Test Yourself

From CrossFit.com:
To be “CrossFit” is to possess a general physical capacity that lends itself generally well to any and all contingencies: to the likely, to the unlikely, to the known, to the unknown. The fitness of the CrossFit athlete provides a solid foundation from which to take on any sport or any task.
On Thursday, February 21st, the 2019 Reebok CrossFit Games Open begins.  “The Open” is an annual CrossFit competition that is held at CrossFit gyms and in individual CrossFitters’ garages all over the world, and is administered online.  Each Thursday evening, for 5 weeks, a new workout is announced, and you have until Monday evening to complete it and enter your score.  You have to either have a CrossFit-certified judge watch you and confirm your results (i.e. throw some “no-reps!” in your face), or do it alone and videotape your workout for proof of your movement integrity.
I would love for you to compete in The Open this year, and here’s why.  You’ve already bought into the idea that in order to know that you’re making progress, you have to periodically test yourself.  That’s why you come to the gym on Wednesdays for our benchmark workouts, push extra hard for that result, and try to inch closer to performing the workouts “as prescribed”.  These benchmark workouts are good examples of tests that may come up in The Open, although we’ve never seen a classic benchmark WOD exactly as written in The Open.
So you can think of The Open as five separate opportunities to test yourself against the rest of the world, or your age group, or your community (you can filter the leaderboard to show only police officers, for example).  And these five separate tests will test different parts of your fitness, from strength to endurance to coordination and athletic skill.  But I really like to think of all the workouts together as an annual comprehensive test of your fitness in general, and one that you can really drill down into the results of.  For example, if I know that I finished in the top 25% of my 35-39 age group last year, my goal might be to crack the top 20th percentile.  If I don’t make it, I can drill into each workout – which did I do well on, and on which ones was I behind the curve?  That gives me some pretty direct feedback on my training for the past year, or at least my physical preparedness when The Open rolled around.
You can sign up for The Open right here.  It’s exhilarating, fun, sometimes frustrating, always eye-opening.  It’s your annual test of fitness.  And it’s happening in 3 weeks.
Ryan