Opinion | CrossFit Open: compete against yourself and don’t worry about the leader board
- CrossFit’s annual open competition is slated to kick off for the 2021 season
- Those taking part need to remember the sport is not about winning, but making yourself a better athlete and person
First, to challenge myself, against myself.
Your first thought might be that I’m talking about the leader board, but that would be incorrect. The leader board for the Open is fundamentally vague and inconsistent year over year. There are always a different number of competitors and different groupings of competitors, a different test, a different set of circumstances and dozens of other different things year to year. The constant is you.
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It’s cool to look back at a profile page and see how I (or any other athlete) have done year after year in the Open. But the far greater value is internal. The feeling of knowing that for one more year I have challenged myself regularly in the gym to prepare myself both physically and mentally for all kinds of challenges both in and out of it.
Most people follow the same programming for a consistent period of time. It might be dot-com workouts, it might be a programme your gym follows, it might be handcrafted by a personal trainer to suit your goals, aspirations and needs, or you might write it yourself. But for most of us, it’s the same most the year.
