Most of what gets posted about CrossFit competitions online is highlights. The lift that went well. The crowd noise. The finish line. Kayla Bonkowski has been on the floor at competitions in Michigan and what she remembers is not any of that — it is the ten minutes before an event starts, standing in the warm-up area, trying to remember how to breathe normally.
The inside of competitive CrossFit is more unglamorous and more interesting than the highlights suggest. This is a closer look at what it actually involves — the preparation, the physical experience, and what you tend to walk away with regardless of where you finish.
The Weeks Before
Kayla Bonkowski spends the weeks before a competition in a kind of low-grade alertness. The training is not dramatically different — she is not doing anything that would not fit in a normal training cycle — but the attention is different. Every workout is a data point. She is watching how she moves under fatigue, where her weaknesses are showing up, what the workout designers might combine in ways that will hurt.
Most local CrossFit competitions do not release their workouts in advance, which is part of the point. You are not preparing for a specific event. You are preparing to be a generally capable athlete who can adapt to whatever shows up. That means the preparation is less about peaking for one thing and more about shoring up the areas where you know you fall apart.
For Kayla Bonkowski, that has historically meant aerobic capacity — the piece of training that is easy to deprioritize when the barbell work is going well. Coming into competitions, she makes a point of not neglecting the long, uncomfortable aerobic pieces that she does not love doing but that end up mattering a lot on the competition floor.
Competition Day
The logistics of a CrossFit competition are their own kind of skill. Multiple events across a single day, sometimes with less than an hour between them. Knowing what to eat, when to eat it, how to keep your nervous system from running too hot in the early events so you have something left for the later ones — this is a real category of knowledge that you only develop by competing.
Kayla Bonkowski has competed at events including No Boys Allowed and Cougars and Sugar Daddies, and each one has added a layer to her understanding of how her body and her mind handle the specific stress of competition. She has made strategic mistakes — going out too hard, not pacing well, letting the nerves get to her in a way that affected her movement. She has also had moments where everything clicked and she performed better than she expected.
The events themselves are intense in a way that regular workouts are not. The combination of adrenaline, other athletes in your peripheral vision, and a judge counting your reps creates a different physiological state than what you experience in training. Your heart rate spikes faster. Your pacing goes out the window unless you have trained specifically to manage it. You make decisions in seconds that you would have thirty minutes to think about in a programming conversation.
What You Take Home
Kayla Bonkowski does not compete primarily to win, though she is competitive and cares about her performance. She competes because the experience of putting yourself on the floor in an unknown workout, in front of judges and other athletes, reveals something about your training that months of regular classes cannot.
You find out which of your skills hold under pressure and which ones fall apart. You find out how you respond when a workout does not go the way you expected. You find out whether you have the composure to make a smart decision mid-event or whether you fall back on panic pacing and regret it at the end.
All of that information comes back with you to the gym in Macomb, Michigan, and makes the next training cycle more specific. Competition is one of the fastest feedback loops available to a CrossFit athlete who is serious about getting better. The highlight reel is fine, but the real value is in everything that happens around it.