“The mentality of, ‘You can’t get through these 15 thrusters’ completely dissolved.”
Photo Credit: Curtis Klem
Immediately after Jeanne Rieger heard the announcement of 13.5, she quit the Open.
Last year, the 53-year-old competitor had to scale the thruster weight and use a band on 12.5, the Fran ladder. A year later, she knew she could do a couple of 65-lb. thrusters, but wasn’t sure about completing 15 thrusters and chest-to-bar pull-ups. During the year and eight weeks she had trained at CrossFit Naptown, she had never touched her chest to the pull-up bar.
“I thought, ‘Yeah, I can do one or two (thrusters) at that weight, but there’s no way I can do 15,’” she says. “And I don’t even have a chest-to-bar (pull-up).”
She didn’t want to try and fail in front of a crowd ... again. Just one week before, she spent seven minutes trying to set a 17-lb. PR on her clean and jerk for 13.4. Despite countless attempts, 95-lb. wouldn’t go up.
She mourned the early end to the Open and decided to start training for next year.
When she showed up for her normal evening workout, she saw 13.5 scrawled across the whiteboard.
“I almost left and went home,” she says. “I was having a pity party.”
But her coach, Peter Brasovan, crashed that party real fast.
“He said, ‘You are still in the Open. You are going to pick up the bar, and you’re going to do it like you mean it,’” she recalls.
After putting her through a warm-up, Brasovan gave her less than a minute to practice. Right before her heat started, she felt her self-pity get washed away by stubborn determination.
“Screw it,” she said to herself. “I can do a kipping pull-up. I just have to pull harder and higher.”
In the warm-up area, she jumped onto the pull-up rig, kipped hard and pulled even harder, and felt her sternum smack into the bar.
“I don’t know what I did, but I did it,” she says. “Then I jumped back up and did another.”
The smack on the bar shifted her mindset. In a split second, she did a mental 180.
“The mentality of, ‘You can’t get through these 15 thrusters’ completely dissolved,” she says. “I thought, ‘I’ve got to get through these so I can get to the pull-up bar and do what I know I can do.’”
After the 3,2,1 … Go, she held onto that thought through the round of thrusters.
“The last four reps were excruciating, and I had to will my arms over my head,” she says. “All I could do was think, ‘If you don’t get this over your head, you’re never going to get to the bar, so don’t stop.’”
Three minutes later, she tallied her 15th thruster and walked to the pull-up rig. With pulverized arms and a racing heart, she jumped up, kipped, and got another chest-to-bar pull-up.
“When I did the first one it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can do more than one, because that was easy,’” she says. “In a totally relative sense, of course.”
Before the four minutes were up, she got two more for a total score of 18 reps.
“I was absolutely ecstatic,” she says. “It felt like victory, and it redeemed my mental state from the last week. It taught me not to underestimate myself, and just how important your mental attitude is. If I walk up to a bar already defeated, I won’t be able to do it. I never saw the importance of that until this Open.”
