CrossFit Open 14.1 Recap

For the first time in the two years I have been doing CrossFit I did two things: 1. I actually considered signing up for the open and 2. I watched the streamed announcement of the first open workout and the “throwdown.” Despite ultimately deciding to not sign up (a topic for another time, but the short version is that I do CrossFit for fun and I didn’t want to make it too serious and suck the joy out of it), I’m still doing all of the open workouts.

This week, I got lucky. The week before 14.1 was announced we happened to do the 11.1 workout (the same workout as 14.1) by pure chance. This meant that I had extremely recent memory of doing the workout and what I wanted to do differently. Since I know there is no way I could ever even remotely be a contender to make it to regionals (another reason I declined to sign up), my goal was based on my past performance.

The first time I did the workout I was 5 snatches short of completing 5 rounds in the time cap, so all I was aiming for during my unofficial attempt at 14.1 was to get to the 5th round.

14.1 WOD

10 min. AMRAP
30 double unders
15 snatches

When 10 minutes finally rolled around I could not be more thankful to be done. The time was painfully long when trying to sprint through as many double unders and snatches as possible, but also too fast to catch your breath and hammer out more reps.

When the time ran out I was thankful that 1. I never had to do that again, 2. I beat my previous score by a full round, and 3. I made it almost to the six round for a score of 222, you know, just half of what the top women and men got.

Plan on doing the workout? Here’s what I would have done differently: I would have slowed down in the beginning and kept my breath as much as possible. I would have stayed more relaxed on the double unders and paid more attention to how frequently I was breathing. I would have broken up the first few rounds of snatches into 2 sets (8 and 7 reps) with a 3-5 second in between the sets to prevent my grip from burning out too quickly. I think it  worked well that I broke down the later rounds into sets of 5 on the snatches. It also helped that for the most part my double unders went smoothly (except for the few times I whipped myself…).