Masters Comp. Day 1

Game Day is finally here! I can still feel the butterflies in my stomach but I somehow feel less anxious than I did yesterday.

Had about 3 hours of pacing, stretching and warming up before the first heat of my first event. It was the one WOD that I had taken the time to test before the comp. so I thought I knew what to expect. It was an ascending ladder of 1 min. AMRAP Clean and Jerks with CTB Pull-ups every other minute.

Things were going more or less according to plan through the first couple of rounds. I had listened to a bunch of other athletes say that they were going to back way off on the pull-ups because of how the scoring was weighted and I decided to do the same. I made sure to leave myself at least :20 to get back to the barbell before each new C&J round.

For some reason, this WOD went very differently when I did it in the actual comp. There were so many factors that made this tougher than doing it in the comfort of my own gym.....the close quarters (almost ran into the guy in front of me a couple times), the heat and humidity, the chaos of having lots of heats going on at once and being confused by the clock announcements (this would come up again later!).

By the end of the ladder I was pretty well gassed and I only managed 2 (although I could have sworn it was 3) successful reps at 195#. This was good enough for 4th overall but I was pretty disappointed with the result.

2nd WOD was a very short one that consisted of 70' prowler pushed followed by 25 Double Unders. This was by far the easiest WOD I did all weekend although it was also the one that had the smallest margin for error. Just one little mishap like getting your rope tangled or dropping it could cost you 5-10 seconds and move you down about 10+ spots. Thankfully, this one was uneventful and I had only one miss on my Double-Unders. My time of 1:59 was good enough for second place.

Next was a 5:00 WOD that started with a 1,000M Row followed by AMRAP wall-balls in the remaining time. I have a good gauge of how fast I can row 1,000M however; I have never had to do wall-balls immediately after so I was trying to determine just how hard to go. I kept my pace at 1:40-1:43 the whole time and got to the Wall-Ball with just a few short breaths in between. I fired off 40 unbroken wall-balls and was still feeling great when I thought I heard my judge say "TIME!". However; there were still 4-5 seconds left and I had wasted them by dropping my wall-ball. This was a pretty frustrating turn of events and it could have proved costly but I still managed to finish 2nd and the guy who finished first beat me by 4 reps. Not likely that I would have closed that gap in 4 seconds.

WOD 4 was a shuttle "sprint" that added on a new movement in each round. I had practiced this one the other day and thought that I should do pretty well. In my heat, I was step for step with a competitor in the next lane -Joe Ames right up until the burpees. Joe actually was a few reps ahead of me starting his burpees but I was able to catch him and sprint (or stumble??) to the finish line to win my heat. This time was good enough for second overall. So, after 4 workouts I had climbed to first overall in my age division with 2 workouts on Sunday + the Finals.