms with peg boards, and usually they're being used as jump rope storage instead of as a piece of workout equipment.

Greg Glassman wrote about peg boards in 2002, in the Garage Gym article of the CrossFit Journal. Climbers have been using peg boards for years to develop grip, back, and arm strength and as we've learned over the past few years, everyone needs to have some sort of focused work to develop greater capacities.

Competitive CrossFitters and their coaches should take note of what's come in the past as a way of prepping for the future. The Open and Regionals have traditionally been very vanilla CrossFit, nothing too surprising going on in either. The Games have always introduced more novel movements and challenges, many of which have shown up in the CrossFit Journal or CrossFit.com programming in the past 15 years.

The Walk-Off Homer Is Key

Yes, consistency is key to winning The CrossFit Games, but that's not news. If you wanna win, you better be ready to step up and perform when it counts the most. You have to be able to take the win.

Rich Froning is unbeatable for this reason: when it counts, he reminds everyone why he's a legend. The last time Rich wasn't able to step up and take the win was 2010, when he lost the last event.

This happened to Sara Sigmundsdottir this year. She was my pick to win this year and just couldn't put it away during those last two events. Ben Smith was able to do this during the Soccer Chipper event on Saturday after seeing Mat Fraser lose his massive lead a little.

The guy who did this best in 2015 was Spencer Hendel, who placed 5th overall. Three separate times Spencer Hendel stepped forward and made a statement about his capabilities: the Soccoer Chipper and both Pedal To The Medal events. Each time he finished significantly ahead of the rest of the pack and each time he showed that when it came time, he was ready, willing, and able to crush some souls.

Love To Suffer

Speaking of crushing souls, if at this point you're interested in CrossFitting competitively but you haven't accepted suffering as a normal part of your everyday life, you should probably quit now.

Many sports require participants to endure massive amounts of pain and CrossFit is no different. Your muscles will cramp, your joints will hurt, your hands will tear, you'll feel like you're dying, and if you can't smile and move past all those feelings then you're fucked.

It's not enough to be insanely fit, you've gotta have the Prefontaine mindset. You've gotta be willing to bleed for it and you've gotta be willing to make everyone around you bleed for it too.

Develop Amnesia

The willingness to suffer isn't the only mental tool necessary to do well at the CrossFit Games. You've gotta be able to forget.

The worst example of this is Camille Leblanc Bazinet. The 2014 Champion had a rough Wednesday night, placing nearly last in the Sandbag 2015 event and just could not put it together from that moment on. She posted several times on Instagram about how poorly the weekend was going for her and how she would try to put it back together again, but even her husband, Dave Lipson, was quoted as saying "All she needs to do is stay out of her own head."

The best example of this was CrossFit Mayhem Freedom. They placed dead last in an event on Friday, then started Saturday with another finish only a few places from last, and yet they pulled it all together to win the Affiliate Cup.

CrossFit Games athletes should seek to learn from golfers and soccer and hockey goalies. The only thing that matters is the task at hand. Beating yourself up over the previous event will only hurt. The same goes for celebrating too early or getting complacent after a good event. Each event needs to be treated as its own thing, separate from everything else. Do what you can, accept it, move on. Lingering on negative or positive events will only distract you from what you should be doing in that moment.

So if you're a competitive CrossFitter, read and learn. Next up we'll cover what the spectators can takeaway from the 2015 Reebok CrossFit Games.