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I haven’t written much of anything about Crossfit and my journey for about two years, so in the aftermath of the first workout of the 2017 Open, I thought I’d say a few things and talk about what I have been doing and what I’m going to do.

I purposefully avoided talking about this in my birthday post for the year or my year recap, but with the Open in full swing it seemed a good time to make some changes.

What’s This “Open” Thing?

I’ll keep this short. Every year, Crossfit as an organization holds open qualifiers for the Crossfit games. For five weeks, every Crossfit affiliate holds exactly the same workouts for every member athlete in the world. The workouts are usually demanding and tough and over the course of the five weeks will measure pretty much every way you can measure athletic ability.

17.1 is the first week’s workout of 2017.

It’s a bit crazy, but one of the neat things about it is that for five days each year, I get to do exactly the same workout as the other Crossfitters at work, since we are fully distributed and I don’t live near anyone else. If you set yourself to it, it can be a lot of fun.

Results

First, some words about 17.1, which is a workout not made for beef. To preserve any chance I had at getting some real work in, I did the scaled version:

For Time (20-minute cap):

  • 10 DB snatches @ 35#
  • 15 burpee box step-overs @ 20″
  • 20 DB snatches @ 35#
  • 15 burpee box step-overs @ 20″
  • 30 DB snatches @ 35#
  • 15 burpee box step-overs @ 20″
  • 40 DB snatches @ 35#
  • 15 burpee box step-overs @ 20″
  • 50 DB snatches @ 35#
  • 15 burpee box step-overs @ 20″

I time capped at 105 reps, which is the first three rounds. I tried for some additional snatches into the fourth round, but was just completely out of fuel in the tank. I didn’t really expect to do more than those three rounds, because at my weight, that many burpees with box overs is just a lot of moving your own body, something I’m very, very bad at in terms of exercise types.

After it was over, my judging coach took this picture, which is what I want to talk about a bit today in terms of changes I’m making with my regimen and some disappointments I have with myself over the last two years:

And so:

Two Years

In the past two years, I have attended between 2 and 3 times per week in an average week. I miss some weeks completely due to work or vacation, but when I’m home, I go for the most part.

In those two years, this is what my weight has done:

Screen Shot 2017-02-24 at 14.52.03

I cannot even begin to describe how massively frustrating this has been to me and continues to be today. In that picture I reposted above, it’s pretty clear that all of my weight sticks in the same spot on my body, and whenever I think about it, I find it alarmingly embarrassing.

It also, due to my diabetes, is likely to be the thing that kills me unless I am able to do something about it.

People have told me over the last two years that I look better than I did before. I’ll be honest—and this is not a fish for a compliment—I don’t see it, because I have a hard time seeing past both that number and the size of my midsection. I haven’t lost a shirt size. I haven’t lost more than a single belt notch. It’s demoralizing.

With the Open coming up, I figured I should make a choice. I either needed to just stop doing it and treading water, feeling like I’m not improving, or I needed to up my game and see what would happen.

So I’m Upping My Game.

Starting this week, I’m actively trying to increase my attendance frequency from two to three times per week to every weekday. I have paid lip service to this idea before, but have always chickened out from it and used my post-workout soreness as an excuse.

Instead, I’m using the Open as an excuse to start going every day and making a real effort at this thing. I suppose the worst that happens is that I’ll just be able to move my heavy weight around better than before.

I did this over this week. There hasn’t been a drastic change in my weight, which I suppose I hadn’t expected anyway because change takes time (even more than the two-plus years I have put in already).

With any luck, I’ll start seeing some kind of positive movement over the five weeks of the Open, and to try to record this, I’ll keep making update posts here once a week talking about my experience.

I’ll apologize for any complaining you hear from me in the meantime. The first week was pretty rough and by the end of it today, I didn’t have much left in the tank. Hopefully, next week will be better.