The CrossFit Open is a 3-week event in which each week all CrossFit affiliates do the same workout.
For competitive athletes, it’s the first qualifying round on the path to the CrossFit Games. For everyone else, it’s a chance to test your fitness and see how you measure up against other people around the country.
The workouts are generally very hard, either physically, mentally, or both.
Most people take a “once-and-done” approach to the workouts, unless they believe that a better score will increase their standing enough to help them make the cut for quarterfinals.
I am not one of those people.
Let’s be real: the only way I’d be going to quarterfinals would be if they held a “bottom-quarter” finals.
And yet, this year, I did each workout twice.
Why would I redo them if there’s no stakes in getting a better score?
Here are 3 reasons why I chose to redo the Open workouts, even though I didn’t care about my ranking:
(1) To Test The Benefit of Experience and Strategy Over Strength
It’s not always about the score, the ranking, or even the workout, but sometimes it is about doing better.
One reason I wanted to do them again was to see if I could do it better, but I wanted to control for the benefits of strength improvements.
Common belief is that you’re always better at a workout the second time. Just like with anything else, you learn things from the first attempt.
These workouts are benchmark workouts that are meant to be repeated in a few months or a year to see your progress.
There’s no question that I could improve in any of these workouts with the benefit of time. Within the span of a few months, you’ve presumably gained strength and conditioning, and improved your skills and your techniques.
A Controlled Experiment: Isolate the Impact of Experience and Strategy
That said, this fact means it’s hard to control for the impact of experience and strategy if you repeat a workout in a few months.
On the other hand, within the span of a few days, you’re unlikely to move the needle much on strength. If anything, redoing these workouts before the score submission deadline meant that I was still fatigued when I did the repeat.
I wanted to test whether I could improve my performance through strategy, instead of through refining skills or building strength.
The other thing that’s different in a few months is that it doesn’t have the same energy dynamic as the Open.
There’s something about the nature of competition that pushes me to push myself harder — even if I’m not in a competitive position.
There’s also something different in the energy of the community.
I wanted to test my performance in as close as possible to the same conditions, so I could isolate the benefits of experience and strategy as much as possible.
(2) To Test My Resolve to Do Something Hard, Knowing How Hard it Will Be
You can do anything hard once.
The real question is whether you can do a hard thing again, knowing how hard it was the first time?
The first time I did these workouts, I knew they would be challenging, but I didn’t necessarily know how hard they would be. I didn’t know how I would feel during it, or after.
In some ways, doing a hard thing the second time is easier, because you know where the hard parts will be and can mentally prepare. Heading into my repeat of Open 24.1, I knew the round of 15 would be the hardest part. In 24.2, a 20-minute workout of rowing, deadlifts, and jump rope, I knew that I’d start feeling some fatigue about 10 minutes in.
In other ways, the second time is harder.
Before you do it the first time, you can tell yourself it won’t be that bad.
The second time, there’s no naiveté. You know it’s going to suck.
But that’s life.
Life isn’t about doing the hard things just once. It’s about doing the hard things repeatedly, knowing that they will be hard.
(3) The Inner Work
Any action we take has two components:
- the *outer work*: the actual task of it; and
- the *inner work*: the piece about mindset, beliefs, and emotions .
The inner work has two components:
- the unseen piece of mindset, beliefs, and emotions
- what we learn about ourselves in the process
As I often remind my coaching clients, the inner work is the real work.
Taking action without mastering the inner work doesn’t do much for you in the long term. And if you’re taking action without learning something about yourself, then what’s it all for?
When you can master the inner pieces, you build a resilience and a source of fuel for other actions in the future. The inner work is what shapes us into who we become through any challenging endeavor.
My decision to redo each of the Open workouts was primarily about using the workout as a vehicle for a particular area of inner work.
In this way, the CrossFit Open became about so much more than the workouts: it became a 3-week personal development curriculum.
More than it reshaped my body and my muscles, it reshaped my identity, self-concept, and my spirit.
Stay tuned for future installments of this series, in which I’ll share the components of the curriculum and what I learned.
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