Burpees and Snatches and BURPEES... Oh, My!

2013 CrossFit Open Workout 13.1

WOMEN - includes Masters Women up to 54 years old
Proceed through the sequence below completing as many reps as possible in 17 minutes of:
40 Burpees
45 pound Snatch, 30 reps
30 Burpees
75 pound Snatch, 30 reps
20 Burpees
100 pound Snatch, 30 reps
10 burpees
120 pound Snatch, as many reps as possible

So, I'm adding my voice to the hundreds of blogs that I'm sure have been posted, post 13.1 WOD. According to the CrossFit Games website, 138,000 people are registered for this year's open and 120,000 people have submitted validated scores. Compare that to last year's 69,000, and you have an idea of what CrossFit has become. For the last two years, I've watched the CrossFit games on ESPN. The first year we watched out of curiosity-- it was a little more realistic competition than the Strongman competitions that we often find ourselves watching. Last year, we watched with excitement; my sons adding names like Julie Foucher and Annie Thorisdottir to their tough, awesome athlete vocabulary. I added some Olympic lifting to my regular weight lifting routines. By the time the 2012 Games rolled around, we were following the coverage online, while waiting for the listing to show up on ESPN. And it was about that time that I begin to consider registering for the Open.

Once that decision was made, my maniacal husband put me on a strict regimen of CrossFit Games-specific training. Every workout for the last 2 months has included warm-ups involving skills practice: double unders, cleans, snatches, handstand push ups... basically all of the movements that I'm terrible at, which, frankly, is most of the CrossFit standard moves. I'm so very thankful for the torture, since the first workout was heavy on the snatches. Just 2 and 1/2 weeks before the open began, I fell on my butt multiple times while attempting and finally achieving my 1RM (that's 1 rep max: the heaviest weight I can do one time) of 100 lbs. 

The 13.1 workout (that's the year 2013 and workout 1) was released online on Wednesday, March 6. That was smack in the middle of the week where we had no internet in our house. Once I was able to go online and discover the workout, I was unbelievably thankful for my husband's insistence that I do heavy snatches (and this is probably a good time to apologize to him for that 1 day when I stormed out of the gym after yelling at him something along the lines of "IF YOU WROTE ME A WORKOUT WITH WEIGHT THAT I COULD ACTUALLY LIFT, MAYBE I WOULD FINISH THE WORKOUT").  

My score for 13.1: 150 with a tie break time of 13:10. (Which means I did 90 total burpees and 60 snatches, finishing my 30, 75 lb snatches at 13:10.)** I will say, I've read more than one other blog post about the Open and seen comments that people have made about the Open being an opportunity to compete against oneself or setting a benchmark for next year or bettering last year's performance. That's a noble thought... that I just can't seem to grasp. I'm totally checking the leaderboard, seeing where I stand compared to everyone in my region. I really do want to be a better me than I was yesterday, but for me, the point of entering the Open is to earn a spot at Regionals. A lofty goal, perhaps, since I'm not really a CrossFitter, but the higher the goal, the higher the aim; the higher the aim, the higher the success. 

**Special thanks to Edwin at CrossFit CVI for validating my score!**