“His teammates jumped into action and were able to resuscitate him thanks to CPR and a defibrillator on hand at the gym,” an article on this very website about Oscar Tyrberg suffering a cardiac arrest during team Quarterfinals read last Friday as I began typing this article about defibrillators in CrossFit Affiliates. I don’t believe in fate, but, c’mon, that was weird.
Using a defibrillator and performing CPR within 3-5 minutes of collapse take the chances of chances of survival from a lowly 6% to a lofty 74% – Part of the Solution are working on increasing the availability of defibrillators for CrossFit Affiliates around the UK.
POTS, or Part of the Solution, was originally set up in 2020 by Dave Shenton and Jamie Walton who had seen, first-hand, the impact lockdowns and restrictions were having on gym owners and wanting to do something to help. There was limited government support available and with gyms being forced to close and not seeing their members, owners and coaches were left feeling unsupported and, at best, uncertain about their futures. “Giving members a way to buy a t-shirt and show they have their Affiliate’s back felt like the right thing to do,” Dave explained. “Beyond the £10 being donated to the gym, it let the owners know their members were still there and wanted to support them and it let members all over the UK feel part of something bigger, to feel like part of the solution!”
Once lockdown was over the duo changed tack and moved to a general fund model to support all UK Affiliates. “We used this to donate a substantial amount to one Affiliate in particular who had numerous unfortunate circumstances and bad luck and were facing closure. Last we heard they were heading for 100 members and thriving,” Dave said.
Now, lock down and restrictions are sort of a weird memory that feels simultaneously real and somehow like it never could have actually happened, so what’s the solution to be a part of? “As the fund grew through t-shirt sales and DriAthalon events, we needed something to focus on. After some research we realized how few Affiliates had defibrillators and what a huge impact they can have on the chances of survival.”
You can’t put a price on a life. Well, that’s not entirely true, it turns out you actually can put a price on it. An internal mounted defibrillator would set you back around £1500 and an external one would be £2500. A pretty hefty outlay for an Affiliate owner.
“It’s understandable that defibrillators would be further down the list, it can never seem like a good time to apportion that amount of money to something,” Dave said. So, that’s where POTS step in. The problem being solved this time is increasing the number of defibrillators in UK Affiliates without taking money from the pocket of the Affiliate itself. “We want to raise awareness of how important they are and give the tools for owners to generate funds to buy them.”
POTS started to put out feelers to gauge interest in being part of the plans to purchase defibrillators but soon found, due to demand, that purchasing the defibrillators and dolling them out would be out of the question. “We had to provide a fishing rod, not a fish,” Dave said, rather poetically, “So we set about creating everything an Affiliate could need to put on a fundraising event, from creating awareness to a library of media posts”. They’ve even provided event guidelines which go as deep as ‘push this button on the rower’. The aim is to put everything in place so the Affiliate owners can “pick a date, create a JustGiving page and get it on!” Shenton said, a bit less poetically this time.
The event itself is based off the perfectly familiar 21-15-9 format, except, it’s a 211,509m row. The idea being that you do it as a solo effort using the defibrillator as needed throughout, or, if you want, you can do it as part of a team of a size of your choosing. If you’re curious how long it would take, the guys have kindly broken down some pacing options:
14hrs for 2min/500m
12hrs20 for 1:45/500m
10hrs30 for 1:30/500m
Every gym has the opportunity to be involved and aim to raise as much as possible with the hope being that if there is spare funds remaining once the defibrillator is purchased that it will go to a general fund to purchase more units for other gyms, or, the gym can purchase a unit for a neighboring gym themselves. “Going forward, a huge part of this initiative is we want Affiliates to support each other, to pay it forward. If your Affiliate has a defib, we hope you do the challenge and donate to the general fund to ‘top up’ the funds of affiliates that fall short of the target,” Dave said. As well as the fund raising event, POTS will also be selling t-shirts using the same model as before with £10 from each purchase going to the general fund.
When Oscar Tyrberg was getting ready for Event 2B during Quarterfinals, the clock counted down 3,2…and he dropped, handless to the floor. CrossFit Fabriken has two defibrillators and their coaches all have CPR training. That’s the reason Oscar survived. CrossFit Fabriken explained to The Barbell Spin that “after 2.5minutes Oscar started to breath again, the ambulance arrived 8 minutes after his heart stopped, Oscar was ok”. It’s something that may never happen, something you hope will never happen, but, something that could happen. POTS are setting gyms up to be ready if it does.
