The final Open workout of the season was today and it 20.5 was a fun one. This one was unique in that we were given a specific amount of work, but was allowed to break it up anyway we wanted. In watching the announcement, the athletes each had different schemes for doing it.

The workout was:

For Time:

40 Ring Muscle Ups

80 – Calorie Row

120 – Wallballs (20#)

with a 20 minute time cap.

The question that I wasn’t sure about was could I get the row and wallballs done in less than 15 minutes and then pretend to try a muscle-up. Our gym scoring system is a little bit different than the actual Open. For our purposes the time that wallballs and row was completed would be used as a tie breaker. So basically do all of them first and then the gymnastic movement – unless you were solid in the movement. So I could do our Platinum/Gold version and end up attempting a muscle up or chest to bar pullup. Or do the scaled and try to complete the whole package with pullups and a lighter wallball. My teammate/judge agreed that I should go with the harder version and see where I ended up time wise.

I broke up the work into 5 rounds of 16 calories and 24 wall balls. This felt like a good pattern. I started out on the rower and flew through the first 16 calories in like 40 seconds. That was a little hot and I felt it with the wall balls. So I slowed down a little bit, but never dropped below 1000 calories per hour. I started out with dropping the ball every 5 shots and Nate told me to go with 6 so I would move quicker through them. That worked for the most part. I had a handful of no reps throughout the work but not too many. I finished this work in 15:18 which left me with some time to attempt our Gold standard which was chest to bar pullups. I’d never done them before. Nate gave me a quick crash course and I tried. I ended up with 3 in the 4:40 I had to play with. I probably got 3 or 4 no reps in the process and took my time in between each rep. He said that on my no reps, I was getting my body up there and just needed to finish the pull to get my chest to the bar. So I guess I have a new skill now! That is part of what the Open is all about!

So I finished with 203 reps.

I’m not sure I could have squeezed the 40 pullups in during that last 5 minutes, but maybe with a different rep scheme and the lighter ball it could have been possible. But I wouldn’t have attempted and gotten a new skill! Yay!