"I thought, 'I'm gonna get through at least one, even if that takes me 10 minutes.'"
Photos courtesy of Nicole Kozinski.
Before last Friday, Megan LaVine had never done a double-under. By lunchtime, she had done 41, for a total score of 56 reps in her first CrossFit Games Open workout.
“It was a rush,” LaVine said. “I felt really accomplished.”
The 30-year-old joined CrossFit 248 in Farmington Hills, Mich., last July to escape the monotony of spin class. Though she thought she might be too fresh to compete, she signed up for the Open to challenge herself. After 14.1 was announced, she worried it was too much to ask.
“It was alarming,” she said. “I had a moment of freak-out within myself. I thought, ‘Oh gosh, I just donated my money.’”
Dismissing double-unders as an advanced CrossFit athlete’s skill, she had never carved out time to practice.
“I would make half-assed attempts to learn it, fail, and say, ‘Oh well,’” she recounted.
With her affiliate’s Open workout scheduled for first thing Friday morning, there was little time to cram. Her first few attempts were less than effective.
“My initial thing was to try to slam the rope down and jump down really hard,” she said.
She donkey-kicked and stomped the ground like a toddler mid-tantrum. There seemed to be a force field emanating from her feet. But when she took a second to calm down and breathe, she remembered some advice from the veteran next to her: Just try to get one.
“I thought, ‘I’m gonna get through at least one rep, even if it takes me 10 minutes,’” she said. “I thought if I could achieve that, I could be happy.”
When she stopped stressing, her wrists relaxed, and the wire circled her twice. The next time, she strung two good reps together.
“After I started to get them, it was like, ‘OK, this isn’t the worst thing ever,’” she said.
Once she had tallied 30 reps, she powered through the snatches, turning the bar over with ease. Only minutes remained when she picked up her rope for round two, this time knowing exactly what to do. The buzzer sounded 11 reps in, and she walked off the workout floor 41 double-unders richer than she had been before.
“For never being able to do them before, I was OK with that,” she said.
LaVine will likely face even more formidable tasks before the Open is over. But now she knows she has what it takes to rise to the occasion.
“I went in thinking I wasn’t going to be able to do even 1 rep,” she said. “To be able to do that and a little more, it showed that I’m capable. I have the ability to do it, I just need to push myself.”
