"I want to be one and done, but I think doing it one time only can be kind of an ego thing. If you can do better, go ahead and do it again."
What’s it like to be one of the first two people in the world to compete in an Open workout while the worldwide CrossFit community watches?
Unlike most of us who had time to think about it, strategize and agonize, Garret Fisher heard the workout, and minutes later he heard, “3-2-1 … go!”
“I’ve never been in a situation like that before, and I had a lot of anxiety,” Fisher said. “The whole CrossFit world is watching you. My take-away after that workout was that I do handle myself fairly well under pressure.”
With a score of 373 reps, Fisher beat Marcus Hendren by 15 reps but fell 75 reps short of Rich Froning’s record performance on the workout from 2011.
“I enjoyed the moment, for sure, but when I got home I looked at scores from 2011 and the Leaderboard,” he said. “I decided to do it again.”
When he went to re-do the workout on Sunday with his older brother Andrew Fisher, he didn’t have a set strategy. Instead he went off the memory of how the workout felt in Atlanta, Ga.
“I didn’t have a new strategy. I just knew how it feels,” he said.
It paid off. Fisher improved by 20 reps for a score of 393 reps.
“I want to be one and done, but I think doing it one time only can be kind of an ego thing,” Fisher explained. “If you can do better, go ahead and do it again. If the goal is to do well in the Open and get to regionals, then I want to do as well as I can.”
Fisher’s training plan is pretty simple. He does “CrossFit, and a lot of it.”
Even during the Open, he will train two to three times per day, and incorporate yoga for mobility on the side. The only exceptions are Thursday and Fridays. He plans on making Thursdays an active recovery day with something like rowing or running, and then hitting the Open workout on Friday mornings. Once he gets the Open workout in, he’ll do his normal training Friday afternoon through Wednesday.
As a NorCal CrossFit athlete, Fisher gets to train with several well known CrossFit athletes like Jason Khalipa, Miranda Oldroyd, Pat Barber and Neal Maddox. Khalipa and Fisher train together once a day on post days, but recently Fisher has started incorporating solo training into his regimen.
It’s harder to push on the workout when no one is around to spur him on.
“Training by myself is really hard,” he admitted. “I need to learn how to push myself and improve my mental confidence.”
Fisher is approaching the 2014 Reebok CrossFit Games Season one stage at a time. Right now, he’s all about the Open.
"I want to take the Open seriously and do the best I can. Then when that's over, I'll move to Regionals," he said.
