OYO Workouts

When I was a swimmer in college, I loved OYO (On Your Own) workouts. I lived for them. They usually followed an extended run of grueling workouts that I think were actually endurance tests contracted by the US Coast Guard to see how long people could swim without drowning.

The OYO workouts were usually short and sweet and the coaches could actually trust you to complete them with little or no supervision. At least, they were short enough that you couldn’t shave off too much yardage without being noticed. But I can guarantee that once one person stopped (the person that was able to sprint through a majority of the workout the fastest) everyone stopped. Yardage started at 1 and ended at whenever-everyone-else-was-stopping.

Nowadays workouts are different. The most obvious thing is that there is no swimming in CrossFit (did anyone else just hear Tom Hanks say “There’s no crying in baseball!!!” No? Just me? …Got it). Gone are the days of workouts that contain the imminent threat of death by drowning. Workouts are also blissfully shorter; the longest CF workout is still much shorter than the shortest swimming workout.

And then there are the OYO workouts. CF OYO workouts are LITERALLY on your own. There isn’t a pool full of other people that you can follow to stop at your earliest convenience. And, more importantly, these workouts are not by design, nor should they be by execution, easier than the other workouts that you do.

Yes, there is the potential for the workouts to be easier, simply because it is totally, completely, 100% dependent upon how hard you push yourself.

Are you going as deep as you can on your pushups? Are you running as fast as you can on your 400’s? How long are you resting between reps? Is twenty minutes closer to eighteen, because there is no way you could finish another round in the last two minutes? Are you really counting out ten burpees – or did seven of them feel like ten, so ten will do (because, if we are being honest, one feels like ten)? These are things you have to check and double check and dig deep to find your inner coach to yell at you.

I know I don’t want Lance or JDP catching me slacking off. I have a sixth sense for judgment and I don’t want that radar to go off for being judged for being lazy or a quitter. Sure, I may make a face or say less than lady-like words, but me a lazy quitter…nuh-uh!

This week I was doing on of the prescribed workouts for I Am CrossFit and I am pretty sure people were like, “uh, where’s the fire?” I was practically pushing people out of the way on the mini-indoor track so I could finish my 400’s.

Did they not realize that I only had twenty minutes to be a badass? And if they were paying closer attention to their workouts (read: sitting around and doing nothing between sets of ten) then they really shouldn’t have concerned themselves with what I was doing.

(And to the person walking the track, I’m sorry I clipped you on my third round. But seriously…who goes to the gym to walk the track?? You are like, 30 not 80!)

The real beauty of the OYO workouts for CF, are that they really make you see how hard you can push yourself and how badly you want to improve. And, sure, you can write down five rounds when you really did four – but why lie to yourself? This isn’t a term paper. You’re not being graded on it. The only person you are hurting is yourself, and…well, why would you want to do that? Like in swimming when we told the coaches we trained over Christmas break, but actually sat around and just thought about training…the coaches can tell. That is their sixth sense. Be prepared to be judged.

I, for one, signed up for CrossFit for extra push, the extra incentive, the extra ally-oop needed to really achieve my goals. But the coaches and group workouts can only do so much. So my OYO workouts – those are something to behold! Just ask anyone at the gym….especially the people walking the track. J