What I learned from the Open

1. I love CrossFit.

That pretty much sums it up.

Now, I didn't love every second of the Open. The first workout (see descriptions of all the workouts here) was brutal for me. As I've mentioned about a million times, my conditioning is my biggest weakness. The weights were comparatively light for women, so the workout ended up being mostly conditioning, aka 17 minutes of hell. During the workout I was suffering. I wanted to give up and I was telling myself over and over...

There are too many reps left. You can't breathe. You're never going to finish. You won't even finish these burpees, let alone get back to the bar for another round of snatches. You've failed. You hurt too much. This is too hard.

I didn't reach the goal I set out for myself. I felt ashamed and let down. Most of all, I was disgusted with what happened to me mentally during that workout. OF COURSE I failed. I barely gave myself any other choice.

After that workout, I took a very different approach to each Open WOD. I concentrated on staying calm and focused on my breathing. I stopped worrying about what other people were doing beside me and focused on my own goals. It can be tempting to look at the person beside you and become intimidated at how fast they're going and try to speed up to match them. But they have different strengths and different goals.

Here's an example. 13.2 was push-presses, deadlifts, and box jumps. The girl competing next to me and I were total opposites - she's well-conditioned, and I can lift heavy weights. I knew that box jumps would be my downfall, so I was going as fast as I could through the push presses and deadlifts (I love deadlifts) so that I could make up for the time I'd lose on the box jumps. She told me afterwards that she had to stop paying attention to me because I was going at a pace she knew she couldn't keep up to on the push presses and deadlifts; little did she know, I was telling myself the same thing about her on the box jumps. In the end, we had similar scores (she beat me by a few reps). If she had sped up on the push presses and deadlifts it would have hurt her, and vice versa for me on the box jumps. You have to know your own strengths and weaknesses and play your own game.

After I figured that out, the rest of the Open was a lot more enjoyable. Still pretty damn hard, but in a good way. I set smaller goals for myself and let myself feel happy about achieving them rather than beating myself up about the things that I didn't achieve. If there was something I didn't think I did well or if there was a goal I fell short of, I wrote it down, and that will form the basis of my training for next year.

There's something about constantly varied, functional movement performed at high intensity in a community that brings out amazing things in people. Every week we cheered each other on, sympathized with each other's struggles, and shared in each other's accomplishments.

My first CrossFit Games Open experience: Awesome, horrible, fun, exhausting, stressful, and most of all, inspiring. Now I've got a benchmark and a score to beat. I can't wait to do it again next year.

It was such a whirlwind that as soon as the Open was over I got knocked down by a nasty cold. I wasn't planning on taking any time off, but my body had other ideas. But I'm on the mend! Training for next year's Open starts now!