The 2012 CF Open

Last year's CrossFit Games at the Home Depot Center in Los Angeles.

The CrossFit Games season is upon us, and the CF Open starts in a month on February 22nd.

If you’re new to us and this whole CrossFit Games thing, here’s how it works. Anyone in the world can compete in the Open, which lasts for five weeks. Each week, CrossFit Headquarters will announce a new workout to be completed that week. Participants complete the workout with a judge at a registered affiliate (that’s us!) or may submit a video of the workout for score verification. Each week you register your score on the Games site and are ranked by your cumulative scores over the five weeks. The top 60 individual men and women plus the top 30 teams in each of 17 regions in the world (Northern California is ours) are then invited to compete in the weekend-long Regionals. From Regionals, the top three men, women, and teams move on to compete at the CrossFit Games at the Home Depot Center in July.

We will follow the same format we did last year to complete the Open workouts: we will reserve Saturdays after the regular class as a time for the Open competition. We’ll have a judge for each competitor, and break the workout into heats as needed. Like last year, you may arrange to do the workout at a different time if you can’t make it on a given Saturday. The Saturday slot is ideal though, in that it provides the competitive atmosphere and support that often promotes higher performance. (There is one important note to make here: the first Saturday of the Open, February 25th, we are excited to be hosting the Balanced Bites Practical Paleo Seminar; the first workout of the Open, therefore, will take place at CFSR on Sunday, Febuary 26th.)

Are you interested in competing? Everyone is welcome! It’s a fun time, and if you’ve been even a little interested in this CrossFit as a competitive sport thing, the Open is a great opportunity to get your feet wet. Note that scaling is not allowed to submit a score, so you’ll need to be able to do the workouts – whatever they are – as prescribed. Check out the six workouts from the 2011 Open to get a sense of what this could look like. We will have absolutely no idea what this year’s workouts will look like until they are announced week by week. Registration for the 2012 CrossFit Open begins February 1st!