When I joined Crossfit just about a year ago, it was just a few weeks before the Crossfit Open. The Open is the first section of a three-part competition to find the fittest athlete on earth. The Open consists of five workouts, one per week that test different aspects of fitness, including heavy lifting, speed, agility, etc. Any person can sign up for the Open and can either take the workout at a Crossfit affiliate or take a video of themselves doing the workout and post it on the Crossfit website to be verified. It’s all very official. The top athletes from those five workouts, make it on to the next round, and then the top athletes from that round move on to the Reebok Crossfit Games, which consists of the 100 incredible athletes competing against each other for the title of the fittest on Earth.
This time last year, I had a twice per week membership to my box (the Crossfit slang for “gym”) and I’d always check the website where the workouts were posted before heading out the door and going. I liked some workouts better than others and if I noticed the WOD (workout of the day) was mostly heavy lifting, I’d usually opt to go for a run in my neighborhood instead.
One Friday morning, I went to the box for my morning WOD noticed that there was an extra buzz of excitement at the box that day. Everyone (and by “everyone,” I mean the four other people that came to the 6 am class that day and our coach, Mike) was talking about this thing called the Crossfit Open and about the first WOD of five that would take place over the next five weeks. Since I was still relatively new, Mike filled me in on what it was while helping to set up everyone else’s workout stations and making sure they complied with the standards of the Open. For me, he set up a modified station. I don’t remember what the workout was but I think it included toes to the bar, which I modified by just lifting my knees, while I hung on the pull-up bar. And it also included box jumps, so Mike set up a pile of mats and let me jump on those instead.
Since it was an Open WOD it had just a bit more intensity than usual and Mike encouraged us to really push ourselves. After that I went to the rest of the Open WODS each Friday because they were such a diverse group of good workouts. Some of the WODs required women to lift a weight that was completely ridiculous for me. Since I wasn’t in the Open, I modified the weight to something I could actually lift, but I decided that next year, I’d sign up for the Open, which meant that I’d have to lift the minimum amount of weight required. I knew there was no chance I’d get very far, but all I wanted was to be be able to do the workouts legitimately without a modification, which is required for the Open.
Well, here we are a year later and two weeks into the 2013 Open. In my next posts, I’ll let you know how my first two Open WODs went!
The Power Puff Chronicles 