More than 2,000 athletes are set to descend on the sand north of the Huntington Beach Pier starting Friday for the three-day SoCal Fitness Festival, a competition that organizers say has roughly doubled in size since 2024. Tens of thousands of visitors are expected to pack the beach for a lineup that includes strongman competitions, Olympic weightlifting, and a U.S. Army-presented obstacle challenge called The Gauntlet.
The flagship event of the festival is Gymreapers Wodapalooza, a CrossFit-style competition that originated in Miami and still holds its original event there each March, according to the Los Angeles Times. This marks the third year the competition has set up shop in Huntington Beach, and organizers describe it as an event still very much in expansion mode. The brand traces back to 2012, when it launched as a single-day grassroots competition in Miami Beach with just 145 athletes and 500 spectators, according to Wodapalooza.
Behind the scenes, the event’s corporate ownership shifted last September when live events company Loud And Live sold the Wodapalooza brand to WZA Sports, an entity led by former Loud & Live executive Dylan Malitsky and long-time CrossFit community investors, per The Barbell Spin. Eric Emerson Botsford, senior vice president of growth and expansion at WZA Sports, is producing the Huntington Beach event, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Council Pitch Emphasized Early Bedtimes
Botsford addressed the Huntington Beach City Council to make the case for the festival’s economic footprint, which organizers peg at $8 million, according to the Los Angeles Times. He told the council the athlete crowd tends to be low-impact for the city at night. “We love to dine, shop and sleep in beds,” Botsford said. “We don’t cause a lot of problems, because we go to bed pretty early.”…