The Open is coming…and Fog City CF wants YOU to sign up!
On February 16th, the official CrossFit 2023 season kicks off with the Open, a worldwide annual event that’s the first stage of qualification to the CrossFit Games. Much more importantly, the Open is a chance for you to set a goal, benchmark your current fitness level, and participate in a fun event with the FCCF community!
Fog City “exists to investigate the limits and capabilities of people, both individually and collectively, to improve their own lives and the lives of those around them.” Health, fitness, performance, and community are the backbone of this labor of love. The CrossFit methodology is a key part of how we try to do this every day.
There is a ton of thought behind the CrossFit methodology that informs our daily WODs, and there’s a wealth of info on CrossFit.com that can compliment your time in the gym. One key tool in improving your fitness is the ability to track and measure your performance over time. This is why we write scores on the white board, and why we encourage you to track your workouts. It helps you to identify your relative strengths and weaknesses, and can show you empirically where you are getting better (especially when it comes to lifts, or benchmark workouts like Fran). For some, competing with others is a big motivator. But for most of us at FCCF, competing with ourselves is where we get the most motivation to stretch and grow!
The Open takes place over 3 weeks every year around this time. Workouts are announced at noon PST on Thursday, and participants have until the following Monday to submit their score online for the given workout. Fog City provides everything you need, including judges, and then you just have to log your score online before the deadline. We will hold multiple sessions each Saturday during the Open, complete with blasting music, people cheering you on, and other folks pushing themselves in the workout. It’s a whole other level of energy, and pushes many of us to do our absolute best!
Hundreds of thousands of people all over the world participate, and you’ll be ranked overall and within your age group. The workouts are pretty representative of your general level of fitness according to CrossFit’s methodology, so I’ve found that the ranking provides a good sense of my degree of improvement year over year. This will only be my 3rd official Open, and I wish I had data going back to previous years. My first year gave me a baseline, my second year I set (and surpassed) a goal to improve within my age group, and I have a goal for this year as well. In a perfect world, signing up for the Open is a catalyst in the months leading up to it for you to stay committed to your fitness - at this point, perhaps it’s a catalyst to really focus over the next two weeks! But even after the Open, you can take what you learned about yourself as motivation to improve throughout the year.
Note there are scaling options just like in class every day - every single FCCF member will be able to do a version of these workouts. And we will cheer you on whether you’re killing it Rx-style, or are doing a scaled version. This is about you doing your best at your current level of fitness! And also, doing it responsibly - push yourself, don’t kill yourself. As always, we want you coming back the next day.
There is a $20 registration fee that goes to CrossFit HQ to support the content they create, the platform and judging (competitive level athletes submit videos for review). Admittedly, as a CrossFit superfan and consumer of a lot of content from CrossFit, I’m biased, but I personally get much more than $20 of value from CrossFit throughout the year and I’m glad to support their efforts. It’s that much more meaningful to me this year because I think with their new CEO, as well as CrossFit OGs, the company is headed in a really positive direction after some quite tumultuous years.
If you are at all curious, just sign up, show up, and have fun! And please also feel free to come during other sessions to judge or cheer! Register here.
Jen Clarke
