Ah, the CrossFit Game Open Season is once again upon us. 

The haze of chalk dust is in the air, sweat drops glisten on the rugged rubber floors. The nervous adrenaline flows so thick innocent bystanders can almost taste it. Dave Castro's cryptic social media vagaries haunt the dreams of top contenders who have been practicing their inverted, underwater, target shooting for months... blindfolded and holding a dumbbell in one hand no less. 

The average Joe's among us have been diligently working on getting our first muscle-up, toes-to-bar and even kipping pull-up in anticipation of moving just a few thousand places up the leaderboard this year. 

When people say, “I’m not competitive,” or “I don’t like to compete,” they are essentially announcing to the world they lack courage.

 Why?

Because competing tells the world, “I care!” Or at the very least, competing tells the world you care enough to put yourself out there. 

And competing at something you’re not good at takes the most courage of all.

For me, long distance running has always required courage. I have been petrified of running more than 200 meters since I was 8 years old.

Your legs are on fire. Your heart is racing. You seem to have lost vision in one eye, and your lungs burn like a bitch. If you’re a CrossFit athlete, you know that feeling—all too well.

Now imagine that feeling if you had Cystic Fibrosis (CF), a genetic disease without a cure that affects the digestive system and lungs, characterized by constant lung infections and the eventually the loss of lung function.

This is the reality for Michelle Miguez, a masseuse and energy healer from Vancouver who suffers from CF. 

After Rachel Siemens helped Team Taranis to a bronze medal at the 2011 CrossFit Games, she abandoned the sport. 

Not because she didn’t love CrossFit. But because there was one part of CrossFit she loved more than anything else: Weightlifting.

Somehow as a community, we’ve adopted the belief that if you rip your hands, you’re a wimp if you don’t work through the carnage and finish the workout—even if you’ve lost multiple layers of skin and are bleeding through your tape. A belief that people will somehow be impressed by a picture of ruined hands uploaded to Instagram. #100-pull-ups=destroyed-hands. 

Despite a deeply-entrenched fear of looking soft, many of the top CrossFit athletes in the world don’t live by these standards. They don't think letting your hands rip recklessly makes them tough. They don't think training is the time to rip at all. And if they do rip, working through the pain and creating deeper rips on rips is just silly.

Whether you’re in individual CrossFit Games competitor, part of a team, or a 60-year-old man, there’s something unforgettable about competing in the tennis stadium at the StubHub.

60-year-old Terry Peters had the chance to experience the magic of the tennis stadium for the first time in the final 60+ Masters Men’s event of the 2015 CrossFit Games—“Amanda.”

“It was really exciting to walk into the stadium and have the crowd cheering as my name was announced,” Peters said. “It was amazing to be standing in the spot where I’ve watched so many incredible individual athletes compete.”

Today, while our world has become more and more connected and interdependent since the 1970s, the world of sports has oddly become more and more fragmented and isolationist. Each sport does its own thing now; each sport has its own World Cup circuit and World Championships, not to mention new sports host their own world events, like the CrossFit Games and the X-Games. So while track and field and gymnastics fans might still follow their athletes at the Pan Am Games, generally speaking the rest of the world barely knows they’re going on in Toronto right now. 

While it might work for some people—possibly the more naturally technical folks out there—for many, nothing can replace a real life coach.

If you’re a competitive CrossFit athlete, ask yourself whether you’re truly helping your affiliate and your community? If you are, awesome! Many do. But if you can relate to the situations in this apology letter, it might be time to look at yourself from an affiliate owner’s perspective.

When it comes to competition, they're arguably the most successful box in Canada West.

CrossFit Taranis has had athletes at the CrossFit Games every single year since it moved from the ranch to Carson, California in 2010.