Presses - Strict, Push, and Jerk

Warmup:
Tabata Squats
11-11-11-11-11-10-10-10

WOD:
Press 5-5-5-5-5

Push-Press 3-3-3-3-3

Push-Jerk 1-1-1-1-1

Results:
40-45-45-45-45x4

50-55-60-DNF

Comments:
I had it in my head that the push presses were 3 x 3 instead of 3 x 5. I worked really hard for that set of 3 x 60, and when i discovered that I still had 2 sets to go I just had an utter failure of will. My back was feeling a little tweaked from the presses, and I just couldn't contemplate doing 2 more sets of 3 at 60#. By the time I made it that far most folks were done or just finishing their jerks anyway.

Blargh

Warmup - none to speak of - i was late to class, and i only got about 4 hours of sleep. (Late to bed, middle of the knight leg cramps, and woke up ridiculously early, unable to go back to sleep)


WOD:
Part A
Mini Bottom-to-Bottom -Tabata

First four intervals are pull-ups, without letting go of the bar, second four intervals are push-ups, rest in plank, third four intervals are sit-ups, rest in up position, final four intervals are squats, rest in bottom position.

Tabata score is the least number of reps performed in any of the 4 intervals.

Plus Part B:

Snatch 5-3-3-1-1

Results:
Part A:
The pullup bar was full, so I started with pushups and then did pullups while everyone else was pushing up. My score was 6/0/7/5. kinda pathetic.

Part B:
Snatches - they just weren't happening today. my timing was completely off, and the 45# bar that went up so easily yesterday wouldn't make it past my nose today. I worked some light snatches - but nothing formal with any sort of rep scheme - up to about 35#. About half way through class I decided to work on cleans instead. 60# went up ok. Not pretty, but ok. Then I got 3 nearly consecutive pulls at 65# - my previous 1 rep max. So I decided to try for 70. First try failed, 2nd try failed. Waited a few minutes. Got it on my third try! New PR.

I do not drop under the bar. That is the reason I can't get very much weight up. It's mostly a mechanics and a balance issue. I am looking forward to the oly cycle we are planning on doing soon, but I know it will be fraught with frustrations and disappointments when my body can't figure out how to do what my brain wants it to. The only way to get better is to practice though, so I'll just have to stubborn through the frustration.

Of meat and leading

So I came to a realization today: eating meat and lead climbing are actually quite similar experiences. As I put it to a friend: suddenly there's a wealth of choices that weren't there before, and at least once between starting and finishing a meal/climb, I have a surreal moment of "oh shit, I can't believe I'm doing this."

Today was my first full day of climbing since getting my lead card, and Tor and I were back on home turf at Ironworks. After the spectacular failure of the 10B last week, and keeping in mind that this is supposed to be recovery week, I resolved to keep the numbers fairly low.

L10a(o), L10a/b(o), L10a(2f), L10b(o), 10b(o)

The first two climbs were quite straightforward, and I tackled them with deliberate movements that belied my inner "oh lordy." The third 10a, however, was the long, LONG and extremely overhung 10a in the cave. It's just ridiculous calling this climb a 10a. Yes, there are nothing but big buckets the whole way, but it's also entirely upside-down and insanely pumpy. I had to take two rests, and when I finally came down, I landed 20 feet behind where I started. After that, the shorter 10b's seemed both easier (since they were short) and harder (because my arms were pumped). The last 10b was toprope, and the entire time I had this sense that A) it was SO easy! and B) I was forgetting something important.

Tonight's WOD was simple 5x5 shoulder presses. At my strongest with these I managed 95#, and I did not do that tonight:

95x3 - 95x2 - 90x4 - 90x5

It was partially weakness from being sick, I think, but mostly just being out of practice with the movement (and, likely, not quite as strong). I didn't really go at it 100%, anyway, since it's half-volume week.

Oh, and we did bottom-to-bottom tabata squats, which was (I think) the first time I've done this. I played conservatively and scored 10. I think I could have done 12, but it would have been much, much more painful.

Tabata something else

Warmup: ME, jog 400m, KB skills - swings, cleans, snatches (I knew I was in sad shape, when I had a really hard time getting consecutive swings with the 12kg KB)

WOD:
"Tabata Something Else"

Complete 32 intervals of 20 seconds of work followed by ten seconds of rest where the first 8 intervals are pull-ups, the second 8 are push-ups, the third 8 intervals are sit-ups, and finally, the last 8 intervals are squats. There is no rest between exercises.

Results:

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	Total
Jumping Pull-up	9	8	8	8	8	8	8	8	65
Push-up	5	5	5	5	5	4	4	4	37
Sit-up	9	9	9	9	9	9	9	9	72
Squat	9	9	9	9	9	9	9	9	72

Comments:

I am reasonably satisfied with these scores. It wasn't a terribly high volume week, but I was still pretty tired heading into this, so I'm just glad to have been ableto get fairy consistent scores.

I feel like the squats could have been higher, but with out any rest after the situps, I was having a hard time just staying on my feet.

Double your pain, double your fun

So Max has kicked off the new year with a new class: Firebreathers. It's "advanced" CrossFit: no scaling or whining allowed, and there's a competitive scoring system in place. I don't really care about the scoring (for me it's a significant achievement just to do the WOD as RX, and I'm never on the leaderboard), but I am interested in the focus on the more advanced skills. I need serious work on all of them. So the pros are:

• Good for my coaching, I think, to take my training up a notch.
• It's an opportunity to practice advanced skills.
• By doing extra-hard work, other WODs should hopefully get easier.
• I really like all the folks involved.

There are, however, some cons:

• I am not advanced. I consider myself a solid intermediate CrossFitter, and not just in skills (although I'm lacking in that regard as well). Primarily, I'm just not very strong.
• The time is very awkward: 3pm on Saturdays. That pretty much kills Saturday for anything else. It also means not doing the WOD fasted, which I prefer.
• It's also awkward with Rebecca. We really like going to class together, but she knows she's not ready for the advanced stuff, so it means either going with her to the morning class and then coming back again by myself in the afternoon (I did this today, and have doubts about its sustainability), or letting her go to the Saturday class alone and taking my turn later. She feels left out, I feel bad about leaving her behind...it's not ideal.

So today was an experiment. I don't know what will happen next week. At the moment, I'm viewing it as an "I'll do it when I can, but I probably won't make every class" thing. And as the weather gets nicer and we're more inclined to take daytrips out to the coast or go climbing, it will get tougher.

Anyway, today I went to both the morning and the afternoon class. This was difficult. I'm not certain, but I don't think I've done two CrossFit WODs in a day before (maybe if one of them was a 5x5 or something, which isn't the same). It definitely pushed my body to its limits.

11am:

"Tabata Something Else"
Complete 32 intervals of 20 seconds of work followed by ten seconds of rest where the first 8 intervals are pull-ups, the second 8 are push-ups, the third 8 intervals are sit-ups, and finally, the last 8 intervals are squats. There is no rest between exercises.

Final score: 29 RX

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
Pull-up	5	5	5	5	5	4	4	4
Push-up	8	8	8	8	7	6	5	5
Sit-up	10	10	10	10	10	10	10	10
Squat	10	10	10	10	10	10	10	14

This score is considerably worse than last time. However, last time Shira (guest trainer) let us have a minute of rest between rounds, and Max did not. I suspect this made a difference. That said, I clearly picked a number too low for the squats, and maybe for the sit-ups....though the last round of sit-ups was a pretty close call.

3pm

There was a TON of stuff in the warm-up and skills workout - enough that it took an hour, and we were pretty tired by the time the actual WOD rolled around. Skills worked were double-unders (I still suck), HSPUs (I can't even reliably get upside-down), and C2B Pull-ups (at least I can actually do these). The final WOD was:

For Time:
100 Reps Kettlebell Swing (2 pood)

12:41 RX

Jesus, Mary and Joseph this was hard. My throat is hoarse from all the grunting/yelling I was doing trying to get that damn orange ball over my head. I ripped open another callous on my hands, though the bike gloves I was wearing definitely helped. Despite the pain, however, I was glad to do this: I think 2 pood KB swings should make my KB snatches stronger, and I really want that 30 1.5 pood snatch skill checked off. I also get more all-over-body sore from KB swings than anything else, so I think they're an excellent functional exercise. I still have a healthy phobia of that 2 pood bastard, though.

On a final note: Rebecca and I cleaned out our closets today (in order to make room for all the new clothes we picked up at the outlets in Virginia). I'm donating a LOT of clothes. Stuffed in the back of a drawer I found a really old pair of jeans - from back before I made the commitment to be fit. They're size 36 waist - 4-6 inches larger than what I buy now. I tried them on and Rebecca took one of those classic "look at how much weight I lost" pants pictures:

This makes me pretty happy.

Tabata Cindy - OMG Really?!

Warmup: 2 quick climbs - a 5.7 amd a 5.9 - both clean. mobility exercises, a 400m run ... don't remember what else.

WOD:

Tabata Cindy
Perform 60 intervals of 20 seconds of work and 10 seconds of rest of:
5 Pull-Ups
10 Push-Ups
15 Squats

Results:
Once again my damn watch totally freaked out after round 16 - it says the total time was 36 minutes (i forgot to completely stop it after the last round) but if I add up all the splits i get 50 minutes! I need a new watch/HR monitor :-P

Regardless. I'm 95% sure I got at least 16 rounds+ 2 pushups - i may have gotten as many as 18 + 2 pushups.

Either way - HOLY COW!!! My PR before this was a whopping 9 rounds. At least I think so. my watch malfunctions lead me to believe that my last attempt was somewhat higher than 9 or even 10.

Splits (such as they are):

Round	Time
1	1:07.2
2	1:12.9
3	1:31.3
4	1:23.6
5	1:30.2
6	1:33.5
7	1:50.1
8	1:48.4
9	1:51.4
10	2:50.2
11	1:29.7
12	2:22.5
13	2:24.4
14	2:02.8
14	0:21.3
15	2:11.8
16	3:14.7
17 & 18?	06:40.1
18 or19	13:13.4

A couple sets are longer and shorter because I forgot to hit the lap time on my watch until after the pullups (like round 10 & 11). Once again my limiting factor was pushups - by the end it was taking me 3 to 4 tabata rounds to get through all 10, but they stayed pretty strong through at least round 10, which is pretty damn impressive given that I didn't even HAVE a pushup a couple months ago. I was determined to make as many of them as possible full ROM, which is why they started taking so much longer - I could have eked out another round - maybe even two if I had just resorted to using my knees - and I still did for a couple reps here and there - and i think my whole last full round - so it wasn't a complete victory - but they still went comparatively really really well.

The jumping pull ups were ... probably too easy an option. It's just that even though my skin has healed, my hands are still really tender, and trying to kip just hurts - even taped. But i won't get there unless I work at it. so. no more being a baby.

I felt like my squats had really improved, too - but without a mirror it's hard for me to say for sure. Max was snapping pictures - i don't know whether he was taking videos too ... I'll ask him if he caught any of either media of my squats.

I think the enforced work and the enforced rest of the tabata structure works really really well for Cindy - or at least it did for me. The main thing it pointed out to me - and Daniel found this to be true too, is that in a normal WOD I wait too long to rest, and then rest too long. I found that with this structure I was super motivated to try to fit an exercise into a tabata period so that I could use the 'rest' time to transition between exercises. This was particularly important going from the squats to the pullups because i had to navigate up onto a box to reach the pullup bar, and if I was hurrying to do it in the middle of a tabata period, i was more likely to misstep and have to try again - wasting precious seconds.

If my splits are to be believed - and I think the earlier ones probably are accurate, I got through 7 rounds in the first 10 minutes.I nearly died when I'd gotten that far and Max said - ok - you're just about 1/3 of the way through. What?! only a third?! Considering that I got through 9 rounds in the whole 20 minutes last time, I was really amazed I was going so fast.

Another issue of note: this was my first workout in an intentionally fasted state. (As opposed to just poorly fed). If these results are any indication of performance in general, IF is amazing! We went to Rudy's for lunch afterward, and I made the mistake of having coffee with milk in it before our food came - and it was a LONG time before the food came - and I felt really jittery and out of sorts for a long time even after eating, which i didn't like. I suspect things wold have gone better if I had had a whole big glass of milk before the coffee.

So much for feeling bad about not seeing good performance. This totally rocked. Now if I can just get my pullups dialed, I'll be able to do it RX! Jumping pullups feel a little bit like cheating.

Oh yeah - and it was really nice to finally get in two clean climbs. There's definitely some muscle memory lacking, and some technique to re-learn, but it felt good all the same :)

Tabata Cindy

Pretty much just what it sounds like:

Perform 60 intervals of 20 seconds of work and 10 seconds of rest of:
5 Pull-Ups
10 Push-Ups
15 Squats

16 rounds RX.

Did this downstairs on the rings with Raphael and James C. Max lent me his watch, which can do intervals, so I was in charge of calling out "rest" and "go," while also juggling my rounds and keeping an eye on the clock to be sure we were doing 30 minutes of work. I think I screwed up and shortchanged us a little on the number of intervals. Max's watch stopped beeping, so I assumed he'd programmed it for 60 intervals, but he tells me he didn't and that it's more likely I just stopped it by accident with my wrist. We couldn't have been TOO far off, as I know we started before the main class and we finished a little before them, too, but I think we may have had a couple more minutes to do. Oh well. It's not like we didn't get any work in.

So this was three more rounds than my last Cindy, in ~10 more minutes' time. Not particularly great. The enforced rests of the tabata protocol DID make it easier, I think - for a large swatch of time in the middle, I felt I was holding down a pace that I could've kept for a long time. It successfully enforced the notion that I rest for too long when I take rests, and that I should A) stop a little earlier, before failure, and B) start again after just a handful of breaths. Hopefully I can keep this in mind and apply it to future WODs.

Afterwards I did some practice at bar-kipping upstairs, and I think I've nailed the form down, even on the bouncy bar (which was giving me trouble). The trick, for me, is to NOT swing so much. It's much more of a pumping, snaking action - I can envision a ledge in front of me at about knee height, and I swing with my hips to get my toes on that ledge, and then push off the ledge to finish the move....or it's like holding a long string and snapping one end of it, so you get a wave that travels down the string. It's like doing that with my body. When I got into the groove of it, chest-to-bar pullups seemed quite natural and easy. It is hell on the hands, though, compared to the rings.

More PRs!

My previous record for Push-Press is 107x3, set on July 2.

*17 hour fast*

Just one workout today:

55 Burpees (spread around)
Tabata pushups (I got 6)
Some other stuff

Push press: 5-5-3-3-3-1-1-1

95-95-115(PR)-115(f)-115(f)-125-130(PR)-135(f)

Eight pounds heavier (~7%), but I was only able to do it x3 once - I failed on the third rep the next two times. The 130 1RM is good to know, but I think I COULD do the 135 with fresher muscles - if I can nail the technique and get it in the groove, like I did with the 130, then it didn't actually feel that bad. Just need to drive harder and get it overhead faster, I think.

WOD 6-29-08

Tabata That

Tabata Burpee
Rest 1 minute
Tabata Sit-Up
Rest 1 minute
Tabata Push-Up
Rest 1 minute
Tabata Squat
Rest 1 minute

Results

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
Burpee*	3.5	3.5	3.5	3	3	3	3	3
Sit-up	12	11	10	10	9	9	9	9
Push-up*	6	5	5	5	5	5	5	5
Squat	12	12	11	10	10	10	10	10

Total: 27

*Burpees & Push-ups were done w/knees on the way up.

Comments
Pretty happy with the scores on this workout. They weren't significantly lower than the other folks in my class, and in some instances, they weren't even the lowest.

We had a guest instructor today - Shira - and she was great. She has a strong back ground in capoeira, and she put us through a pretty lengthy warm-up that worked on things like handstands and running and she was very focused on the correct form for things which was helpful. One of my complaints, recently, is that I don't get a lot of opportunity to practice the various crossfit motions outside of class, and it's easy to forget to concentrate on form when you're working against a clock.

I asked Shira to look @ my pushup form - it was after class, and I was pretty tired, so it was hard to get a realy sense of what my form is like when i am not tired - but form is most important when you're tired, anyway :p) so it was probably a good time to check it out. Apparently support through my lower back is collapsing when I push back up - so that is something I definitely need to work on.

Tabata That!

Tabata Burpee
Rest 1 minute
Tabata Sit-Up
Rest 1 minute
Tabata Push-Up
Rest 1 minute
Tabata Squat
Rest 1 minute

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
Burpee	4	4	4	4	4	4	4	4
Sit-up	12	12	11	11	11	11	11	11
Push-up	10	10	10	10	10	10	8	8
Squat	14	14	13	13	13	13	13	14

Final score: 36

Guest instructrix Shira Yaziv led the class today while Max is off frolicking in Tahoe (not that I'm jealous). It was a fun class, and she lent a fun, dancy vibe to the group warmup. My first time Tabata-ing, and I think I did a pretty good job of aiming for consistency. I can't really conceive of doing Burpees faster, but I think I could definitely improve my squat numbers. The sit-ups might be better with a foot anchor. The pushups....it killed me that I wasn't able to hold on to the 10-per-round that I set up, losing it so late in the set.