Everytime Open season comes around it feels like an electric current running through the gym. The hair on your neck stands up, your heart races, and there’s a palpable buzz of anticipation. There are cheers of excitement, cries of frustration, mental barriers are broken, new depths of the pain cave are explored, and more often than not there are surprise performances that athletes didn’t know they had in them.

The events themselves are nothing more than another day’s training. We’ve run through workouts just like this, training days with 3x as much work as one Open event requires of us, and yet some will hear that voice inside their head that tells them this will be their Achilles heel. They worry about how to game plan the event, how can they maximize their score, and make it the perfect performance. This is an understandable approach, you certainly should do what you can to maximize you score on each event. The downfall lies in the inevitiable twist. “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men. Gang aft agley”. The Open is the test, but truth be told it’s just another conditioning workout. You’ll always feel like you could have done better, and maybe if you repeat it you might get a better score. Is that necessary? Remember why we challenge ourselves to strive for more, to improve our movements, our skills, our stength, speed, and endurance. Remember why we gave up peck-deck flys and crunches and fell in love with squats, push jerks, and toes to bar. We thrive on a challenge, and live for the success that comes from training for performance.

Give each Open event your best effort, but don’t stress about performing the workouts or worry about redoing them. You’ve done this before, hundreds of times, each day you train with this incredible community of friends. Learn to ignore the inner voice that holds you back from what you can really do, and remember why you strive to improve. It’s fun.