Competition Brings Out The Best In Us

Haney

*Weekend Schedule Update*We are hosting a kettlebell cert this weekend in Southie Orange.  Classes on Saturday will be in Green only.  We will have and 8am, 9am, 10am, 11am, noon INTRO class, 1pm Open Gym and 2pm and 3pm class on Saturday.  Yoga is canceled on Sunday and all CrossFit classes on Sunday will be held in Southie Green.

In the fall of 2009 CFNE had a team competition. 2 guys and 1 girl. Goose was on a team for CrossFit Boston with EC Synkowski and Mike Giles. I stood on the sidelines watching in awe….I will never be there I thought to myself. I was still working on my pull-ups, my strength movements were lacking, and my skills such as double unders and oly form was non-existent. I would never compete.

A few months following that competition my friend Melissa and I were told about the “NE sectional” that was going to be held in March. We had just received our level 1 certificates and decided that together we wanted to take it to the next level. We figured that it would benefit us to have a common goal-to compete at the NE  sectional.We had 3 months to train and a lot of the gymnastic movements and RX weights we had not tried before. I will never forget the 7am weekend workouts at CFB. A lot of the time it would just be myself, Goose, Alec, and Melissa, which is how we got to know Alec well enough that he became our first CrossFit Southie coach. We were dedicated and determined. We knew that we would be mixed in with women way out of our league, but our goal was to complete the workouts and to hopefully not finish last.

WOD 2 -“fast and furious” it was called. 3 rounds,20 box jumps, 20 C2B pull-ups, 20 Wall Balls (higher than normal target). Womp Wommmp…I had never done a chest to bar pull-up before, never-mind 60. My parents were there, my friends from our box were watching, and one at a time I wiggled my chest to the bar. I still remember everyone’s faces looking up at me, you could tell that they felt bad because I was fighting as hard as I could to get through the pull-ups. I was finishing my first round at the same time as the top women were completing the workout. I finished pretty close to last, if not last in that event. As disappointed as I was, it was my first time doing chest to bar pull-ups and I completed 40! On events 1 and 3 I had better finishes, and the final workout was my best event by far. I thought my placing  in the final workout would be enough to slide me into the top 30 and allow me to qualify for Regionals.  But unfortunately, I ended up missing out by one spot. I was devastated. Couldn’t fight back the tears! Suddenly I wanted this so bad.

That year they had a waiting list for the regional. If women dropped out to go team they would let the next in line through. I got an email asking if I wanted to compete at the regional and I almost lost my mind with excitement. I trained my butt off until the regional that June. I ended up placing 24th for the Northeast AND there were chest to bar pull-ups in the first event!

My first experience though hard at the time, made me stronger in the end. If you told me back then that today would be qualifying as an individual out of a 1500+ female competitor pool I would never have believed it. I certainly wouldn’t have thought that I would be on a team that had a real shot to make it to the CrossFit Games either. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t put myself out there for my first competition, and I encourage all of you that have never competed to sign up for the internal throwdown next weekend-May 12th.  This is your chance to compete at your own gym with people you are familiar with. We have offered 3 different levels to try to accommodate everyone. There will be no other classes scheduled for Saturday, May 12th so why not join the fun! We have 70 individuals signed up so far, but we would love to see more! Click here to register. Registration closes on Sunday evening. The WODs will be released on Wednesday night. If you need to change your division or would like to volunteer please email [email protected].

One more thing. The cookout/social will begin after the final event, which should be around 1pm. We will be grilling burgers and chicken, but we would love to have some other contributions. Ideally, we would like to contribute most of the registration money to prize money for the top finishers. If you are able to contribute some fruit, a salad, side dish, or paleo dessert please post to comments so we can get an idea of what we still need. Thanks guys! This is going to be a great event!

Strength
Deadlift
5-5-5-5 Strict Sets

WOD
5-4-3-2-1
Muscle-up
Wall Climb
Double Unders x10

ADV- one 15ft Rope climb at the completion of each round

Goose – 8:47 ADV