Why you should join in on the CrossFit Open
By Carl Netzler
That most magical time of the year is almost upon us! No, don’t check your calendar, we haven’t quarantined through to another Christmas. It’s Open season!
Every year, in boxes and garage gyms across the world, 400,000+ CrossFitters participate in the world’s largest sporting event. If you’ve been a member of CrossFit Bangor for a while, you may remember the annual Open workouts, or last year’s Open Intramural team competition, and wondered what it is all about. Strictly speaking, the Open is the first step on the road to the CrossFit Games, an annual sporting event where the greatest in the Sport of Fitness compete for the title of the Fittest Man or Woman on Earth. To officially participate, athletes register on the CrossFit Games site, and complete 3 weeks of workouts. In addition, CrossFit Bangor is once again holding its Intramural Open competition, where every participant, whether officially registered or not, will be assigned to a team, to join forces and carry their teammates on to glory. But the Open is so much more than just an online qualifier. I love the Open so much, and I’m going to share with you 5 reasons why you should, too!
1) It’s all about community! The Open gives you three great views of the community of CrossFit. At the smallest scale, you’ll be in class, sweating through a ferocious WOD, cheering on your friends and teammates, and being cheered on in return. You’ll see people volunteering to help judge the movement standards of fellow athletes, and pushing them to finish strong. You’ll also see how the Open’s enthusiasm spreads throughout all of CrossFit Bangor, and how the Intramural teams will fight for supremacy while also celebrating the other team’s achievements. You’ll also be able to join in with the CrossFitters across the world, as for three weeks we are reminded just how big the greater CrossFit community really is.
2) It’s magic! I cannot tell you how many “firsts” and “bests” I’ve seen in the Open. First pull-ups, first muscle-ups, huge PR’s, athletes taking on workouts they weren’t sure they
could complete, and finding that they were able to rise to the challenge. The Open presents devilishly simple, and effective, workouts that will test your mettle with achievable challenges that can bring out the best from your inner athlete. You may find yourself being inspired by a fellow classmate, and I think it’s a very safe bet to say that someone else will find you inspirational as well.
3) It proves you’re good enough. The Open gives you a workout, and a set of standards to meet. For each category, Foundations, Scaled, Prescribed/Rx, Equipment-Free, and Adaptive, each workout provides the standards that must be met. Doing an air-squat? Here is how low you need to go, and how high you need to be to finish. Fighting to meet the standards, and helping others to meet those standards can really up your game and improve your movement quality. Sometimes it’s nice to be challenged to do your best, and to find just how strong you can be.
4) It helps you appreciate the best of the best. In the Open, you can see your scores compared with athletes across the box, and across the world, including the very best around. Matt Fraser and Tia Toomey have won the CrossFit games an unprecedented number of times, but they both started out their season completing the same workouts I did. When I watch them at the CrossFit Games, I can appreciate exactly how superhuman their feats of athleticism really are. You can also look back each year, and be able to see how you’ve improved. I’ve completed 7 Opens, and it’s incredible to see my progress as I slowly climb the leaderboard.
5) It’s so fun! In all reality, the Open is just a handful of workouts completed over 3 weeks. But I promise you that the Open is so much greater than the sum of its parts. I get butterflies in my stomach before the workouts, I scream myself hoarse rooting on athletes from the opposing Intramural team, and I give dozens of (properly socially-distanced) high-fives to folks who surprise themselves with a personal best! Like many of the best parts of CrossFit, I love it, I dread it, and I just can’t wait for it to be here again!
If you want to participate in the CrossFit Bangor Intramural competition click on this link. The Open workouts are going to be programmed every Friday, anyway, so you might as well sign up and see what all the fuss is about! I can’t wait to see how well you do!