Tuesday, March 29, 2011

2011 Reebok CrossFit Games WOD 1

The Games have begun for this year and I'm competing in the Master's Division.  This blog isn't about me and my performance on this WOD was only good enough for 93rd in my age group of 500+, so don't watch it thinking you'll be dazzled by the show.  It's strait video, I don't even know enough to rotate the vid and cut out the boring parts (like having to document the weights on the bar for the Games upload).  The only point to it is, if you've yet to see a CF WOD, this will give a decent idea of what the point of them is.  The point is - work as hard as you can for a specified period so as to develop work capacity, the more the better, across as many modalities as you can think of, the more intense the better (in this WOD the modalities are 30 double under rope jumps - two rope swings per jump - and 15 75# power snatches per round.  What do we mean by intensity? Well, if you can move 75 pounds 18 inches in 3 seconds doing a curl, it would be better to move your whole body 20-29 inches in the same or less time via a pullup - in other words, we use power as a definition:  force times distance over time.

What you can't see in this CF workout is how close to exhaustion you run in these things - these workouts make you think about quitting.  They certainly challenge your ability to do anything with precision due to the inherently high fatigue levels - but of course, in application, being able to deliver precision with extreme fatigue is a virtue worth training for.

In short don't watch the whole 11 minutes, and skip the first 60s, but take a look at an almost 47 year old doing a workout that I couldn't have done a year ago, and wouldn't have contemplated four years ago, and you may get an idea of why I've been "going on" about CrossFit so much since January of 2007.  Five workouts remain in the Open portion of the Games, it's quite an indulgence to enjoy such a challenge.

No comments:

Post a Comment