Why You Should Enter a Competition

Move- Lift- Work is on Saturday 10 October, here, in our gym. Three events — Move is the engine piece, Lift is the lift, Work is the CrossFit workout. Individual entries. Sign up on WodBoard, and entries close on 21 September.

It's for EVERYONE in the gym. Every event has a version for every athlete, the way every Tuesday does.

Now the argument for entering.

A date in your calendar changes how you train. Three weeks out, you stop skipping the thing you're bad at. The person who has avoided the rower for a year does some rowing. The one who never lifts near a heavy single books the session where they will. Nobody organises their training around a vague intention to improve, and everybody organises it around something in the diary. Three weeks of that is worth more than three months of turning up and taking whatever's on the board.

The second thing is information you can't get in a class. You find out what your pacing does when it matters. Nearly everyone goes out too fast the first time. Knowing that about yourself is useful for the next two years of training, and there's no way to learn it on a Tuesday morning with four people in.

The third is the bit people are most nervous about, and it resolves itself in about four minutes. You will be watched. So will everyone else, including the fittest people in the room, who will also be uncomfortable at some point in the day, and everyone finds this out about everyone else simultaneously. The fear of being watched doesn't respond to reassurance. It responds to evidence.

Plus, how often do you get to be centre stage in your life? Embrace the challenge! It's so worth it!

I always relate this to my days as a golf pro — you practise harder when a comp is coming, and you learn so much about yourself when you have a scorecard in hand. So much so that I really only counted my score in competition. Practice and social rounds just don't hit as hard.

If you've never done one, the day runs like this. You arrive an hour before your first event, eat something normal, warm up with the people in your heat, and then do three workouts across the day with plenty of time between them. Everybody spends most of the day sitting around watching and eating. It's much more of a social occasion than a sporting one.

Bring more food than you think and something to sit on. Whatever you'd normally eat before training, eaten two hours before each event, beats anything clever. Trainers, skipping rope, tape and a jumper for the gaps — the gaps are long and the unit is cold once you've stopped moving!

So: enter, then pick one weakness and rehearse it between now and the 10th. Not five. One.

Entering and coming last beats standing at the side with a coffee. No one has regretted their first comp. They often regret not doing it earlier.

Entries are on WodBoard until 21 September. If you want to talk it through first, grab me in the gym or book a free, no-obligation 15-minute chat with Jeremy or Beth at crossfitchiltern.com.