It’s that time of the year again. The Open. Every Year for the last three years of doing the Open the butterflies show up right on time. The unsettling nervousness sits like a pit in my stomach. The unknown and unknowable. If you have been doing Constantly Varied, Functional Movements, at High Intensity than you should be good, right?
The answer is yes. If you have been coming into the gym and giving it your best 90% of the time, scaling appropriately, and leaving it all out on the rubber mats, then you shouldn’t have to worry. Yet the answer isn’t that simple. We start to second guess our training; make excuses as to why we wont be able to preform a movement if it shows up. We start to think about the cheat meals, the days we sandbagged a workout. We start to worry that we may not have trained as hard as we should have. I’m not writing this to say its OK. At the end of the day you determine what is OK.
I’ll speak for myself. I am not where I want to be with my fitness, but I truly believe I will never be satisfied with it. Thats the beauty of CrossFit. We never settle. We always want more. That drive and pursuit is what makes this journey so worth it, its what makes our lives outside the gym make sense a little more. If we are always striving for more in the gym, then we should be striving for more in our everyday lives. That can be spiritually, emotionally and mentally. Maybe you want to be a better friend, mother, father, employee. That same drive you bring in here translates to that same effort you put outside the gym.
Back to my fitness. The point of the Open is never to be ready. If that were the case the workouts wouldn’t be so secretive, or announced every week. The point of the Open to me is to let me know that if I want to be able to preform at my best then I need to be honest with myself and know that everyday that I come into CrossFit Paradise, I need to give every workout my best. Not only for me, but for you guys. Although this is my journey I share it with all of you. I don’t care about my score at the end of the day, I care that I inspired some of you to push hard and see what you’re made of. I care that I pushed you outside your comfort zone to show you what you’re capable of. The Open is a way to measure that. The Open is a way to show the world and everyone one else we are accountable to ourselves.
So whatever doubt resides in between those ears. Let it say what it wants, and then choose to respond differently, choose to go where you haven’t. You won’t know what you find there. I do know that everyone that has gone there hasn’t come back and been upset with what they found.
The CrossFit Journal put out an article “THE KNEE SLEEVES DO NOTHING!” and I loved how short and to the point it was (opposite to my TL;DR blog posts).
In the article it said:
With the Open almost upon us and 16.1 on the horizon, I’ll offer the one thing you need to remember in order to bypass the tension and truly thrive in the Open: Everything is OK. You’re a fine, hardworking human being. You’ve trained all year, and you’re ready. You don’t need to worry, so just have fun proving your fitness among friends. Relax, give your all, smile while you suffer, and cheer for your buddies. Then come back to the gym tomorrow and keep training.
No matter what’s announced on Feb. 25, remember that everything is OK. You will come through the workout just fine, and someone will give you a hearty fist bump before allowing you to work on your sweat angel. As you lie relieved and writhing on the rubber, you’ll ask yourself why you were worried in the first place—yet you’ll start fretting about the next workout an hour later.
So remember this: Everything is OK.
In the calm before the burpees, take a minute to write it on your arm now. Touch up as needed and refer to it any time you feel nervous. Be sure to take a good look at it right before you do 16.1. Then draw in a big breath and grab your demon goats by their flaming horns.
Back to the beginning of my post. The butterflies I said come every year right. They now fly in unison. They don’t go away, but I’m Ready. I am ready for the Open.
Everything will be OK.