The CrossFit Games

I'm not sure what I was thinking.  Part of CrossFit is supposed to be its inclusiveness.  There is something for  everyone.  Young and old, more fit and less fit, lean bodies and not-so-lean bodies.  Once a year, CrossFit has its annual "games" - a few days of competition in CA.  To get there, you need to qualify.  That qualification process begins with five consecutive weeks of  scored workouts.  At age 55, the workouts are scaled to make them easier.  Not so at age 51.  Not even if you have a wonky shoulder.

But, I did spend the $20 to sign up.  The first workout was announced last night, and my shoulder hurt just reading the workout:


MEN - includes Masters Men up to 54 years old
Proceed through the sequence below completing as many reps as possible in 17 minutes of:
40 Burpees
75 pound Snatch, 30 reps
30 Burpees
135 pound Snatch, 30 reps
20 Burpees
165 pound Snatch, 30 reps
10 burpees
210 pound Snatch, as many reps as possible

First of all, I've been trying to avoid overhead lifting.  There is no doubt that somewhere in the five workouts, I'll have to scale things.  We will have handstand push-ups, which I can't do, or toes-to-bar, which I can barely do, or double-unders - another skill where I struggle.  And, I'll have to scale my workout and record the fact that I modified the workout so I could complete it.  Once I do that, I will be officially eliminated from contention in the final results.  But, that's certainly not a big deal.  I am nowhere close to the top 20 CrossFitters in the world who are age 50 or older.  So, I'm not going to CA for the finals anyway.

From the reactions I saw on Facebook last night, this workout surprised a lot of people.  Last year, the first workout was as many burpees as possible in 7 minutes.  The second workout included snatches.  This workout looks like the evil spawn of those two workouts.

When I saw this workout last night, my first thought was that I'll simply scale right from the start.  I've been doing mostly power cleans instead of snatches, so I could do that.  But, after I thought about it for a while, another thought occurred to me.  My snatch PR is 130, so the second round of snatches is out of the question.  But, I think I can do 75 pound snatches without bothering my shoulder.  That really is a light weight for me.

So, even though I won't do this workout until tomorrow afternoon, I think I already know my score: 100.

I can do 40 burpees in five minutes or less.  I can do the 30 light snatches in 3-4 minutes.  And, I will have plenty of time remaining to do 30 more burpees.  And then, I'm done.  One hundred reps.  And still not in the scaled division.

Tomorrow will be my fourth consecutive day at CrossFit and I need to be rested enough to teach skiing over the weekend.  I am guessing that I will take it somewhat easy tonight so that I can get through 100 reps as comfortably as possible for this workout,

And then I'll wait for next Wednesday, to see if I can find a way to complete the second workout without any scaling.