CrossFit Open 14.5

Week 5.  14.5

21-18-15-12-9-6-3 reps for time of:
95-lb. thrusters
Burpees

I had a very difficult time anticipating how I would perform in this workout.  I had the opportunity to watch the announcement event live, but those guys are ridiculous so any comparison is worthless.  The prep videos weren't as useful as they had been previously.  Carl Paoli's video was probably the most useful.  He emphasized minimizing movement on the burpees.  Other than that, everyone basically just said it was hard.

I figured I would go unbroken on the 12, 9, 6, 3 rounds of thrusters, but I didn't really know if that was feasible.  I wanted to hold the top of the thruster to rest and control pacing.  I wore lifting shoes to help with the thrusters.  I didn't think they would hurt my burpees that much.

My rounds broke down like this: 21, 10/8, 6/5/4, 6/6, 9, 6, 3 (I think).  I hadn't planned on doing the first round unbroken, but once I started, they felt really easy.  I was going too fast though, because I wasn't pausing at the top at all.  Around the 12 round I started really struggling with the burpees.  I had to step back and up or I was just going to burn out.

In the end, I finished in 14:56 which put me in 5th place for that workout at our gym.  I was really happy with my performance at the time, but I had no idea that I had done that well compared to the rest.  Definitely my best showing.

I had my standard crew of support watching me, which really helped.  In particular, Colin really helped me toward the end.  I literally had no idea where I was at with time, but on the 6 round he started saying that I could make it under 15 minutes.  That gave me the extra boost I needed to race through the end.

An interesting thing happened after this workout.  I got a lot of attention from folks about my performance.  It was awkward but also really great.  I've never really had that from crossfit stuff.  I spent a while thinking that maybe it wasn't legit.  Perhaps my thruster form was not legal or something and that's why I was able to do comparatively well.  If you check out the video, let me know what you think, but it looks good to me.  I've now accepted that I'm just randomly good at thrusters.

To all of my loyal fans, I apologize for not writing this earlier.  I'm lazy.  I'll write a full recap of my training and the open eventually.