The 45 Minute Partner Carry

Workout date: 3/7/15

I remember a time when Saturday mornings involved sleeping in until 10:30am, followed by slowly getting ready for a late breakfast, after which I'd return home and take a nap.  Wait, why am I not doing this any more?  That sounds fantastic!  Instead, I've been getting up and going to Competitors Class at 7am.  Well, more like 7:15.  There is only so much you can expect from me that early on a weekend.

Luckily, being 15 minutes late to that class is not nearly as stigmatizing as arriving 2 minutes late to a weekday class.  When I rolled in at 7:15, almost everyone still had a coat on (it takes a while for the heaters to get going) which indicated that I hadn't missed out on anything.  Giulia had told me the night before that we would be doing a team WOD as part of the workout, but I wasn't sure how many people would be on each team.  With 8 of us in the class, it would have worked out whether we went with teams of 4 or teams of 2, but the workout ended up being for teams of 2.

Before that though, we warmed up with a 50 calorie row (simple enough), then continued on to a snatch complex where every minute on the minute for 7 minutes, we would do a squat snatch, a power snatch, a hang snatch, and an overhead squat at 80% of our max.  My max snatch is 175, but that was not at 8 in the morning.  (To be fair, when we did Brawl in the Burbs last summer, the snatch was part of the first event that took place early in the morning and I did 165)  Because my body was still hitting the internal snooze button, I didn't warm up very much with my weight of 135 (a little less than 80%).  And when we started round 1, I was in for a shock.  My squat snatch was a failure.  My power snatch was fine.  The hang snatch was not close.  With the clock running, I decided I needed to hustle and change weights.  I dropped down to 115 and did the rest of that part of the workout with that weight, but even that was a bit of a struggle.

After that, it was on to the main event.  I asked Giulia to be my partner and we took on this behemoth:

(I would have put a "Spoiler" about the results, but you already read the subject line, didn't ya?)

My initial impressions: I suck at KB swings, so 200 of them doesn't sound good.  Should be able to chip through the wall balls, should be able to chip through the handstand push-ups using 2 abmats, and I always enjoy rope climbs.

Could not have been more wrong about this workout...

The row ended up being fine, although we moved at a decent enough pace that our lungs were working pretty good when we finished the 2,000 meters.  Next were the KB swings and I started off with a set of 20.  That wasn't too shabby for me.  Soon we were doing sets of 15 and then sets of 10.  We fell a little bit behind here, but not too far behind as I was still, ya know, doing something at this point.

That would change on the wall balls.  The toll of getting through all of those KB swings was that my shoulders were now sore.  And they wanted no part of tossing a 20 pound medicine ball 10 feet up a wall.  Our game plan was simple: each of us do 10 at a time.  But a few rounds in and I was smoked already.  Giulia kept pumping out rounds of 10 reps, while I had rounds of 9, 8, 7 and even a round of 5.  Even in those smaller rounds, I was jumping to get the ball to the 10 foot mark, something I rarely do.  Towards the end, I did manage a set of 11 and a set of 12, but Giulia carried us through that section.  And my exhaustion had put us further behind.

The handstand push-ups couldn't be worse, right?  I mean, we only had to do 100 of those and we were using 2 abmats.  Once again, Giulia cranked out sets of reps, while I tried to get my arms to work.  She had to do the first 15 before I managed to contribute at all, and that was only after Marisa added a 3rd abmat, meaning that I was doing a push-up of about 2 inches.  With that range of motion, I was able to crank out some larger sets, but poor Giulia was stuck carrying the load once again.

I was relieved when we finally got to the rope climbs, as I've learned how to get up the rope with my legs more than with my arms.  I did 6 of the 10 climbs, and we stopped the clock nine seconds shy of 46 minutes.  If Giulia hadn't done as much work as she did, we might have cracked an hour for our time.

Another Saturday morning workout was wrapped up and I was exhausted.  But I did get to enjoy a bit of my old tradition.  We celebrated Giulia's birthday with breakfast afterwards.  And then I went home and thoroughly enjoyed a nap.