Raising the Bar – Crossfit Competition!

Where did the weekend go?? I feel like I have neglected this blog lately and know I have been close to silent on Twitter, but now that my very first competition (other than The Open) is over, and now that I’m officially an ISSA Certified Fitness Trainer I can finally start to finish up some of the million draft posts that I have started! However, I first must talk about the awesome time I had at my competition this weekend!

When I first saw that a competition was announced and they specifically encouraged new Crossfitters to sign up, I was quite interested. Participating in the Crossfit Games Open was one of the best experiences in my short “Crossfit career” and it gave me this competitive drive that I never had before. I hoped that signing up for a real, live competition would do something similar – push me out of my comfort zone and make me do things that I did not think my body was capable of.

While the main point in any other competition is to go to win, I looked at this one similar to how you look at a race. Most people don’t go to a race expecting first place. You are going to show that all of your hard work and training has paid off and to compete against yourself. It also worked out pretty awesome that the two ladies that I dubbed my biggest competitors (I feel like we are all just about the same size, and almost similar strength), both signed up for it, too. So while I was competing against myself, of course I silently wanted to kick their butts as well. 🙂 We had a total of 11 athletes representing our box out of 87 total competitors across all divisions.

The WODs were announced ahead of time so we had just over a week to prepare. For the Women’s Modified division, the WODs were:

WOD 1:
AMRAP 10:00
10 Power Snatch 55#
10 Burpees
10 Hands-off-ground Push-ups

WOD 2:
Clean & Jerk Ladder, starting at 55# and going up 10# each round;
2 burpee buy-in
Once a rep is failed, complete toes to bar for the remainder of the minute

WOD 3:
“Running Karen”
200 run w ball
50 Wallballs (12#, 9′)
3 rounds for time

Lovely, aren’t they? After a restless night, and packing an abundance of food and snacks, we made it there bright and early at 7:30am.

They ended up making some modifications like shortening WOD 1 to 7:00 from 10:00 due to time; thanks to some awesome, cold and rainy Michigan weather, switched WOD 2 and 3 to try to beat the rain (fail), and to make things simple, they changed the women’s weight on the wall balls to 14# from 12# AND made it 4 rounds of 30 wall balls instead of 3 rounds of 50, with a 15 minute time cap. More running – great. 🙂

Either way, I had a great attitude to start and was excited, nervous, scared, ready to go!

The first workout started with snatches, which is probably my weakest lift (right next to overhead squats). I am still not comfortable with the whole wide snatch grip, but since the weight was only 55lbs, I knew I could physically push through it. We had practiced the first workout the prior Sunday using a 10:00 AMRAP with strict push-ups; I felt okay, but not great. In practice, I had managed 2 rounds, 10 snatches, 10 burpees, and 3 push-ups.

When I got up to the bar, it did not feel right. In my box, I always use the “girl” bar at 35lbs, regardless of what weight I am putting on it, so I am used to the grip on the smaller bar. However, we used man-bars for this workout, which made everything just seem so much heavier!

The push-ups were extremely difficult for me! I absolutely need to go back and finish my 100 Push-ups program and work on these as my form as all sorts of bad!!

With a shorter time cap than practice, and the luxury of more friendly push-ups, I managed 2 rounds, 10 burpees, and 1 push-up.

I ended up in 22nd place out of 27 for this workout.

Next up was the workout I feared the most: Running “Karen”, which combined wall balls and running. Not just running (cause you know how much I love to run… ha!), but running with a 14lb ball. In the cold. In the rain. Then coming back and doing more wall balls with the wet ball. And returning to the cold rain for some more running. Repeat.

Again, all you can do is stay positive and just go!

I felt awesome on the wall balls! I had NO “no-reps”, which was a miracle. When I did the Open workout with wall balls, twice, and got so many no-reps, I knew that this one was going to be a struggle, but I nailed all of those wall balls!! Whoo!!!

But then there was the 200m run. In the rain. With the ball.

Let me tell you, there is absolutely no comfortable way to hold a large, 14lb ball while running 200m. Especially in the rain. I tried on one shoulder, than the other; on one side, then the other. Even tried to put it up on my back like a back squat, but could not find a good place at all!

Hardest. Workout. Ever. Did I mention it was cold and rainy? 😉

Endurance is the weakest part of my training (trying to avoid saying “I suck at..”) and I am trying so hard to become better. I have been pushing myself into the Endurance classes and I have been doing interval training and doing multiple WODs in a week, but endurance is progressing so much slower than my strength, which gets super frustrating. Alas, I tried my best.

I love the pic below as it has me struggling with my ball, a girl from my box trying to run me in, and in the background is another athlete from my box doing the workout, and another fellow athlete from our box running alongside her. It was awesome to have these ladies pushing us through the finish (though they could not even begin to understand the difficulty we were facing!)

I ran out of time before I finished the last set of wall-balls and the run, so they penalized my time (no clue how it got calculated), but I did 3 full rounds and 10 wall balls. At this point, I dropped to 24th place from 22nd.

Last came the workout I had the most anticipation for – the clean and jerk ladder! Now, if you remember when I did the Crossfit Games Open I hit my PR for the Clean and Jerk at 95lbs. This was an awesome accomplishment for me, especially since after that workout, I seemed to psyche myself out and never get 95lbs again (even when we had 20 minutes to work on it!). But last Sunday I did it a handful of times, so was pretty confident I could get 95lbs this time. However, we only had a minute to try it. And you had to do two burpees before the attempt; if you failed your attempt, you immediately had to go to Toes-to-Bar for the remaining minutes and then you were done.

I made it through 55#, 65#, 75#, and 85# (which seemed lighter than 75# – turns out they had they switched!). Then, I faced my nemesis: 95lbs.

BAM! Nailed it!

I had never attempted any more than 95lbs, so was so happy to make it this far, considering my body was quite a bit fatigued and I had struggled with this weight so many times before! And then I stood in front of 105#, took a deep breath, listened to my coach, and went for it.

No such luck, BUT it was a PR on my Clean, which I am thrilled about! Now I am SO ready to knock out a C&J at 105lbs!!! Then I had to do my toes-to-bar and cranked those out one at a time (still can’t string more than one in a row).

Even though so many other ladies creamed me on this workout, I came in 15th place in this WOD, which bumped my overall ranking to 21st place!

Overall, I had an amazing time and even though it was an extremely long day, the event was well-organized and I hit a PR, so cannot complain about that! We had so many amazing people from our box show up to cheer us on and the atmosphere was unlike anything else. My fellow athletes and coach are the most supportive people and I would never have had the confidence to enter a competition if it were not for them continuously encouraging me!

Plus we got a cute t-shirt! 😉

Your turn..

Have you ever competed in a Crossfit Competition?
If you do Crossfit and have not, what is holding you back?
Do you run races expecting to win?