Crossfit Games: 03/09/13

I am competing in the crossfit games this year.  I've always either been too poor or too broken to compete.  The games consists of 5 workouts issued every Wednesday for 5 weeks.  This was the first WOD:

17 min AMRAP:
40 Burpees
75 pound Snatch, 30 reps
30 Burpees
135 pound Snatch, 30 reps
20 Burpees
165 pound Snatch, 30 reps
10 Burpees
210 pound Snatch, as many reps as possible

I am not good at snatches and pretty marginal at olympic lifting in general.  I've only snatched a handful of times because it makes me nervous to throw a lot of weight over my dome and try to catch it.  I practiced on Thursday at Bally's. 75lb were easy.  135 weren't bad either.  I tried to do a 155. If I tried to drop under it I would have been close, but I didn't want to fail in Bally's with metal plates. I was feeling pretty confident, but I was nervous.  I like to be good at things and I knew that I was probably headed for an average performance. 

The atmosphere at my crossfit gym, Crossfit 718, was festive.  Lots of people hanging out before and after their workout to cheer on competitors.  There were judges for each competitor. I got there about an hour early so got to watch the first 1/2 hour of competitors.  It got ugly really quickly. 

I warmed up with a group of 2 or 3, much smaller than the previous groups.  This was really a race against myself.  The snatch is such a technical lift that you can't just will yourself through it.  You need to keep your technique perfect. Our coach, I guess I don't go there enough for him to actually be my coach, but he served that purpose, made a great point that this was a snatch workout and the burpees were just there to intimidate and tire you out.  He set up a slow metronome that we could use to pace our burpees.

Go! 

40 burpees: unbroken, nice, slow pace.

30 75 lb snatches: broken up into 12, 10, 8

30 burpees: unbroken, but starting to feel it

30 135 lb snatches:  I took a good minute to set myself knowing that I didn't want to miss any of my first couple of snatches due to burpee fatigue.  Holy. Crap.  This was terrible.  Right from the first one.  They went by achingly slow.  I did it in groups of 5, but even those five were broken up cause I kept dropping the bar instead of guiding it down and snatching it back up. If I had to do it again, I would have tried to get some unbroken ones in towards the middle. Ugh. My brain stopped working around 20.  I saw the target as finishing the 30 snatches, but it should have been the 20 burpees to follow.  I finished the 30 at 16:28, only 30 seconds left to do 20 burpees.  I did 8 and almost threw up.  Shit.

Then off to enjoy some goaltimate in the beautiful spring day!  I started off terrible, but rallied as I got my legs underneath me and ended it feeling strong and playing well.  Combine like activities tomorrow for the Rumble.