It’s clear that I am NOT a competitor, nor am I a competitive person. Let’s start there. Competition makes me feel like a loser, mostly. Usually, people don’t compete in something unless they have some feeling that they have it in them to win. There are things that I feel that I could compete confidently in, but CrossFit is not one of them as you just don’t know what the events are going to be.

I surprised myself on the first and second WODs. After WOD #2 I was actually in first place (I think… that’s according to HB) due to my 215# split jerk (the highest of the day), but I quickly lost it on WODs #3 & #4 as they were more metcon based and I just don’t have the lungs for them.

Here are the WODs and how they played out:

WOD #1

3x

• 300m row
• 10 back squats @ 185#

Immediately followed by…

WOD #2

• 3 minutes to find your 1RM on shoulder to overhead.

My time for WOD #1 was 6:02 and I put up 215# on the shoulder to overhead. 300m is a good distance for me on the C2. I can pull hard pretty consistently, and if I am careful, I won’t gas myself out. This was the only WOD that I was happy with my performance on.

WOD #3

This is where I totally lost it and came in dead fucking last out of everyone that came out. It was a 12 minute AMRAP of:

• 3 burpees
• 6 air squats
• 9 KB Swings @ 1.5 pood (I did 2 handed snatches as KB swings still don’t feel so hot on my back)

I managed to get 10 rounds plus 1 burpee. Horrible. I guess trying to compete while sick isn’t the best idea, eh? I felt like my chest was going to explode. There was also lots of coughing and hacking. After this WOD I was pretty discouraged and didn’t even want to go through with the next.

WOD #4

At this point, my attitude was horrible. Mostly of “screw it, whatever, I want to go home'”, much like a five-year-old that takes the kickball away and stomps back to his house because he’s losing. More so, the WOD was something that there was no way in fucking hell that I would ever even have a chance at, so, whatever. You gotta know when to fold ‘em, right? The WOD was:

• 800m run (to the end of Cherry St. and back)
• 50 games style push ups

My time here was 6:37. At least 2 minutes slower than the people that I needed to keep up with. Guaranteed that even had I ran the hardest I could have run, I still would have lost. The odds of me doing that with a chest cold… – 1280371471324.

You may have read my post on running at some point. If you haven’t, take a minute to see why I have such negative feelings surrounding this activity. Those feelings combined with the fact that I really needed to place on the last WOD to stay competitive meant something along the lines of “fuck you, fatty, you’re done” in my head.

So, V says to focus on the positives. Let me see if my pessimistic ass can find any.

1. I did pretty well on WOD #1. I didn’t come in first, but was at the very least had a time that was competitive with the rest.
2. I came in 1st on WOD #2 and split jerked more then everyone else. Yay for me.
3. I participated and didn’t quit even though I felt like chewed up, spit out dog shit and wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep before even arriving.

Maybe there are more, but I can’t think of any.

I have been thinking about whether or not I would like to do something like this again, and it’s hard to say. I went into it promising myself that I wouldn’t think of it as a competition and that I would just have fun and focus on getting the activity in. That worked great while I was staying with the rest of the pack.

As soon as I started to slip away, I was that fat little 6th grader back on the school court yard with everyone else leaving me in the dust and it felt absolutely horrible.

It took me a good 5-10 minutes after that last WOD to flush the feeling of “loser” out of me, but eventually I did and remembered that these are all my friends and don’t think the horrible thoughts that those 6th grade bastards did.

Take it or leave it, right or wrong, those are my thoughts.