Week 2 of the Crossfit Open 2018 is here, and I have had a far from ideal week leading up to it. I work full time, aiming high and wanting to get on with my career so I put the hours in, working hard to do myself proud. The relevance is because I end up not taking my holiday when I’m supposed to, supporting the ‘needs of the business’…I had been looking forward to having a week off between Workout 18.1 and completing 18.2. Having moved house late last year I had a lot to sort out and just needed some rest time, my sleep pattern was all over the place after to completing a three week stint working nights and I just needed to reset my body clock, recover and come out fighting. But because of the hectic, fast paced nature of the forever changing retail industry, I was back in work four days into my holiday, so my week off resting started something like this…
- Monday – Travel to Manchester to take part in Kitbox Athlete Training Day
- Tuesday – Day out with my WHY, before she travelled to her cousin’s for the week
- Wednesday – Snow-day, first day of actual rest and day off I’d had since Christmas
- Thursday – Back at Work
It came to Friday and the Open Announcement and I was knackered still, sleep pattern still all over the place, so much so that I pretty much failed to stay up until 1am Friday morning to catch the announcement, which is always embarrassing when you fall asleep dribbling watching a fitness spectacle. HOT RIGHT? The Announcement was:
Due to that fact I’m a Spartan Race addict and am a bit sick, I LOVE Burpees…like, actually love them! I was over the moon to see them included in the Open, it meant there was something I was actually comfortable doing. Squats I’ve always been bad at because, having the flexibility of a brick, I can’t get low enough, and with the whole 1 rep max Clean, I barely knew what it was let alone how I was going to do one.
The decision now was do I go with scaled (the easier option) or Rx (the badass option), the only difference between the two was the weight on the squats and the fact you could do stepping burpees on the scaled workout, but because I’m a sick burpee fan meant the only thing I had to think about was weight. So I decided to try scaled first and then over the weekend go for RX, what could go wrong….
Well, life always gets in the way of things right, but sometimes in the most beautiful way? At short notice we had to go and collect George’s belongings as her house sale had finally gone though, something she had been waiting on for a while – due to the property market being a shit show it was on and off for a while. This meant that it was going to be a hectic weekend, so we had to squeeze the workout in, instead of having the luxury of time and various attempts.
Fast forward to Monday, following the busiest but best weekend with George, moving heavy boxes up and down stairs, my body aching as we are standing in Crossfit Huntsman about to do our workout, we have one shot…do or DIE! I hadn’t fully decided what to do, my mind talk was all over the place – still being new at Crossfit my confidence isn’t what it should be, and I have a massive fear of failure, I’d been listening to the new Underoath track ‘On My Teeth’! But after a chat with George and her filling me with confidence I decided to go for Rx in the vain attempt that I might get it done and place higher, if you go for Rx and nail it you place higher than the scaled athletes.
I have the advantage of having some of the most supportive people by my side. Talking to Paul, who is so supportive with me, about how it would get real dark in the later rounds bizarrely enough gave me confidence as I’ve been to that dark place before when running marathons and came out fighting. And then Huntsman Coach Kelly giving me the look and telling me to smash it was a massive help, when people have confidence in you it helps so much, giving you belief that you can do it.
I managed to absolutely nail the first part in my target time of 10 minutes, it felt hard and it felt disgusting at points, it most certainly got dark at round 7 where you just think “what the hell am I doing?”, you can’t breath and your legs are on fire. But you keep pushing, with the support of those around you, including Lee from Monday Muscle who came by to give some more moral support.
And then it was time for the clean, I am super pumped to say that I got a PB, with 60kg! I felt so empowered by everything that I had to go for it, my technique may have been sloppy but I got it done and I know that with some proper weight lifting training I can go a lot heavier. I’m more than happy, hell I’m ecstatic and have been on a high since. Today I felt like I belonged and it was an amazing feeling, thank you Crossfit Huntsman and thank you George, you are amazing!
Are you doing the Crossfit Open too? How did you get on? Do you, like me, love burpees?
Comment and let me know, I’m really interested to hear from you…
