As I've gotten older, I've come to the realization that the best weekends are not those where you have some super exciting event planned. Rather, they are the weekends when you can lie in bed and not have to worry about an alarm going off. This weekend was going to be the first one of those for me in quite a while. In fact, I honestly can't remember the last weekend when I enjoyed this luxury. That went out the window when I got the text from Giulia on Thursday:
"Saturday 7am - Team WOD!"
Now to be fair, I tried my best to elusive and avoid having to get up before the sun made an appearance on the East Coast. At first I claimed she had the wrong number, then I went with the tried and true "no hablo ingles". Somehow, she saw through my clever ruse and I ended up agreeing to the madness I experienced today.
7am classes in February mean it is dark and it is cold when you get to the gym. I arrived to find 5 ladies and 1 small dog dressed in parkas. Here is a dramatic recreation of Giulia and her dog Polpetta this morning:
Once the heaters got going, everyone shed their extra layers, including Polpetta. Keith and Laura arrived soon afterwards and we had 2 teams of 4 ready to tackle...good god, is that what we're doing?
(Spoiler: in order to get done by 8:30, we did half the amount of planned reps for the last three movements)
Before getting into this monster, the eight of us did a warmup which included rotating through stations of handstand holds, push-ups, lunges, air squats, slam balls, rowing, wall balls, and one other movement I am blanking on. After that, we split into our two teams. One squad consisted of Aimee, Keith, Giulia, and Michal, while the other team was Marisa, Rachel, Laura, and myself. We took some time to get organized as you don't want to try and figure things out on the fly in a workout like this. At all times, the 75 pound barbell had to be in the air, or all members of the team would be penalized with 25 wall balls. There was no chance we were letting that bar touch the ground.
We got started with Laura on the double unders, and after setting the top time in the gym yesterday for Annie, I was sure that she would do a large chunk of the 400 reps. She did, but then I was next, and I did not do so well. Maybe I got all of my good double unders out of my system during Annie. Oops. I did 18 and grabbed an end of the barbell to hold on to while Marisa tore through a large number of double unders. Finally, Rachel got a turn jumping rope. Laura and I would go again before Marisa finished off the 400 reps. We were already behind due to my lousy rope jumping skills. Great!!!
For the shoulder to overhead, I think we all did somewhere in the 12-20 rep range when it was our turn. Rachel started for us and Laura finished, meaning I had the honor of starting our "chest-to-bars". And yes, those quotes are necessary. I had a box and a band set up and tried to knock out a good set of pull-ups, but 8 was all I could muster before giving way to Marisa. Not surprisingly, this would be the worst part of the workout for me. 6-8 reps was my standard, while the rest of the team did much more. Rachel finished the set and we were off to a movement I liked much more, the burpee box jump over.
I'm getting a little more efficient with my burpees, and I love getting to pretend I'm Q*bert as I quickly hop laterally to get to my next burpee. But with all of the work we had already done, I was starting to get winded, and my knees weren't thrilled with the quick lateral jumps I was doing. Still, this was much better than anything else we had done to this point, and I closed out the round. Up next were front squats, where we all did rather big sets (15+). I only got to do 1 set as Laura finished things up for our team.
If there was one thing that I did not expect to be doing this morning, it was handstand walks. Somehow that task ended up falling on me though. Marisa grabbed hold of my left leg after I went into a handstand and I walked as fast as I could across 5 mats. It was not pretty, but it wasn't nearly as bad as the second round would be later on. Next up was 20 bar muscle ups. I had intended on using the 17" box for this as my attempts using the 13" box in warmups did not work out so well. However, I decided to drag over our 20" box for my attempts since I was already tired and was worried that I might not get anything with the 17" box. I was wrong. The 20" box made things a little too easy and I was able to rip off 7 reps when it was my turn. I might have been able to do more if I hadn't been sweating like crazy all over the bar. Laura took care of the last few reps.
Laura gave it a go on the handstand walk (on her own, not being held upright like I needed) but only got 1 mat. She passed it along to me and the Marisa-Dave wheelbarrow was re-created. This version was much more wobbly than the first, and as I made my way across four mats, it was in a severe diagonal to the right. Everyone got a laugh, even the other team (who was still ahead of us).
Marisa got us going on the barbell lunges, which was another movement where we all did big sets. Marisa even impressively lunged the bar all the way down to the other end of the gym so we could be close to the rings. After she finished our 100th rep, Rachel was on the rings for dips. It was at this point that time became a concern as certain people needed to leave by 8:30. An executive decision was made to drop the reps for the hang snatch and the pistols to 50 and the reps for the last set of double unders to 200. The dips were not fun for any of us. I think we all did one decent set, followed by smaller sets. I believe Rachel did the last few reps and then got us started on the snatches. After she and Laura went, it was my turn to go and I definitely had some concern about my ability to hang snatch 115 pounds at this point in the workout. However, once I got going, it wasn't too bad. I did 8 in that round and then did the final 10 for our team. On to pistols!
Even though I love pistols, I wasn't all that excited about doing them today since it took so long to recover from that crazy pistol workout last week. Not to worry, as Marisa, Rachel, and Laura took care of all 50 for me, leaving me to get us started on the final 200 double unders. At this point, the other team had finished and was rooting us on. Sadly, my double unders were simply gone by then. I got up to 12 before letting Marisa take over. She did a huge set, Rachel did a huge set, and then Laura cleaned up the rest like it was nothing. Results...
Afterwards, I got the two things I badly needed: breakfast and a long nap. Tomorrow will definitely be a rest day. If it's nice out, maybe I'll do some double under practice. Might even row a little bit. But one thing is for certain: there will be no alarm waking me up tomorrow.
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