On CrossFit Open
Ever since “getting into” CrossFit in late 2020, I've been trying to compete in the Open — an annual CF competition where you get to perform 3 workouts over 3 weeks with everyone else in the world performing same workouts. This answers 2 questions:
How fit am I comparing to others?
How fit am I comparing to me last year(s)?
2025 ended up being my best performance yet, and I’m generally happy, but it always comes with a mixed bag of emotions, obstacles new and old, and learnings. Ideally, these learnings are to be incorporated in the following years but I’ve been only mildly successful at that :)
Progress
I’ve registered for the Open in ‘21 and ‘22 but haven’t actually participated until ‘23. Not sure what exactly happened there but I think I just felt like I needed to be at the top of my game; that participating and not doing well would be a final and total defeat; that finishing in the bottom 50 percentile would result in an entire CrossFit community pointing and laughing at me. I registered again in ‘23, still hesitated and only performed 1st and 2nd workouts. Last year (‘24) was the first time I actually completed all 3 weeks.
The jump from 2023 to 2024 was massive, likely because of full completion, and it ignited the desire to take Open seriously. At that point I was also practicing CF consistently for quite a while so I ended up performing “well” and even qualifying for quarter finals (top 25% in the age group). 2025 goal was to perform at least as good, ideally better. I managed to do just that, but there was a catch…
Percentile paradox
Even though I got 1k closer to the top, I realized I was in the top third of all participants and wouldn’t even qualify for quarterfinals this year. How is this possible?
2025: 8431 / 25025 = 33.7%
2024: 9497 / 35168 = 27%
Naturally, the percentile depends on the length of the tail, and perhaps isn’t as representative of your performance. I ended up further down on the leaderboard because less people participated in the Open, likely due to last year fiasco.
Devil’s advocate: what if I got closer to the top simply because fewer of the “fitter“ people competed, hence pushing my score upwards? Counter argument: the score will always be relative to number of participants, level of participants (which constantly increases), and that year’s workouts; it should not be taken too serious to measure your own progress (more on that below).
Focus is hard
Every year around the Open time the common theme is: life gets in a way. For example, one year we were invited to a birthday celebration of a good friend on a beach in Oaxaca with an all-paid-for accommodation, a once in a lifetime opportunity not to be missed and of course there were no CrossFit gyms in a 2 hour driving radius. This year I made sure to finalize my travels and have access to the gym a month before Open started. Yet, I was coming off of a 2-month long Asia trip so the training has been spotty and recovery poor. My jetlag lasted almost 2 weeks. As the Open started, I ended up upstate next to Hunter mountain realizing that this is my only chance to ski for the year, then skiing on 2 consecutive days 4-5 hours each, which threw a wrench into my 1st competition week. I had an absolute blast on the mountain though!
Expectations vs. reality is strong on this one. But it really comes down to “how much does this matter to you?“ And as with other goals in life, we often underestimate how much we’re willing to endure (and to give up) to bring our internal narratives to life.
I think this year was a good level of compromise but the skiing trip timing was unfortunate; I took it easy on my 1st try of 25.1 and I know I could have gotten a much better score if I retested on Monday. I suppose I can reframe this into an opportunity to get a better score next year :)
I see clearly now that what separates the good from the great CF athletes are not how much time you’re putting in the gym or any specific program or nutrition you’re running. It’s how well you can block out everything else in life in order to make training front and center.
Practice makes perfect
Few years ago I read The Gains Lab’s essay on skill work and it completely changed my approach to training. The idea is that all other things equal (strength & work capacity), your proficiency in skill will determine your success. In simple terms, you can’t expect to be good at muscle-ups if you’ve only ever done them 25 times in life. Times here means days or sessions. 25 could mean, for example, that you’ve been doing them once a week for 25 weeks (~half a year). You’re probably decent at them at this point but certainly not proficient. If you’ve done them 100 times, however, you’re almost definitely going to be significantly better. Especially, under fatigue.
This is a funny metric, and my brain always tries to hijack it by coming up with counter-arguments:
well, what if you’ve done 100 wall ball sessions in your life but then stopped doing them 3 years ago?
well, what if you only do 1 session per month over the course of 10 years?
well, what if your volume isn’t enough in each session? or set and rep scheme don’t change enough? does it matter if you always do the same variation of a movement? shouldn’t you add some negatives to increase the strength capacity in the eccentric portion?
While all of these are valid points, this is the kind of heuristic where you just have to paint with broad strokes. And if you do, it’s surprisingly powerful. Just don’t go into extremes — focus on frequency of practiced skill (1-3 times a week) and keep racking up that number of times you’ve done it. Eventually, it adds up to something magical. Something something 10,000 hour rule.
Proficiency in the Open
Following that logic, one of my goals last year was to simply rack up 100 muscle-up workouts. That’s it. I managed to do just that. Usually this meant practicing every week. Sometimes once, sometimes twice, sometimes a week would be skipped, sometimes I’d catch up and do it 3 times; or 2 consecutive days, it really didn’t matter. The were times where I’d come to the gym and bang out 10 in a row — wow! Then I’d come next week and could barely do doubles as if my body entirely forgot it all. I didn’t care about year-long progression and I didn’t care about temporary regressions. All I had to do was to get to 100/100 by the end of the year.
The result was kind of astonishing — muscle-ups turned from something I’d come to a bar and not know if I’d be able to do 1-2 on that day to something I was able to perform a set of 15 during Open 25.2 while under extreme fatigue from pull-ups, chest-to-bar, and thrusters where I could barely hold onto my grip.
Same thing happened with wall-walks which I got to 100 sessions last year, and they felt the easiest during 25.3 grueling chipper. The opposite was also true — because I barely practiced thrusters last year, they absolutely demolished me during the Open. I had to break a set of 18 into 6,5,4,3 with just 115lb on a bar.
Gaming the system
As much as I like to get high scores at the Open, I have to remind myself that this is a very narrow and biased subset of overall fitness that CrossFit aspires to advance. As such, it’s easy to game by prioritizing movements likely to be included in it. This is why I wasn’t doing any running in the months leading up to the competition, or any GHD sit-ups, rope climbs, and heavy squats/deadlifts.
Devil’s advocate: are you better at the Open this year because you’re fitter or because you’re better at the movements that were in this year’s selection?
Of course true measurement of fitness is better answered by tracking performance over a much broader spectrum of CF benchmarks. But is the Open prep really different than a prep for a marathon where you emphasize long distance running and prepare your body for large volume as opposed to speed work? Or a Hyrox race where in addition to running you’re also improving strength and skill in a set of very specific movements.
Road to top 10%
I knew I was in trouble if thrusters were in the Open (as they always are). I tried practicing them frantically few times in the 2-3 weeks leading up to the competition but the results just didn’t stick. Forget unbroken 21-15-9, my HR would spike to 95% just doing 10 reps with 95lbs. Could it be that thruster procrastination is related to poor front rack mobility? They aren’t something I can just jump into but need 15min of prep and that’s a big deterrent. I need to hammer these weekly if I want better performance.
I also learned I’m bad with high-rep olympic lifts. I knew that my Grace (30 clean and jerks for time) score of 4:08 is “intermediate“ but it reared its ugly head twice in the recent practice, first during 23.1:
AMRAP in 14 minutes:
60 calorie Row
50 Toes-to-Bars
40 Wall Ball Shots (20/14 lb)
30 Cleans (135/95 lb)
20 Muscle-Ups
I was only mildly fatigued by the time I got to 30 cleans and figured moderate-pace singles will be done quickly. Instead, it took me the remaining 5-smth mins just to finish them, giving no time to do ring muscle-ups that I really wanted to squeeze in as I’ve been practicing them more lately. Few days later I ended up doing 25.3 which included almost identical pattern — 25 cleans under fatigue. I’m glad I did 23.1 and my body already knew what this would feel like, but I could have done much better if this was practiced regularly.
Conclusion: incorporate regular barbell cycling and high density oly lifts.
Finally, the other big improvement would be working on improving VO2 max via Zone 2 training. There’s plenty of evidence that this works; I just wish it wasn’t so boring.
Last year I did a VO2 max test where they strap a mask to your face—the real deal, very accurate—and it showed that my aerobic threshold is at 78% (138bpm) vs. 80-85% (~150bpm) that it usually is in trained athletes. It means the body doesn’t know how to stay in the lower intensity zone for long time and switches to a higher (aerobic) energy system. Because I often train HIIT, it’s able to stay in that aerobic zone for a long time. Overall, this results in an “excellent“ score of 55.4 for my age but widening aerobic band could be the key to an even better capacity.
Looking ahead, I’m confident I can keep getting better and inch even closer to the top next year. But the priority is still on improving overall fitness—and increasingly so—on recovery, mobility, and quality of movement as those are the foundational blocks of athletic performance.