The Strongtown Open

The 2017 CrossFit Open is starting in just about 4 weeks. For those who have been with us for a year or more you are probably very (painfully) aware of what the Open is. For everyone else...the Open is an online competition that the entire CrossFit community, not just our gym, participates in once a year. Overall the competition is 5 weeks with 1 workout being announced each week (Thursday 8:00pm). For the super elite CrossFitters the Open is the first step towards qualifying for the CrossFit Games...for the rest of us mortals it's a chance to see where we stack up. The workouts are no different then anything else we do during a normal week...the only difference is accountability. As opposed to scoring ourselves on the workout, during the Open everyone gets a Judge to count their reps and make sure their meeting the movement standards. 

This year we're going to be treating the Open similar to how we ran things way back when in 2015. Back then we called it the Intra-Gym Open...or Intramural Open...the gym was divided into 4 teams and each team was scored based on participation in each workout. Instead of calling the the Intra-Gym / Intramural we're going to be simplifying things and just calling it the Strongtown Open. 

How it works - everyone who signs up through the games.crossfit.com will be entered into an overall pool of people. During the week of February 13th anyone in the pool will either be randomly selected or go through a mock-draft to create the Team Rosters. During the course of the Open each team will be scored based on the following system:

• 1 Point for every person who completes the workout (division / rx / scaled does not matter)

• 1 Point for every person who logs their score through games.crossfit.com

• 3 Points if 50% of the Team completes the workout on Saturday

• 5 Points if 90% of the Team completes the workout

• 10 Points if 100% of the Team completes the workout

In addition to the points above teams will also be able to earn extra points with:

• Guess the Open Pool: this is both a game of chance and skill...see below for more details

• Weekly Challenges: Each week there will be a weekly challenge for all the Teams to complete, if your team completes the challenge they will be awarded the points and the points will vary based on the challenge.

The purpose of this challenge is to have fun as a gym - it's about participation and I truly believe that whether you're a Veteran CrossFitter or just starting to learn the ropes that you can do the Open. 

Each week there will be an opportunity for teams to earn extra points based on the weekly challenge. Challenges will vary each week and bonus points will be awarded based on the difficult of the challenge.

What to Expect:

• Schedule – throughout the 5 weeks of the Open our Friday evening (5:30pm) and Saturday (9:00 & 10:00) classes will be reserved for people participating in the Open. We’re very sorry to anyone who’s schedule this screws up…this is something we’ve done every year and we do it to be fair to those we paid the sign-up fee.

• Workouts – there is really no difference between the workouts we do during throughout the year and the workouts of the Open. The biggest difference is that Mikey and I program our regular workouts and Dave Castro / CrossFit HQ program the five Open workouts. At the end of the day it’s still the same pool of movements that they’re programming from…you can expect to see burpees, box jumps, pull-ups, power cleans, snatching, wall-ball, deadlifts, push-ups, toes to bar, thrusters etc…

• Judging – this is probably the biggest differentiating factor of the Open. Since the Open is essentially an online competition, making sure movement standards are maintained and upheld is paramount to the success of the event. It’s safe to say you can expect a bit of extra instruction on specific movement and judging standards. Each person participating will also have the opportunity to get their feet wet with Judging as well as have all of their workouts Judged & Validated…so exciting.

• Workout Heats – since everyone gets to have their workout judged we will be running multiple heats for the workouts within each class. Heats will be set on a first come, first serve basis and will limited by the number of Judges. If we have a 20 person class we can run 2 heats of 10, or 3 heats at 7/7/6 ..we can not do a heat of 15 or 20. As we saw last year with the overhead walking barbell lunges some of this is also limited by the workout. What this means is - please show up on time.

• Entering Scores – completing the workout is doing 90% of the work, the other 10% comes down to entering your score. After completing the workout both you and your Judge will sign the scoresheet acknowledging your score. The gym gets one copy and each person gets a small slip of paper with their score as a reminder. From there you will have to login to games.crossfit.com in order to submit your score...which we will then verify and validate.

• Scaling / Modifying Workouts – just like any other workout we do, it is completely acceptable to scale and modify the workouts. At the end of the day we want people to get in a good workout and have a little fun. What we will talk about is how the score gets entered on the games site. Depending on how the workout was scaled or modified it may be entered on the games site based on how much of the standards were completed. We’ll talk about this more with each person modifying the workout throughout the five weeks. The point is that scaling and modifying workouts is an option. Now I will say that if there was ever a time to try and push to go Rx on a workout...this would be it.

• Support / Encouragement – this is by far one of the best parts of the Open. It’s an amazing environment. We’ve seen people get their first double-unders, first chest to bar pull-ups, toes to bar and muscle-ups, we’ve had people set PR’s on lifts and then continue with it for multiple reps. There is something about the Open that creates an environment that exudes positivity and encouragement. It’s helps give us that extra push we can all use.