One of the things we love about the Open is that it provides a great data point for our athletes to measure their progress. But it also allows us to take those data points OUTSIDE the box and look at performance against the local – and even worldwide stages. Today we celebrate two of our athletes who not only crush it in the box every day, but had phenomenal overall performances no matter how you cut the data: Justin M. and Marina A.

Justin M competed this year in the 14-15 year-old division for the first time. Having JUST turned 14, he came in at a developmental disadvantage (as a year makes a huge difference in this division). He was just coming off a successful high school basketball season and was thrust immediately into the madness of the Open. The first workout was a real challenge for him as he had not been able to attend many classes during the season and the dumbbell snatch was completely foreign to him. He finished in 9^th place in the state of Maryland. He didn’t do as well as he hoped but resilience is a quality that Justin has plenty of. Justin ended up taking first place in two subsequent workouts: 17.2 (winning by 15 reps) and 17.5 (by a whopping 2 minutes). He also took second place in 17.4 making massive improvements from the last time he performed that workout in 2016. Justin propelled himself back up to the 3^rd spot in Maryland. It was a heck of a comeback and moved Justin up Justin 398^th (out of 1900 athletes) in the world with, again, the vast majority of those athletes are a year older. This data points to a very bright future for young Justin and we are thrilled to help get him where he wants to go.

Our second athlete we wanted to recognize is on the other end of age spectrum. It’s Mama Bear herself, Coach Marina. Although young at heart, she doesn’t mind being “old” in CrossFit – she just loves that master’s division! This was her fifth Open, and while she has always done well, this year she really blew it out. In her division (#respectyourelders) there are over 10,000 athletes worldwide, and Marina ended up finishing as the 2^rd best female the state of Maryland and 275th in the world. She was really only a few bar muscle ups away from making the worldwide online qualifiers for the top 200 athletes. This is the next step for actually qualifying for the Games! (side note: yes, I am working on gymnastics programming for her right now). The 2017 open didn’t really play to Coach Marina’s strengths but our broad style of training at the Cove in terms of “specializing in not specializing” allowed her to have solid performance in most of the workouts. She really put on a show for 17.5 (remember that deadly combo of thrusters and double unders?!) and Coach Marina took 45^th place worldwide out of those 10,000 athletes!

What’s next for these two athletes? Well Justin continues to train hard and live the life of an average high school freshman. But now we are looking to improve his diet to support him building more strength. He continues to work hard during WODs and has added some additional strength training and programming with Coach Brian to get ready for next year’s basketball season. Coach Marina looks to continue to do her normal routine of killing in class and then trying to find volunteers (a.k.a. suckers) to do post-workout assault bike sessions with her. She is now looking to take some of that time to practice the bar muscle ups and other gymnastics skills as well. We are amazed at what those two have done this past year and can only imagine what lies in their future.