The 2018 CrossFit Open just ended a few days ago, but let’s take a minute and look back at the last five weeks, the experience, the triumphs, the failures and your plan moving forward.
This year was by far my favorite open since its inception 8 years ago. I felt the programming was well-balanced, fun, challenging and really made athlete comes out of their shell and hold themselves to a high-standard. It made for an outstanding experience in class, at our Friday Night Lights and helped, I believe, bring our community closer in the name of CrossFit. I could see that each workout was throughly thought about for a good butt-kicking, but still accomplishing the overall goal of the workout. Did you have enough cardiorespiratory endurance? Muscular stamina? Did you have the skills necessary to complete repetitions? Were you strong enough to lift the weight required? All questions that you could ask yourself and get the answer pretty quick post-WOD. In the end, athletes were challenged beyond their expectations, and because of that, we witnessed so many triumphs and “firsts.”
But, along with all those triumphs, there will always be failures, and failure is where we truly succeed. “Failure is the mother of success.” Without failure, how would we know what to work on and where our weaknesses and faults lie?
Every failure or struggle you had during the 2018 Open should set you on a path to want to get better. The open is not just about finding the fittest athletes who qualify to regionals and later the CrossFit Games, but more about a 5-week window where we look to challenge and test that your fitness is improving and you are moving in the right direction. We utilize the same process in our classes at Mission. We test something, see where you are at, then spend weeks and months working on it through our programming. Then, what do we do again weeks or months later? Test it. Did you improve? Did you stay the same? Did you get worse? All of which give you answers of what is happening during your workouts.
Look back at your 2018 Open experience. If this was your first time, congratulations on finishing your first ever CrossFit Open! Take note of your percentile ranking in your division in the world and region. This is a great measuring tool of your overall fitness when it comes to the open. With so many people competing, scores for workouts can be lost in the mass numbers of athletes, but your percentile can be something you focus on year-to-year. This goes for those of you who have done the open in previous years as well. Make some notes about what movements you struggled or failed at, or maybe something broad like your endurance. Now, write down a few things you can do to improve upon those once a week moving forward. Without much effort, you have already starting setting yourself up for success and improvement, not only for next years open, but also in classes.
I personally want to say thank you to every athlete from Mission CrossFit who competed in the 2018 Open this year and every spectator who spend their Friday evenings with us cheering people on. You’re the reason we have such a great community and strong camaraderie. I am sure I speak for the entire training team when I say thank you for making this year’s open the best yet and we are really looking forward to 2019!
– Coach Drew
