Mike Warkentin advises you to find your own limit in your next workout.
Ever watch an auction and want to choke the guy who continually adds a buck to the top bid?
You know the guy. He’s the same one who ruins office pools with the ultra-clever “and one dollar” bracketing strategy learned from contestants on The Price Is Right.
He’s also the guy who ruins any poker game without a minimum raise by forcing everyone to call dumbass nuisance raises.
That guy can be found in a lot of CrossFit gyms, too. Let’s call him the one-upper.
In the clever article Clock Whores by Doug Chapman, the owner of CrossFit Ann Arbor/Hyperfit USA wrote about those who care nothing for integrity or fitness but desire only to have the best time of the day by any means necessary. They’d jump over a bleeding family member to get that time, and they’d count the jump as two reps if a trainer wasn’t watching.
One-uppers are a lot like clock whores; they’ll definitely sacrifice integrity at times, but one-uppers don’t want to win big. They just want to win by a pound or a second, and their whole workout strategy involves gaming WODs to worm their way to the best time on the whiteboard.