Tracking Your Benchmarks

By: Nora Sweet

I wanted to share with everyone why it is so important to track your scores, especially your benchmarks!  Take the WOD Grace, 30 reps of Clean and Jerks at 135/95#, which we did last Monday.  We do this WOD typically for Barbell for Boobs (B4B) and other times too.  I started coming to CrossFit Max Kane in May of 2013 (I can’t believe it will be 3 years this year!).  So the first time I attempted Grace I went for 90# with 3 months of CF under my belt.   Let’s just say by looking at my time of 13:36 and the fact that I could not finish the 30 reps, I went way too heavy but I was stubborn when I first started.

The next time I did Grace was B4B was a couple months later in October.  This time I knew that I was never going to finish the WOD in the expected time so my goal was to RX the weight but do half the reps.  FYI I had to split jerk every single rep of those 15 reps.  It took me 8:47 as long as or longer than the rest of ladies who RX’d the WOD completely.  BUT I did it in 4:49 minutes faster than the first attempt!!

Let’s fast forward to last year!  We did B4B again and I’m way stronger than from when I first started.  But I had no cardio conditioning at the time because I was on a strength program to work on Olympic lifts.  So I went for it anyway and I got 6:14!!  That is 2:33 minutes faster than I did it 2 years ago and I did double the reps!! Even though I know I could have done better I was happy it was better than my last attempt at Grace.

So let’s talk about last week!!  Since my last program, I have been really pushing myself to keep moving and take shorter breaks in WODs to get my condition and mental game up.  I had a game plan for how many reps I would do and when to take my short breaks.  I got a SUB 5 time of 4:38!!!  How freaking cool that?!  It was another 1:36 minutes faster than just 3 months ago!  It is so great to be able to look at how far I’ve come and where I started!  If you don’t track your times and weights throughout the year, how will you know if you are getting any better or not???