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!

This is the 4th week of the CrossFit Open so 20.4 was on tap today. Simply put, this workout was box jumps/stepups and clean and jerks. Within a 20 minute time cap. I went for the CrossFit scaled version of the workout which is:

For time:
30 box jumps, 24 in.
15 clean and jerks, 65 lb.
30 box jumps, 24 in.
15 clean and jerks, 95 lb.
30 box jumps, 24 in.
10 clean and jerks, 115 lb.
30 medicine-ball step-ups, 20 lb.
10 clean and jerks, 135 lb.
30 medicine-ball step-ups, 20 lb.
5 clean and jerks, 155 lb.
30 medicine-ball step-ups, 20 lb.
5 clean and jerks, 185 lb.

For some reason CrossFit gave everyone the option of either doing box jumps or step ups. Obviously, box jumps are faster but more exhausting. I knew I could clean and jerk 95lbs, but wasn’t sure much after that.

I finished the first round in just over 3 minutes which was a good pace. The 30 step ups felt annoying – it felt like a lot of time on the box. The 95lb C&J weren’t too bad either I think I finished that round in about 6 minutes. The 115 were starting to feel heavy and I was making sure to split jerk each one. I split up the reps more and was definitely dropping the bar with each rep. I couldn’t believe when we were putting the 45lb plates on for 135lb clean and jerks. I had about 2:30 left on the clock and definitely did one rep at a time. Nate was encouraging me to keep moving while the clock was winding down. I managed to get 5 reps in at that weight. I ended up with 165 reps and blew through my clean and jerk 1RM!! So that was pretty awesome. Nate said I was still making 135 look easy so there is more out there!

Part of me is tempted to retest this, but I probably won’t.