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The CrossFit Games Open is here for another year and CrossFitters around the world are getting pumped, waiting to see what Dave Castro and the team have for us again to twist our minds and help us understand just how awesome this sport of fitness is.
We are in an exciting time where The CrossFit Games has evolved to help a more general slice of the population participate. Despite this, there is still a subset of the community sitting on the fence because they don’t want to hand the twenty bucks over to CrossFit. They figure they can’t justify the $20 entry fee because they will have to scale the workouts, because they won’t be going to The Games and because they can’t compete with the big guns (or whatever other excuse there is). That’s cool, and no-one forces participation but I think many of these people are missing a bigger picture.
CrossFit is about community. Those that try to imitate us fail time and time again because nothing compares to our family, our bond and our ability to hold ourselves accountable for our actions. It’s about being a part of the biggest and best community in the world. The community of your local box is just a small part of this bigger (and more badass) working machine.
The Open is so much more than what happens in your box or comparing yourself to the rest of the world. It is participation in our community and finding out (whether you are elite or beginner) where your weaknesses are. The Open will expose a weakness and it might (and often will!) make you feel as though you aren’t as fit as you thought. That’s the point! Their job is to test our fitness, expose our weaknesses and then we go away and work on them so we come back better for next years test.
I’ve done The Open offline (just followed the WOD’s and compared myself to where I would be on the leaderboard) and online with my affiliate and nothing compares to doing it online with your affiliate. We make up extra fun around it and create our own scoreboard to for friendly rivalry in our box as well as see where we sit on the worldwide leaderboard. It’s fun and it’s with our family. It helps bring the newer members of our CrossFit family closer and pushes us to our limits.
For those that are afraid, fear goes out the window when you are with family and friends. Trust me, when you sign up to The Open your list of family members increases exponentially. We are all here to support and lift each other up.
This CrossFit community is about more than turning up to do a WOD and most of us know that. For those that have forgotten (or don’t know) about the CrossFit community, take the same challenge that you put to yourself physically when you train each day; Push yourself out of your comfort zone to think about the bigger picture:
We are all smaller muscle fibers (athletes) making a whole muscle (affiliate) work as one. Get more muscle fibers working harder and the muscle will work to its best ability. Then those muscles (affiliates) have to work with other muscles to make the larger organism work (CrossFit inc.). You can’t just have big biceps and expect to be called strong.
We are a strong community and The Open is one of the times we all come together show how awesome this thing called the sport of fitness really is. Test yourself. Leave your fears (and your ego) at the door and get involved. And don’t be that person that thinks they’re better than the rest because you know, deep down, that this is as good as it gets.