January is here.
The Open is 9 weeks away.
(Timeout) What is the Open?
The Open is a special time of year in CrossFit. It’s a 5 week long series of weekly workouts that are performed by the entire CrossFit community.
Most of you are probably thinking, “well that sounds kind of cool, but I’m not sure what that really has to do with me…”
And you’d be right. Just like when I play a game of touch football in the backyard during the Summer, I’m not out there competing with Antonio Brown for reception yards. However, that doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy the game played by the pros and have some fun.
So, what does that look like at CrossFit Sandpoint?
On one level, it doesn’t look any different than any other week of the year. Show up, workout, kick ass with your friends, do shit you didn’t think you’d ever be able to do, go home. Repeat.
On another level, you can join up on an Intramural Team and participate with a group. We’ve done this two years in a row, and if you spend any time reading our Member Spotlights, you’ll recall that a great many of those mention that being on a team for the Open was one of their favorite memories of the year.
Each of our coaches pick a team of roughly 10-15 people. These members of their teams score points for their teams by doing the workout, and by wearing their team colors for that workout. We also award points to the top 5 males and top 5 females. In other words, if you’re worried about your performance hurting your team, all you have to do is workout and wear a color and you’re doing all your team can ask for.
To make the season more fun, we do these Open workouts on a handful of different days: Thursday Night (right after it’s announced), Friday all day, and Saturday for the morning class.
Saturday is definitely our most popular version, with 20-30 people doing it that day, all dressed in their team colors. It’s a silly amount of fun.
Finally, for the most involved level, you can throw your hat in the ring in the online version of the competition. You’ll submit your score weekly and be able to compare your score to hundreds of thousands of other competitors. Few CFSP members do this, but there are some great reasons to do so.
For one, it is surprisingly interesting (and somewhat discouraging) to compare yourself to the rest of the world.
For two, it allows you to track your performance year over year.
Third, depending on your personality, it can be really fun to take things a little more seriously for a few weeks out of the year. You may just find that it’s something you want to do in the future, and ramp of your training with that in mind.
So, with the Open coming up, our training will change slightly.
As with above, for most of you this doesn’t mean anything. You still just need to show up and be your normal ass kicking self.
For those of you who like to pay more attention, the next 9 weeks will be more Open focused. We’ll focus on more skill development, revolving around things that we’ll encounter in the CrossFit Open. More skills in regards to handstand push-ups, pull-ups, toes to bar, double unders and more.
These skills will be practiced outside of workouts for the majority of the upcoming future. This will give you an opportunity to focus on these skills without the pressure of the clock.
Then, on either Thursdays or Fridays during the week, we’ll do repeat a workout from Open past, to get a little bit of a scrimmage feel, where you’ll get a good glimpse into how these workouts proceed and feel.
This is all a ton of fun, and I encourage you to view it at such!