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[/caption] I have to apologize for the delay in posting this blog, but it has been a busy week! To sum up the week leading up to the competition, I basically took it pretty easy. Well, not entirely. Monday I rested, but Tuesday I did a nasty little number Mike put together: 4 rounds of 5 power cleans, 5 front squats and 5 push jerks, all at 95 lb. It took me 4:43. After I did the WOD, I thought, “Man, I could have gone 4 minutes, easy! But I failed on the overhead movements in the third round. My jerk technique still needs work. I was forced to put the bar down, clean it and finish the round. So overall not a bad time.  The rest of the week was all stretching, rolling on a tennis ball, reviewing the WODs for the FrostFit Games and planning my strategy. So the event was awesome. I placed third overall in the advanced-women category. Third will do for now! I took third in the first workout, and I was just two reps behind first place and one rep behind second place. I was pretty happy overall with that WOD, except for the last 3-minute station, where I should have kipped the toes-to-bar, but I didn’t. Mike asked me afterwards what happened and why I deviated from what we had planned. I had to admit that I just decided “I can’t” and went with slow but sure reps. Had I even tried, maybe I could have gotten those two extra reps. Lesson learned. The second WOD was a heartbreaker for me: an 800-meter row followed by 20 overhead squats at 55lb. Wow! Could I have asked for a better WOD? In my mind, there was no way I wasn’t going to win that. I planned to row a 1:50 average pace and bang out the squats unbroken. So what happened, you ask? Well, I rowed even better than I thought I would, staying between 1:49 to 1:51. I hopped off, picked up the bar and did 20 unbroken squats. When the judge called my 20^th rep, the clock was at 3:57 and I was done. And then disaster. I dropped the bar instead of setting it down. They had a “no-drop” rule with the weights in an effort to preserve the equipment. I knew this, but in the heat of the moment, happy and tired, I just forgot. The judge called no rep, so I picked up the bar to log a new final time of 4:04. It put me in third for that WOD instead of first. I was pretty upset going forward but rested the minute and went onto to part B. The first 20 presses were unbroken, as well as the 20 kettlebell swings. The parallette shoot-throughs slowed me down. I walked back and forth slowly, instead of firing my feet though. Mike and I reflected after the workout that when a new movement comes up, we’ll drill it until I am confident and proficient. It might have made a difference. I took fifth in that WOD. The final WOD was doozy. The strategy was just to hammer through it! I planned to break the pull-ups into sets of 10, and then go unbroken on the double-unders, and as unbroken as possible on the wall-balls. The snatches I would have to grind through. I came off the bar at 1:30 from the pull-ups, and I knew this was solid. I quickly finished the skipping and moved through a solid set of wall-balls. I can’t remember the exact breakdown of my reps, but I did a minimum of 5 before I allowed myself to drop the ball. The snatches started off slowly, and I decided to pull them from the floor rather than the hang position, but when I hit 20, I banged out the last 10 unbroken and finished the WOD under 10 minutes. I will tell you, I went to a different place during those last reps, and although I wanted to puke, it made me better. I know I can push through and get really uncomfortable, and not lose my insides! And I finished first in the workout, which was a great way to end the day. The next 17 days I prepare for the Intergalactic Throwdown. I know Mike has some great stuff planned, so stay tuned!