23.1=14.4

CrossFit is a great activity for comparing yourself to your former self.

We started the CrossFit Open this week and the first workout was a repeat of one from 2014.

To decipher, we had 14 minutes to row 60 calories:

In an unusual move, the women and men rowed the same number of calories. The rower favors the tall, which men generally are, so often the women’s calories would be 10-15 fewer than the men’s, but not this time.

Next up is 50 toes to bar, which means hanging from a bar and whipping your toes up to touch the bar, bending yourself in half.

I’m still in the knee-lifting phase, but Buds has been working hard to string these together and he was pleased with how they went.

Next up: 40 wallballs.

This means squatting down with a weighted ball, 10# for me, 20# for Buds, and tossing the ball up to a 9′ line for women, 10′ for men.

Then to the cleans. An Olympic lift where the bar starts on the floor and ends with you standing straight with the barbell on your shoulders: 135# for Buds, 65# for Ginnie.

We both love power cleans. The full body extension, the feeling of power, the relative ease compared to squat cleans.

But looking gorgeous when lifting heavy is not as easy as Instagram might make it seem.

The final piece of the workout is 20 ring muscle ups. This is the evil cousin of a pull-up where you start hanging from a pair of rings and get yourself up over them and pressed out above them. This is the kind of thing an Olympic gymnast can make look as inevitable as gravity. But for us, regular gravity is a little too much. It didn’t matter anyway because by the time we got to this part of the workout we thought it was better to lay on the floor.

Our gym has a tradition of Friday Night Lights. This means everyone gets together from about 4:30 p.m. on Friday until 8:00 p.m. and there are heats of athletes completing the workout together. Ginnie did the workout earlier in the day so she could judge and cheer on Friday night. Buds waited for prime time. What you don’t see in the pictures is the motley horde of fellow crossfitters drinking, chatting, and cheering just off screen.

Our finals scores were:

Ginnie got through 10 of the cleans.

Buds got through all of the cleans, improving on 2014 Buddie by 10 cleans, and he bounced back much more quickly from this time around than in 2014.

Two more weeks of open workouts to come. A lifetime of CrossFit skills to improve.